I once heard someones theory about the Middle Ages and how it really didn't happen and EVERYTHING about early history is false. Obliviously modern "ages" are "real" because we are able to recored "history" ( I used quotes because depending on your belief you may believe that "modern times" itself may be false to some extent) Does anyone out there know anything about this subject because this really interest me.

Obliviously.

The middle ages happened.
Otherwise there would have been an embaressing gap between the Dark Ages and the Age of Enlightenment.

Deal with it.

Meow Purr

Didn't happen....God went straight from resting on day 7 to watch football in the late 1800's.

that is a HIGHLY controversial point 'Mule... according to the Dead Manchester Scrolls, football actually started in 2001, or... as the adherents call it.. the Year of Our Lord Rooney.

but that's another story.

Meow Purr

Wow you guys, I just asked a question. I doesn't mean I believe in it I just want some info on this point of view. If you can't deal with the idea of an alternative belief that deals with history then don't answer. Why shot down someone who wants information whether it be true or not???

Heavens, Ship and Mule, how dare you not approach this topic with all the respect and piety due to Jesus playing footie. And thank goodness you got here before I did to toughen up the OP before I hit him with historiography.

Mr Sheep: the idea is utterly ludicrous. Besides the sheer bulk of verified documents we have, there are several international events recorded in several dating systems in different civilizations that allow us to cross-check calendars. And there are no unaccounted for holes. Some false premises that this silly idea depends on.

1) Western Europe incorporates the entire world. If the entire world were missing centuries, they'd be gone in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, too. Unfortunately, all these cultures can happily account for themselves through the entirety of the Middle Ages.

2) Everyone in Western Europe was too stupid to write anything down, or that anything from that period is a fake. People who allege this have no idea of the amount of actual material dating back to the Early Middle Ages. There's far too much bulk to fake without incredibly obvious parchment/vellum-faking factories. Furthermore, there's an entire study of studying documents, how they were made, how they fit in with their time period and history. Every single historian in every single country on the planet since the Middle Ages involved with the Fake. This is wholly illogical and deeply ignorant of the actual field of history and of actual historians.

3) Language. Language develop at a reasonably predictable rate. This time period essentially covers the rise of the Romance languages out of Late Vulgar Latin. And we have a full record of those changes largely according to established timelines. According to this theory, all those languages would have perforce spring up over night, and people who one day spoken together with mutual intelligence would, the next day, not be able to communicate with the neighbours. There is no record of this happening, ever, but is the sort of thing someone, somewhere would record.

So in conclusion, they only way this could be true is if the progenitor of the idea were grossly misinformed about historical realities or very stupid. Now an interesting debate would be which of the two -- unless you paid $14.95 for him to tell you all about his idea... That'd settle it pretty quick.

--Jaylemurph

...It's like saying the holocaust never happenend. But, not really.

I mean, sure our technology as it was in the Roman/Greek era was utterly amazing, and the Middle Ages...well, that's just embarrasing. I could see why people would want to shove it out of history.

Sorry Commie I cant help be sarcastic at times.

In all honesty - if you want a better answer you need to clarify your question. What exactly didn't happen? The time is missing? Fuedalism didnt happen? The Magna Carta wasn't written? No Crusades? What?

Yep, pretty much what I was gonna ask until I saw your post......more info on original question would be good to make a topic out of this one - and even I don't think I can make anything out of it.........

pretty sure the Middle Ages happened, but sort of wish it didn't anyway, such a violent time in history....all that chain mail, armour and spiked hammers

just to reassure you , my mother can trace her family lineage without a break back to just before 1066 ( which is at least the middle ages and probably the early middle ages) so, apart from all the other evidence, (including "bank"(promissory)notes from the middle ages still held in swiss institutions) theres a little bit of personal history from someone with no interest in conspiracy theory, to indicate that the middle ages really did happen.

748...I won!!! (My mother's family had to resettle because they were kicked out of some county)

But if we stay away from the funny part...(or should I call it : the making fun of... part?) who said that there were no records of the middle ages?

It is true that we know very little about the daily life but we sure know about the "glorious bloody deeds" of the ruling class. We know about monks building convents and nuns building cloisters. We know about churches being build. There is poetry and fiction from that time. It is not like it is a big dark hole.

Then, even if Europe was pretty backwards and fanatic, the rest of the world kept on as if nothing was happening. China, Arabia, South America comes to mind.

Right, so the WHOLE thing is one, enormous cross-referencing conspiracy covering pretty much the entire world?

Think about what you're saying mate.

May be referring to the fact that history is written by the "winners and those on top of the mountain" at the time. Look at american history and ask the native americans if they agree. His story ... what about her story? I would guarantee that it would be different.

I could be wrong but i think that we and the general public know a great deal more about the middle ages now than we would have 50 years ago due to mass media and researches carried out. Probably lots of other things too. Now we know more about the times, they can't really be considered dark ages.

I did, from experience with more... well, I hate to use the term "more informed" on something so obviously, fundamentally stupid, but... more informed version of the theory than the one presented by the OP. They do allege that there either are no documents from back then, or that they are all faked.



Historians haven't used that term for a while now; they tend to opt for Early Middle Ages, for (among others) exactly the reason you state. And to Mr Walker, 1066 is one of the dates -- there are others, but that's a big one -- used to mark the end of the EMA.

--Jaylemurph

Right...and now what is the benefit of faking 400 years worth of documents?

I don't know: I've never heard a good explanation. Or even one that made sense.

--Jaylemurph

I would see it if somebody said that 400 years just "disappeared" because nobody counted them...but faking them? Sometimes some " historians" make me wonder whether they only write under the influence.

Wow people truely amaze me sometimes. For someone to think or believe that the Middles Ages didn't happen. That all at once 400 years of History poofed. And the Artifacts when poof too. I am amazed that some people can get out of bed and comb there hair in the morning.

The freedom of information that is common today isn't all that common. I used to be friends with a Russian immigrant who knew a lot less about his countries 'actual' history then I did, so the idea of history being distorted or falsified isn't that far fetched. There are actually quite a few books about Stalin's pictoral tampering and history altering in existence that document how the purges were effectively back dated to wipe out entire families and lineages and events. To say that an entire period of history was tampered with in the same way or fabricated does seem a much bigger deal then the Russian model, but there's some validity to the suggestion. If one explores the foundation of history, there's plenty of historical documents that include major inventions and fictions according to modern study. Heroditus doesn't read like a text book, but it's recorded history, rains of blood and monsters and all.

I think the question as originally stated could have used some revision. Historical events could have been manipulated and tampered with, omitted or fabulated, but there is a clear timeline and certain general events that can be documented and scientifically proved. There were crusades. There probably wasn't a Prester John. There were Assasins and there were Knights Templar. There probably wasn't a speaking severed head and nobody will ever know if they Saladin's reason for backing down when he clearly had the Assasins beaten was due to their ability to get to anyone, no matter how prestigious or well defended.

It's easy enough to evaluate history through lenses tainted by a culture soaked in information and jump quickly to the false conclusion that history as we know it, is as we know it, because of substantial empiric knowledge. It was only a few years ago that archeologists were able to identify that Roman Legionaires were using staples to close wounds in the far reaches of the empire. The discovery was not outright. A dated museum display had the staples mis-identified by learned men, steeped in empirical knowledge, and a medical student insisted that what he saw was actually a staple used in wound treatment. There was an investigation, and history was rewritten to record that the Legionaires did in fact employ staples to close wounds. Point is: keep and open mind and don't go for the easy kill when the point is discussion. Help reword the question so everybody can learn something and nobody hesitates to ask something for fear of being flamed out.

All history is manipulated and tampered with, but impossible to the point that the whole thing would be fake. That is way to obvious.

Agreed. We need the original poster to be more specific in any case. I just wanted to validate the intent of the original post and not be so hard on whomever it was and go the dumb question route. It's a forum, so I figured the hard responses to the initial post could use a little bit of mellowing.

I dunno. A lot of legitimate historians I know frequently work under the influence of Scotch, Bourbon and/or Rye. I don't think I've ever written convincing non-fiction like that (maybe I'm just not old enough for the subtle effects of a single malt to really permeate my grey matter) but I have written some good fiction under the influence of cheap rum.




Pah. History is not for pansies. (Well, not weaklings. I know a lot of perfectly butch pansies.)

--Jaylemurph

Yes there are middle ages.
May be happened about 5 times in our earth.
Because we are in fifth generation now.

Perhaps Sheep' should provide a photograph so we can check ? But then... the tinfoil nightcap keeps the hair in check overnight....




Oh dear... is this another "Mayan Calander" discussion ? Perhaps we should ask Sheep' if we can borrow his tinfoil nightcap ?

Meow Purr.

pssstt ... I have tin foil caps for cats...veery cheeep, never uses...exclusive quality....

I'm sorry Questionmark, but your last post was ridiculous . Try harder.

<Cat briefly scans up and reads the OP>

Sorry QM...in context.... I withdraw my previous comment.

Could those tinfoil cat-hats be reconfigured as tinfoild "chase-toys" ?

If so, PM me with a quotation, your preffered shipping agent, and BACS details.

Meow Purr

My Kentucky Bourbon fouled brain just hiccupped...............



Lapiche

I've read that historians know far more concerning day-to-day social life in Egypt in 1200 B. C. than we know about the British equivalent in 1200 A. D.

But that's a far cry from saying that 1200 A. D. never happened!

EDIT: Corrected "that" to "than."

Well, you bend that fact a little, adorn it with some syntactic excesses and BINGO: you have a book for the more gullible....

If we share the by-line can we split the cash?

Can't be part of it...in real life I got a reputation to loose...

That's utter, utter tosh! In fact, there's a fine, fine book on the exact subject called 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danzinger and Gillingham. I'd give the Amazon.com link, but the mods frown on it. It's the sequel to a book called The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium.

--Jaylemurph

Heh, yeah... I read an article about that:

THE PHANTOM TIME HYPOTHESIS

And here's something about that hypothesis in Wikipedia:

WIKI article

Maybe the OP has just heard that there is confusion over what defines the Middle Ages, not whether they actually existed? I usually take it to mean [in Britian at least] around AD 411 to about the Reformation period. Within that, you have early/middle/late Saxon, then post-Conquest, then onto the later periods. It's all totally arbitrary anyway, I mean nobody at the time thought they were living in the Middle Ages, obviously.

The faking history thing is interesting though, my folks lived in Japan for a bit in the early 90s and my mum came across a Japanese school textbook claiming that far more atomic bombs were dropped on Japan at the end of WW2 than actually were. I wasn't born then so I don't know. But I think it probably was just the two.

I heard a story once about this guy who lived in Nagasaki, and went on holiday for the day to Hiroshima on the day they dropped the bomb. He got blown up a bit and crawled all the way back home, whereupon he was nuked again. And survived. I never found any confirmation of this but I really, really hope it's true.

It would have been only one if the US navy would not have captured Adolf's enriched uranium on its way to Japan. There was no more than for two bombs on the American side and one on the German, one bomb was tested in Los Alamos...that leaves two.

On the other side, if the Japanese would have known that that was it we don't know how they would have reacted despite being beaten even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And as I stated before, all history gets manipulated....

One example i know of is if you ask an afrikaaner who one the boer war, they will say they did. If you ask a british person, they will say the opposite.

I think you are a big reason I hate cats

You could well be right but that's what I was taught in both high school and college World History. And much more recently (just a month or two back) an academic friend used exactly this comparison to explain why she'd chosen early mediaeval history as her field of graduate study. In fact she used the specific example of the "sketchiness" of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles versus the "richness" of ancient Egyptian sources.

And my high school history teacher's explanation of the American Civil War was this:

*pointing to a portrait of James Buchanan: "The Civil War was all this man's fault. He was a flaming homosexual."

My point being, sometimes general courses, such as in high school or intro classes in college, are perforce quick and simplistic, often to the point of eliding to the complexity of the truth in favour of a tidy lesson plan or description of the broader course of history. I hope in graduate school, she learned to do better than make false comparisons between vastly different time periods and cultures; or at least not to compare a single volume with an entire corpus of a civilization: it'd be like comparing My Life in Kenya to the entirety of Latin literature.

--Jaylemurph

Hmmm... the explanation I always got was that all "is caused by the ignominious judeo-masonic-communistoid get on"

did not make me feel good about my ethnicity....

I'm gay, so I understand your reaction.

I later made the mistake of asking that teacher how he knew Buchanan was gay. His answer: "He had... The Look." Without the foamy mouth and wild eyebrows and out-thrust hand, it's not nearly as bizarre, though. It can be argued that virtually all my career has been a response to that little transaction. (It's not strictly true, but true enough.)

--Jaylemurph

I like to call it the Homo-Beacon.

Whatever it is, in whatever language you say it, I'm sure it's capitalized.

--Jaylemurph

I guess some psychologist sure earned some money on that basket case....

No, he eventually retired to a cabin up in the mountains to shoot things and rave.

--Jaylemurph

Aha... just that he was not capable of assembling exploding wood blocks like the Unabomber....

The Middle Ages are popularly perceived as a period of intellectual and cultural stagnation. This perspective is reinforced by the common description of this era as the Dark Ages or the fact that the word "medieval" is frequently used as a pejorative in our modern vocabulary. These stereotypes, many of which were first formulated by Renaissance intellectuals, have little basis in historical truth. In fact, modern scholars now refer to the High Middle Ages as the 12th-century Renaissance. book review

List to browse of tech

Yeh...just like the Holocaust never really happened...

For the record I believe those attrocities did occur...I am merely trying to illustrate a point...

“History is written by the victors.” - Winston Churchill