The Myth of AD

anno domini falling like dominoes

Once again, Laurent Guyénot is blowing out of the water everything I thought I knew. This time it’s his book Anno Domini: A short history of the First millennium AD, An experiment in chronological revisionism.

The first millennium, it turns out, may have lasted only 300 years or 768 years by other accounts. That would mean we’re really living in the 1300’s or in the year 1792. After presenting the evidence, I’ll be proposing another way to look at this if it’s true.

It also turns out that Rome was not in Italy, Latin was a truncated language invented for imperial accountants, and a long list of historical figures were made up in historical forgeries. As always, Laurent brings the receipts and lets you decide. We have 1000 years to cover in a third of the time, so let’s get started.

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‘don’t know much about chronology …’

Laurent seems to come to his most outlandish conclusions the same way I have—noticing something that doesn’t fit and pulling on that thread, only to have the whole thing unravel by the end. He’s one of the most honest and curious scholars I’ve ever found. In his intro by this title, he notices these loose threads when doing his doctorate in medieval culture:

• medieval popular tales are so clearly ancient pagan myths they’re like ‘dispossessed inmates of an Irish pantheon.’

• King Arthur, a sixth century figure, was so beloved in the 11th that anyone telling a Breton Arthur was dead would have difficulty escaping with his life.

• The tale of the Fisher King has clear ties to the Egyptian myths of Osiris, Horus as Perceval and the fratricidal Seth the Red as the Red Knight.

Laurent notes that there are no primary source documents, rather than copies, from before the 10th century. All dates of authorship, along with the actual authors, are hypothetical. The end of the 10th century, by all accounts, was a rupture, a ripping of the social fabric. Volcanoes erupted, the body of a dragon was seen in the sky, a five year famine drove people to cannibalism, a plague made body parts drop off.

But there was also a new distribution of power and type of exploitation in seigneurie, the feudal system of a lord holding all the land. The right of seigniorage is the ability to stamp coins and assign them a higher value than the metal, creating the market as an extension of the lord’s power. This social rift seemed like it induced amnesia through collective trauma where the former way of life was forgotten.

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time conquistadors

The chronology of the first four centuries is entirely dependent on Eusebius, continued by Jerome. The last six centuries are almost all dependent on Sigebert of Gembloux who wrote in the late 11th century. But it wasn’t until the late 16th c that a worldwide conquest of time was launched. As Serge Gruzinski writes in Time Machine:

Little by little, across the entire planet, the relationship with the past is becoming more homogenous … Over the centuries, while Europeans physically invade planetary spaces and relate them to their vision of the world, they conquer the memories of the societies they invade or contaminate.

In these countries, confronted with a past, a present and a future formatted in the European way or simply seduced by the modernity that this way of thinking projects, [they] receive (or adopt) a history which they internalize as the westernization of the world progresses and European globalization reshapes minds and imaginations.

China, for instance, had compiled its historical narrative in the 10th c Song dynasty but 18th c Jesuits revamped it to fit their chronology, resulting in centuries where progress seems to stand still. Indian history is considered so nebulous before the Muslim era that scholars have stated India has no history.

Isaac Newton suggested that the antiquities of Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia should be drastically reduced. It’s taken five more centuries for his suggestion to be taken seriously, that the histories of these regions have been put end-to-end rather than being side-by-side as happening simultaneously.

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forging ahead and behind

Laurent writes, “There is no question that the greatest forgers of history were churchmen. … It is no exaggeration that European history was, to a large extent, shaped by [a] single papal forgery.” This is the Donation of Constantine that conferred on the pope the full extent of imperial authority, the right to give it or take it away from emperors or to rule as emperors in their place.

What about the first century and the detailed history given by Tacitus? Although his name was known, all his work was thought lost until the 15th c when two collectors of ancient manuscripts ‘found’ the last six books of the Annals and the first five of the Histories. They have no explanation of how they were found, were not known for honesty, and had scribes trained to imitate ancient calligraphy, as they bragged.

Eighty years later Pope Leo X (a Medici) offers a small fortune for Greek and Roman manuscripts and the first five books of the Annals magically shows up, likely from the original forger’s son who also was Leo’s secretary. They also ‘discovered’ other work by Cicero, Lucretius, Vesuvius and Quintilian. Michelangelo got his start producing forgeries pretending to be ancient statues for the Medicis.

Works of Cicero are known or suspected forgeries by Petrarch, who also put together Titus Livy’s 142 volumes on the foundation of Rome through Augustus, from sources that are no longer available. The first five centuries are known to be ‘a web of fiction.’ The Augustan History, on which The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is based, has been exposed as the work of an imposter who invented 150 fraudulent letters, speeches, senatorial decrees and acclamations.

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et tu, caesar?

Another scholar concludes that the works of Julius Caesar are late medieval forgeries. Archaeologists have found them wrong about geography, demography, anthropology and religion. The word Caesar comes from Indo-European ‘king’ and wasn’t used until after Julius’ time. The name Iulius, spelled with the I and not J that wasn’t in the language, comes from Iule or Yule for the solar god, as Jupiter means Jul Pater.

Roman emperors were considered adopted sons of Jupiter or the Sol Invictus, Undefeated Sun, and the first emperor, Octavian Augustus was alleged to be the adopted son of Julius Caesar. Were Jupiter and Julius the same, with the Julian calendar simply the solar calendar?

If this is true, then Roman history is mythology—’a literary fiction built on mythical structures.’ Rome lacks its own mythology and merely changed the names of the Greek gods. How is that possible for an independent people? Without Julius Caesar, the whole history of Imperial Rome thins to transparency. And that brings us to Laurent’s critical point, that:

Imperial Rome is actually, for a large part, a fictitious mirror image of Constantinople, a fantasy that started emerging in the eleventh century in the context of the cultural war waged by the papacy against the Byzantine empire, and solidified in the fifteenth century, in the context of the plunder of Byzantine culture that is known as the Renaissance.

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constantine the fake

The biography of Constantine is written by Eusebius. He tells of Constantine’s miraculous conversion to Christianity by seeing the cross in the sky with the words, ‘In this sign, conquer' on the eve of the victorious battle that made him king. He also says that Constantine moved the capital of his empire from Rome to Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople.

However, Constantine was from the Balkans (shout out to Tonika ;-) in the region called Moesia that went from the Balkan Mountains and the Danube to the Black Sea. Laurent writes, “In broad terms, Constantine may be called a Dacian, or a Scythian.” His father Constantius came from Moesia and his predecessor Diocletian is written as Dux Moesiae or king of Moesia in Byzantine chronicles.

The plot thickens. By the time of Diocletian and Constantine, all of Italy had fallen into anarchy so Rome was deserted in favor of Milan as the capital. Byzantine scholar Anthony Kaldellis notes the differences in culture, that the Byzantines “were not a warlike people” as were the Romans:

They preferred to pay their enemies, either to go away or to fight among themselves. Likewise, the court at the heart of their empire sought to buy allegiance with honors, fancy titles, bales of silk, and streams of gold. Politics was the cunning art of providing just the right incentives to win over supporters and keep them loyal. Money, silk and titles were the empire’s preferred instruments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies.

It’s Laurent’s contention that Byzantium was the real heart of the so-called Roman Empire. When the late medieval Church started the Crusades and the systematic plunder of the East, it inverted history with an Italian Constantine who brought Rome and Christianity to Byzantium.

This is belied by the undisputed fact that Roman law, the foundation of our legal system, was ‘imported to Italy from Byzantium at the end of the eleventh century.’ Any knowledge of Roman laws disappeared for 700 years until a Byzantine compendium by Justinian was discovered around 1080 by Bolognese scholars. The logical conclusion is that this originated in the East, not the West.

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a scythian segue

For astute readers, the style of governance under Diocletian and Constantine in Byzantium may seem eerily similar to the Hyksos or foreign rulers in Egypt. Nefahotep has summarized this strategy as “ingratiate, infiltrate, usurp.” Does the name Moesia not seem like Moses? It was the Scythians who provided the terrorism so the Hyksos could keep their hands clean. Why conquer when you could just walk in and show the rulers how to extract, exploit and bribe? Until you replaced them, of course.

The non-warlike characteristics of the Byzantium court doesn’t explain how they got the ‘bales of silk and streams of gold’ with which they bought allegiance. That doesn’t just happen without violence somewhere down the line. Brittanica on the Balkans in the Roman Empire tells me:

The Dacians had suffered invasion by a number of peoples, including the Scythians, a mysterious people probably of Iranian origin who were absorbed into the resident population.

Odd that it would say Iranian and not Persian. On the Scythians, Brittanica writes:

The Scythians were feared and admired for their prowess in war and, in particular, for their horsemanship. They were among the earliest people to master the art of riding, and their mobility astonished their neighbours. The migration of the Scythians from Asia eventually brought them into the territory of the Cimmerians, who had traditionally controlled the Caucasus and the plains north of the Black Sea. In a war that lasted 30 years, the Scythians destroyed the Cimmerians and set themselves up as rulers of an empire stretching from west Persia through Syria and Judaea to the borders of Egypt. …

The Scythians were remarkable not only for their fighting ability but also for the complex culture they produced. They developed a class of wealthy aristocrats who left elaborate graves—such as the kurgans in the Valley of the Tsars … This class of chieftains, the Royal Scyths, finally established themselves as rulers of the southern Russian and Crimean territories. …

The Royal Scyths were headed by a sovereign whose authority was transmitted to his son. Eventually, about the time of Herodotus, the royal family intermarried with Greeks. … The community was eventually destroyed in the 2nd century BCE, Palakus being the last sovereign whose name is preserved in history.

The Scythian army was made up of freemen who received no wage other than food and clothing but who could share in booty on presentation of the head of a slain enemy. … Burial customs were elaborate and called for the sacrifice of members of the dead man’s household, including wife, servants, and a number of horses.

Did the Royal Scythes disappear or transform into Diocletian and Constantine? The word Tsar has the same root as Caesar. The Royal Scythes were backed by the same brutal incentives we saw with the Habiru or Hebrew in my episode The Master Baiters. They were fed and given a share of the spoils, requiring pillage in order to be paid. The Torah describes the same acts of terrorism as the Scythians, with heads required as proof. Did Constantine morph into the Medici Popes, as king makers and breakers?

The Grim Reaper, pictured with a scythe, is a figure that goes back to ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Wielding this curved, wicked-sharp blade from horseback, the Grim Reaper is an apt metaphor for the bringers of death, the Scythians.

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asha logos demurs

But another view of the Scythians is given by Asha Logos in Our Subverted History:

In The Scythians and their Kin, Asha Logos describes them as:

Agile, independent, self-sufficient... only taking fights on their own terms, and only when the odds favor them.. refusing to play their opponents games or fall into their traps. Unassailable, yet powerfully capable of assailing enemies. Profoundly competent, yet understated and unpretentious. Just, honest, genuine, courageous and magnanimous, yet capable of being ruthless when the situation warranted. To my mind, these are the hallmarks of the 'True Scythian', that most ancient root of the Indo-European people that proceeded to branch out across the known world and subsequently become known as an endless variety of peoples and nations over time.

He says this shouldn’t make other peoples feel inferior, there’s just a reason this fine stock took the world by storm and came to be rulers and elites over so many cultures. I don’t know if Asha Logos understands the concept of conquest. It’s not innate superiority that raises the poison to the top but utter ruthlessness. Morals are a real impediment when harvesting heads.

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the roaming empire

Back to Laurent and Anno Domini. Another clue that Byzantium was the OG Rome is the name itself. Romos is a Greek word meaning strong or courage. Byzantines called themselves Roman and their city Rome, and the surrounding country Romania.

We’ve been told that all the so-called Romance languages derived from Latin but linguists are puzzled by this. They all resemble each other more than any of them resemble Latin, and by a wide margin. Curiously, Latin shares a strong similarity with Romanian even though the people haven’t mingled for 2000 years. Why is that?

We’re told that Rome conquered Dacia under Emperor Trajan, Dacian prisoners are pictured on the column of Trajan and the Arch of Constantine. The Dacian language disappeared without a trace in a mere 170 year occupation, but Latin stuck through all subsequent invaders. That’s one theory.

But Laurent posits that Latin is a language originating from Dacia. He writes:

The reason why Dacia is also called Romania is because Dacia—rather than Italy—was the original home of the Romans who founded Constantinople. That is consistent with the fact that Constantine the Great was a native Dacian. It is also consistent with the notion that the Roman language (Latin) remained the administrative language of the Eastern Empire until the sixth century AD, when it was abandoned for Greek, the language spoken by the majority of its subjects.

It would also be consistent if Trajan conquered Dacia as a roaming Scythian, not a Roman emperor, and if Constantine was a Royal crypto-Scyth.

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a mother tongue of lawyers

Laurent quotes MJ Harper on the character of Latin:

Latin is not a natural language. When written, Latin takes up approximately half the space of written Italian or written French (or written English, German or any natural European language). … it seems a reasonable working hypothesis to assume that Latin was originally a shorthand compiled by Italian speakers for the purposes of written (confidential? commercial?) communication.

And Steven Runciman:

while Greek is a subtle and flexible tongue, admirably suited to express every shade of abstract thought, Latin is far more rigid and inelastic; it is clear, concrete, and uncompromising, a perfect medium for lawyers.

Even Dante assumes that Latin was an artificial and synthetic language created “by the common consent of many peoples.” A German author argues that “The origin of Latin as an administrative lingua franca conceived by the Franks in the Early Middle Ages is a hypothesis that cannot be rejected out of hand.”

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a wobbly chronology

This barely scratches the surface of the first chapter. I will summarize the rest in a few paragraphs, with the suggestion that it’s well worth reading this short, inexpensive book that could change your entire understanding that the passage of time is an invention of the oligarchs, not just individual histories.

Laurent cites the Russian mathematician Fomenko in History: Science or Fiction, saying that “our conventional history is full of doublets, produced by the arbitrary end-to-end alignment of chronicles that tell the same events, but are ‘written by different people, from different viewpoints, in different languages, with the same characters under different names and nicknames.’”

Laurent synchronizes these narratives side by side, showing that the same human events and natural occurrences in alignment collapse the elapsed time.

Isaac Middle will be pleased that “astronomy is one of the oldest sciences, so matching astronomical events recorded in chronicles with their real time line should be easy.” However, it’s fallen victim to circular reasoning where the predictable movement of stars and planets, which is also true in retrospect, has been made to fit the chronological narrative.

Some fail to account for precession, a term I learned from Isaac, that the wobbling of the Earth’s axis through the poles advances the calendar one day every 71 years. German astronomers calculate that the period between the last two recorded jerks of the earth’s axis—in Caesar’s time and in the 15th c—was not 1400 years but 700. This matches other evidence.

The most compelling and irrefutable evidence is archeological stratigraphy where artifacts supposedly separated by centuries are found together and distinct building strata groups supposedly seven centuries apart are layered right on top . Architecture has anomalies in building materials and styles in immediate juxtaposition. Historical monuments like the Arch of Constantine would have us believe it was begun and finished centuries apart.

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the real anno domini

Who are the perpetrators of this fraud, if it be so? The papal forgery factory, as Laurent titles one subsection, details this as the rule, not the exception. Between 990 and 1009, there was cooperation between the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, the German emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II. This is when the Carolingian phantom empire was born and the myth of Charlemagne. The Ottonian Privilege, handed down from Charlemagne, is written by his propagandists, laying claim to vast lands.

Otto III didn’t accidentally reign in the year 1000, he decided that “it suited his understanding of Christian milleniarism”. His good friend Pope Sylvester helped define the date and Constantine VII had monks rewrite all Greek texts and destroy the originals. They filled in the blanks. According to a monk named Dionysius, Laurent reports, Jesus was really born in the year 753.

So this is where Laurent and I part ways. For all of his willingness to question history as myth, Laurent still believes in the gospels as history. Popes fabricated every other document that gave them the power to make and break kings, but the foundational story that gave them any power at all is the God’s honest truth—even though it is externally contradicted by archeology, geography, astronomy, linguistics, history, psychology, theology and internally contradicts itself.

Laurent sees cataclysms as fulfilling the prophecies of the Bible and therefore conveying credibility to Christianity. But he also admits there is no primary document in existence before the tenth century. So those prophecies could be fabricated in reverse.

What this makes possible is that, instead of the story of Jesus being written under Constantine in the 4th c, it may have been written sometime between the 8th and the 10th. There’s no reason to fit our current timeline to an arbitrary fictional event. Instead of seeing our current year as really 1324 or 1792, we can also move history up into the Common Era. What has been relegated to the ancient past that is just a millennia or two away?

Perhaps the famines were as man-made as the Biblical one in Egypt created by Joseph’s taxation scheme. Maybe the plague where limbs fell off was an analogy for the new system of seignorage taking the land and coining the money. Were the Scythians the ones lopping off limbs? Were they the same as the Hyksos in Egypt and the Hapiru in Canaan?

I feel like the weight of 700 years of oppression has just been lifted. Suddenly the centuries that this scheme has worked have been cut in half. How many other rebellions have been twisted into fulfilled prophecies? The inevitability of might making right, evaporated just like that. As the past changes, so do the possibilities for the future. And as the future changes, it seems, so does the past.

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My title reflects self-inflation through manipulation of others to do the dirty work. I look at the historical clay tablets called The Amarna Letters sent by vassal lords in Canaan and Lebanon to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. I compare the historical and linguistic clues to Biblical figures, asking Who was Abraham? Who were the Hebrews? I link Abram to the mercenary warlord Abdi-Ashirta who used the belligerent Habiru to poach the cities, including the oldest in the world, Byblos/ Gubla.

Looks at the power of religion to make good people do evil things. Defines scripture and inner vs. external authority. Sees IDF soldiers as puppets with stories being the strings that control them. Quotes Bassam Youssef on Israel as a narcissistic psychopath that f*cks you up and then makes you think it's your fault.

Puts the Biblical story of Babel in context of the genealogy of Noah, transferring the right to rule the world from Shem (Shemites) to Abram, the first Hebrew. Explains the thorny problem of how there are so many languages if everyone descended from Noah. Also looks at R.F. Kuang's excellent book Babel on translation, etymology and colonization.