- Page breaks are not included on this page, please refer to the original document for page numbers.
- Notes by the author are marked in parentheses with initials GH (Gunnar Heinsohn), as presented in the original document.
- Highlights in red and/or bold are as placed by the author Gunnar Heinsohn.
This article is part of "The Controversy" set of correspondence -
- Trevor Palmer's Response to Gunnar Heinsohn [archive.fo/WSPIK], Trevor Palmer's biography [archive.fo/aJ9V7]
- Gunnar Heinsohn's Answer to Trevor Palmer: "Rome's Stratigraphy belongs into the 8th-10th Century A.D." [is.gd/DRArpb]
- Gunnar Heinsohn's 2nd answer to Trevor Palmer: "Did European civilization collapse three times during the 1st Millennium AD?" (.pdf) [is.gd/pYZFuX]
- Ewald Ernst: "Toppling Rome's Obelisks and Aqueducts", a comment on Trevor Palmer's review of Gunnar Heinsohn's new 1st Millennium AD chronology (.pdf) [is.gd/sEqNoP]. Ewald Ernst (b.1945; Berlin) majored, in 1973, in architecture at RWTH-Aachen-University, Germany’s leading institute of technology. During his studies as well as in his professional career as an construction engineer he had the chance to visit the most important Greek and Roman sites in Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and the Near East. He specialized in ancient Roman architecture, building technologies, and construction materials (hydraulic cement, wall elements etc.). He pioneered in researching Roman settlements east of the Limes (2006 lecture on “Roman buldings on the Weser River“). In 2008 he received government permission to excavate the „Hohlweg [ravine] an der Grossen Egge“ (Teutoburg Forest) through which a Roman street had passed. (See here [archive.is/gbAqg])
- Jan Beaufort, in Support of Gunnar Heinsohn: "Conspiracy or Religious History? Some Objections to Trevor Palmer's hasty classification of the Heinsohn-Thesis as conspiracy theory" intro [is.gd/BF1UOC], full report (.pdf) [is.gd/gohv3l]
- Trevor Palmer Challenges Gunnar Heinsohn's Latest: "The Chronology of Europe from the Reign of Septimius Severus to that of Maurice, according to Sources from the Fourth to the Ninth Centuries" [is.gd/3TIFFT]
===*===*===
MY ANSWER TO TREVOR PALMER’S ”CHALLENGE” -
To make the Roman Empire visible in its entirety, not only the characters and events of the 1st-3rd and the 4th-6th c. periods have to be called upon but also the rulers and actions of the 8th-10th c. CE. This conclusion is imperative because the archaeological levels of all three periods share the same stratigraphic plane, i.e. they are contingent with 10th/11th materials or onsite strata. My research indicates that no individual archaeological site from the 1st millennium CE has more than about 300 years of genuine historical substance. It is inconceivable that this conclusion – that some 700 years of archaeology are missing from the 1st millennium CE – would not draw serious criticism. Therefore I am grateful for Trevor Palmer’s first go at it. Since, however, he does not touch upon stratigraphy at all, my answer starts with an overview illustrating that very claim (all figures rounded).
(Thanks for editorial assistance go to Clark Whelton, New York. GH)
[Chronological Table]:
Contemporaneity of 1st millennium periods (strata group B) that are contingent with the material culture of the 10th/11th c. CE (strata group A), and, therefore all belong to the 8th-10th period.
Strata Group A
Territorial Focus -
- South West (Rome) (1-230s CE)
- South East (Constantinople) (290-520s CE)
- North East and Near East (Scandinavia, Baltic Sea, Carolingians, Mesopotamia etc.) (700-930s CE) (=290-520s CE =1-230s CE)
Strata Group B
Territorial Focus -
- South West (Rome) (10th/11th c. CE)
- South East (Constantinople) (10th/11th c. CE)
- North East and Near East (Scandinavia, Baltic Sea, Carolingians, Mesopotamia etc.) (10th/11th c. CE)
[End Chronological Table]
In his "Chronology of Europe" (here on q-mag [archive.fo/7ugyQ]), Palmer has amassed (from mainstream history texts) long lists of emperors, popes and non-Roman chieftains of the 1st-6th centuries CE to underline the historical reality of these personalities. Trevor’s impressive effort, however, only makes sense if he regards me as someone who wants to abandon genuine rulers, or even turn them into fictitious characters. Never, in scholarly exchanges of nearly half a century, have I come across a more profound misunderstanding.
The existence of most of the rulers Palmer mentions is proven by coins and other artifacts, most of which are genuine pieces, and, therefore, cannot be denied by anybody in his right mind. Since Palmer, too, is aware of such coins, I should have no difficulty convincing him that they must receive their appropriate place in any evaluation of the history of the Roman Empire.
It is not my intention to deny rulers and their coins. More than Palmer or anybody else may imagine, I actually could easily accommodate more rulers and more coins to furnish the vast space of the Roman Empire and its neighbors. Every new discovery is welcome because we need rulers not only for the multitude of Roman Ceasars and Augustusses but also tribal reges negotiating or warring with them. Portraits with Roman diadems and the Roman chlamys (woolen cloak), for example, we also find on 8th-10th c. coins of Anglo-Saxon kings like Alfred the Great (9th c.) or of Frankish kings like Charlemagne (8th/9th c.). Did they really have to sink so low as to show off in Roman costumes to impress their wildling-subjects, or did they, as Roman foederati, and not as primitive braggarts, belong to Rome’s turf, too?
8th/9th c. rulers in 1st/2nd c. Roman diadem and/or chlamys -
- Edward the Elder (899-924) (via englishmonarchs.co.uk) [archive.fo/Ns69p]
- Charlemagne, reproduction coin (via static-numista.com/catalogue) [archive.fo/0AktX]; {original coin not included in this report} [archive.fo/roIjJ]: Obverse of a Charlemagne denier (a silver coin) coined in Frankfurt from 812 to 814, today at the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris.
- Alfred the Great (871-899) (via bbc.co.uk) [archive.fo/DtHUs]
Since there are no medieval castles with tower, moat and drawbridge – they arrive in the 11th c. – to house Alfred or Charles, one has either to shroud these larger-than-life figures in eternal mystery or to look for their material habitats in Roman period strata where they can be identified easily. Alfred’s Winchester (Venta Belgarum) has a Roman-period palace that nobody claims for anybody, and Charlemagne’s palace at Ingelheim is a villa of which everything is Roman but the 9th c. date. If Roman strata are to be excluded, Alfred’s Winchester has no strata between the 3rd and the 11th/12th centuries. His 9th c. date would be left with no buildings at all – a perfect invitation to doubt his very existence. However, his coins stand in the way of such a denial. So far, it is only me who can bestow more credibility on Alfred, Charlemagne and many more of the indigenous rulers. See more on the Roman palaces of Alfred and Charlemagne here: [is.gd/Wbeix9].
Even the sagas surrounding King Arthur, a Briton ruler fighting invading Saxons, will find their appropriate historical context once the chronology follows stratigraphy and not vice versa. A 6th c. Arthur cannot be verified due to the extreme poverty of British strata or even records assignable to the 6th c. when powerful indigenous Britons were a thing of the past. Yet, once we acknowledge that Germanic tribes, most prominently Saxons, have been competing with Rome for the conquest of the British Isles (See chapter 4 in my Charlemagne’s Correct Place In History) [is.gd/Wbeix9] the archaeological substance for Arthur’s legendary Camelot is before our eyes. It is Camulodunum (Roman Colchester) whose most powerful king, Addedomarus (on his coins also written Aθθe-domarus), rules Eastern Britain in the late 1st century BCE. Yet, not only the conage of King Aθθe but also his Camulodunum’s archaeological substance for the late 1st c BCE (i.e., shortly before 700 CE in stratigraphy based time) is unquestionable (GH: My King Arthur = King Aθθe is work in progress for q-mag).
Thus, far from dismissing even a single ruler whose existence is supported by coins, I am, so far, actually the only author who may be able to support the historicity of many a personality by drawing on material evidence that everybody else either regards as forgeries or pushes aside as chronologically irrelevant for understanding Roman, Britain etc. history.
With all due respect, I beg not only mainstreamers but also Illigist and Fomenkoist dissidents alike to stop discarding historical narratives that are, in my view, unintelligible only because, through misdating, they have been torn into pieces that are spread over huge and disconnected time spans. We will understand many an historical event much better when we illuminate it with all shreds available, even if today (or, better, for at least one millennium) one is dated to the 200s, another to the 500s and the final one to the 900s. By gluing together snippets of the same narrative that are now distributed over 700 years, many a chronological conflict of the 1st millennium CE becomes intelligible for the first time.
For example: Manichaean-like Essenes -- hermits who supposedly meditated in the desert -- follow, in the 1st c. period of St. Paul, a "war scroll", of which nobody appears to be afraid, though it contains detailed instructions on how to train anti-Roman insurgents and organize their military logistics. Diocletian (an otherwise reasonable leader), 300 years later, persecutes followers of Mani after supposedly (and hysterically) painting them as a lethal danger to the Empire, though there appears to be no hint of a sectarian insurgency. In the 8th/9th c., Paulician Christians from Mananalis (led by another holy Paul supposedly trying to recreate the days of St. Paul 700 years earlier) take up arms and go to war against the crown (Pointed out by Peter Winzeler). Their insurgents are hunted down and slaughtered throughout the empire’s eastern territories. Taken separately, none of the three episodes makes sense. By combining them, however, a readable story of a massive persecution unfolds. The fate of entire ethnic groups can be untangled, too. The Slavs, to give one example, are believed to have existed in their traditional territories south of the Baltic Sea as early as the 1st-3rd c. because they are known as Venedi by Tacitus. Then, they are supposed to have disappeared into an as yet unknown location. From that unknown location, they moved back to their original realm in the 6th c. when Jordanes knew them as Venethi. Still, their new homes in their former realm are difficult to identify. Yet, in the 9th c. Alfred the Great’s traveler Wulfstan knows them as Weonod living in hill forts of the 8th-10th c. CE. In reality, the Slavs never left their habitats for mysterious new frontiers from which they slid silently back home centuries later where they leave tangible traces even more centuries later. See already my "Mieszko I, destructions, and Slavic mass conversions to Christianity"(.pdf) [is.gd/C4jY4N] p. 12.
Even minor problems find a solution once the contemporaneity of Caesars and Sub-Caesars or Augustussses and Sub-Augustusses, now separated by some 300 years, is taken into account. Rome’s castrum at Basel (Switzerland), e.g., goes out of use for some 290 years because it is known under Titus (79-81), and mentioned by Valentinian (369-375), who are, stratigraphy-wise, contemporaries, as may be seen from the following overview (already shown in my earlier presentations on q-mag) -
[Chronological Table]:
Selection of contemporary emperors now dated some 300 years apart. (So-called Late Antiquity emperors in bold letters)
Also see: See G. Heinsohn, "Wie viele Jahre hat das erste Jahrtausend? (How many years there are in the 1st millennium?)", Detmold; private print; October 2013, chapter II; using J. Beaufort, "Einige Heerführer und Kaiser von Caesar bis Diocletian gemäß Heinsohn-These mit um 284 Jahre rückdatierten Soldatenkaisern", May 2013, PDF-circular.
[End Chronological Table]
[Chronological Table]:
CHRONOLOGY OF BASEL’S CATHEDRAL HILL IN THE ROMAN PERIOD
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basler_M%C3%BCnster#Baugeschichte; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel#Geschichte
364-375 Under Valentinian Castrum re-activated
74 bis 364 Castrum supposedly discontinued although no aeolian layer, necessary for a waste period, fiund.
74 Castrum deactivated under Vespasian/Titus
17 CE Eraction of Castrum under Tiberius
40/20 BCE Creation of Roman district under Augustus
[End Chronological Table]
If we want to get a wider perspective on the empire’s six million km2, 2,500 cities, a road network of 85,000 km, with 8,500 km of borders, we must look for the local protectors of this realm – ethnically diverse Sub-Caesars and Sub-Augustusses – who needed imperial residences and local mints. Today we have difficulty seeing these many separate centers of power in full splendor at the same time. We have, e.g., light being shed on 4th century Constantinople whilst at the same time Rome’s imperial quarters are out of use. When Rome is well lit in the 1st c., Constantinople prefers darkness. When Harun ar Rashid's capital of Raqqa, or Charlemagne's Ingelheim, blossom in the 9th c., Rome as well as Constantinople appear to be in agony, whilst Arabia suffers the same fate (.pdf) [is.gd/yrdcua] when Rome trumpets in the 2nd c. or Constantinople triumphs in the 5th century. Yet, once we take into account that all the regions supposedly coming to prominence in periods many hundred years apart, are actually stratigraphic bedfellows we immediately understand that the magically unaltered re-appearance of architectural styles and building technologies in the 2nd, 5th, and 9th c. is due not to an as yet unsolvable enigma but to the outfall of chronological concepts dreamt up since the 10th/11th c. that were never meant to match stratigraphy but to fill a thousand years with historical narratives (.pdf) [is.gd/DIJZd3]. The composers of this millennium-long story line have left us the texts that Palmer regards as ”sources from the fourth to the ninth centuries,” although for none of them do we have manuscripts preceding the 11th c. CE. I am with Palmer as long as we refer to unquestionable substance in the texts (like rulers with coin evidence etc.). Yet, I cannot turn such compositions into original 1st millennium sources when we only have versions that have been edited and chronology-fitted during the early 2nd millennium. I am simply in no position to promote 2nd millennium prose into prime first millennium originals. And, I think, neither is Palmer. Therefore, for the moment, let us stay with hard items from art and architecture, now dated, e.g., to the 1st, 4th and 7th/8th centuries, and check if we really find them in strata layered on top of each other at the same site. We may easier comprehend the striking similarities of such items in design and building technology across these three periods once we understand their stratigraphy-based contemporaneity.
[Chronological Table]:
Nowhere verifiable stratigraphy (schematic) required by Palmer’s timeline for the 1st millennium’s 1,000 years
- (E 10th/11th c.): Clearly non-Roman period culture (castles with tower, moat and drawbridge)
- (X3 930s): Destructions plus DEPOPULATION of Slavic tribal regions
- (D 7th/8th-early 10th c.) Distinct building level of Carolingians, Vikings, Slavic hill forts, Abbasid Arabs, Anglos-Saxons etc. (.pdf) [is.gd/pPT4F2]
- (X2 520s): Destructions plus PLAGUE of Justinian
- (C 290s-520s): Distinct building level of Late Antiquity
- (B 230-280s): Meagre building level of period of Baracks Emperors
- (X1 230s): Destructions plus PLAGUE of Cyprian
- (1-230s): Distinct building level of Early Antiquity
Under E one will find either (X3 +D), or (X2+C) or (X1+A) but never all three or even only two of such pairs.
B will nowhere be found. Rome’s wall dated to 275 CE was actually completed with Hadrian [117-138]-bricks (see: K. Schade, “Die Archäologie”, in K.-P. Johne et al., Hg., Die Zeit der Soldatenkaiser: Krise und Transformation des Römisdchen Reichesim 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr.. (235-284), Berlin: Akademieverlag, 2008, pp. 59-87).
X1 / X3 / X3 will be visible as a destruction level, dark earth layer etc.
Many sites end in X1 / X2 / X3 for good.
[End Chronological Table]
I will focus on the most prominent rulers of (A) the 1st (Augustus) and (C) the 4th century (Constantine the Great). The near identity of style and execution of their sculptures is, of course, well known. Scholars believe that the 4th century’s rationale was to exactly recreate the splendor of the 1st c. CE to, in kind of a magic spell, resurrect its admired but also envied vitality. Yet, to this very day, not even a single letter of an 4th c. imperial order has come to light that has obliged artists or architects either to exactly repeat designs out of fashion for 300 years or to face punishment. Nobody understands how each and every artist from the empire’s immense realm could be broken into foregoing ambition and to devoting all creative energies to sickening repetition.
- Statue of Augustus (1st c.) (A) (via projectionsystems.wordpress.com) [archive.fo/ZAob1]
- Head of Augustus (1st c.) with corona civica (A) (via de.academic.ru) [archive.fo/FamP8]
- Statue of Constantine (4th c.) (C) (Lateran-Basilica; Foto J. Sidorczak-Heinsohn)
- Head of Constantine (4th c.) with corona civica (C) (Foto J. Sidorczak-Heinsohn)
Even 4th c. sculptors begging for permission to work in 2nd c. style swiftly got to hear, ”you do 1st c. style or you are going to regret it”. At least, that’s the impression conveyed by the hard evidence as long as it is separated from the originals by some 300 years.
Modern historians may believe that 4th c. police officers (vigiles urbani) were perfectly capable of recognizing and instantly destroying any three-dimensional item not having a 1st c. appearance. However, writers appear to have suffered the same repression. If they tried to chisel their work in stone in their 4th c. Latin, they were immediately silenced, or worse, if they would not promise never again to deviate from 1st c. inscriptional Latin (See more on the striking similarities between 1st, 4th and 8th c. Latin: W. Stroh, Latein ist tot, es lebe Latein [Latin is dead, long live Latin], 2007, Berlin: Ullstein).
Fine, one might go along, but such an oversight could not be left to semi-literate vigiles. Some six million imperial km2 would have required legions of qualified censors trained to tell the difference between 1st and 4th c. Latin to mete out an appropriate punishment like, beware Jupiter!, cutting off a straying writer’s hand. Yet, it looks as if total obedience of writers had been secured. Not only the philology but even the content of 4th c. texts did not differ much from 300 year earlier prose. Even more than that may have been achieved. The entire 1st-3rd sequence appears to have been repeated by 4th-6th century poets: "From the ‘poetical revival’ of the fourth century – the chronological boundaries I set for this chapter – poets activate and intensify features of the first century C.E. verse as part of developing a second late style in the Latin tradition" (S. McGill, ”Latin Poetry”, The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 335-360/336).
Never before, and never since, has censorship been applied with such overwhelming success.Yet, Late Antiquity’s (4th-6th c.) repetition of Antiquity (1st-3rd c.) did not stop there. In the 9th/10th c. censors may have succeeded one more time to force early antiquity on people of talent: ”Many scholars point out the continuity of poetry of the first two centuries C.E., especially of the didactic poetry, with the later one [of the 4th/5th c.; GH]. / In the fifth and sixth centuries, some inscriptional epigrams show quotations, or echoes, of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca [4th/5th c.; GH] or, at least, of the style represented in his poems. [...] Later, in the cultural context of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance of the tenth century, the funerary epigram for Michael, synkellos of the Patriarch Nicholas Mysticus, was composed in the Nonnian style” (G. Agosti, „Greek Poetry”, The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 361-404, 364/382; bold GH).
Yet, the censors have not been content to exercise their power merely with movables like texts and pieces of art. Entire urban spaces had to match 300 year older structures, right down to the wall patterns. However, in 4th-6th c. capitals, building strata for the 1st-3rd c. period are absent, whereas on top of capitals – with their 1st-3rd c. building splendor of marble and brick – we find no additional strata with new buildings and urban complexes in marble and brick. It is either 1st-3rd or 4th-6th c. palatial wealth.
[Chronological Table]:
1st c. capital cities with circus and palace whose urban and palatal pattern has been “repeated” in the 4th c. CE
- ROME: 1st c. imperial palace with circus and amphitheatre. No 4th-6th c. inperial stratum (C).
- MILANO: 4th c. palace and circus of Maximinian
(Civico Museo Archeologico di Milano. Foto G. Heinsohn]. No 1st-3rd c. building stratum (A).
- CONSTANTINOPLE: 4th c. palace and circus (nationalgeographic.de/thumbnails/lightbox/32/70/00/byzanz-ausstellung-konstantinopel-aus-der-vogelperspektive-7032.jpg). No 1st-3rd c. building stratum (A).
- SIRMIUM: 4th c. palace and circus of Diocletian (Sirmium-Museum. Foto J. Sidorczak-Heinsohn). No 1st-3rd c. building stratum (A).
[End Chronological Table]
But what about Rome’s 4th/5th century churches? They make Palmer confident that although “the empire was no longer governed from Rome the city continued to function” after the empire had been “split into two by Diocletian”. That “split” of the empire’s vast space into two, thereby beginning the Dominate 300 years after the Principate of Augustus, provides one of the most beloved concepts of historiography. The Romans themselves, however, were not aware of it. How could they when it was created in the 19th c. by a German classicist, Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)?
Diocletian (ca. 284-305[=1-14=700-714]) is seen as the most radical of all the Late Antiquity repeaters of everything 300 years out of fashion. His obsessive passion for tradition is second to none. He becomes the model for everybody, actually for countless millions, because not only the leading personages but regular citizens, too, when buying fibulae, glass beads, or houses and their interiors, would not deviate from styles that were popular 300 year earlier. No artist would have dared to portrait Diocletian in a 4th c. manner. It was 1st c. or nothing. Late Hellenistic elements of the late 1st c. BCE were okay but anything later than early 1st c. CE led into deep water – or so mainstream history would have us believe.
[Chronological Table]:
Left: (via roman-emperors.org) [archive.fo/U3t8H]
Middle. http://home.arcor.de/bisous/Christenverfolgung.html.
Right. With corona civica; (via askbiography.com/bio/Diocletian.html) [archive.is/RCL2g]
[End Chronological Table]
Diocletian’s private mansion at Split is a throwback to the style of the castra of the Late Republic, dated 300 years earlier: ”La villa, come alcuni altri esempi tardo-republicani, è costruita a modello di un castrum con le mura di cinta e i torrioni, ma fece da ispirazione anche il complesso dei palazzi imperiali del Palatino" (Palazzo di Diocleziano, 2013) [archive.fo/qAwBF]. His villa’s colonnades ”especially impressed early visitors [of Split]. […] Colonnades are an important part of some Hellenistic and most later Roman architecture (M. Greenhalgh, Diocletian the Builder, and the Decline of Architecture, 2013) [archive.fo/VJS8Q].
Yet, what even the most hardened historians cannot comprehend is Diocletian’s decision to deprive his cavalry of the stirrup. His horsemen are sent into battle against armies taking advantage of this military tool since the late 2nd century CE, e.g. the Kushan Empire east of Rome’s Parthian arch-enemy. Yet, if Augustus could wage battle without knowledge of the stirrup against non-stirrup armies Diocletian could, at last, not only pay homage to his idol but, at the same time, outperform him by perfectly knowing the stirrup, and, still, sending his horsemen against superior stirrup-forces. How sweet to accept defeat if it is suffered in the name of love for Rome’s finest traditions. Because it sounds so bizarre, mainstream scholars might emphasize, we cannot help but believe it. But, yes, we still do not have his anti-stirrup-order. I beg to differ. Diocletain was not insane but 1st c. in textbook chronology, and 8th c. in stratigraphy based history. I regard him as a leading holder of one of the border Caesarships that had been established after the devastating civils wars from 49 to 30 BCE. That’s why in Nicomedia, Diocletians capital, the imperial cult instituted for Augustus, received its first temple. Only once, and even during that visit in the company of his Co-Augustus, Maximinianus, did Diocletian enter Rome (Cf. T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine, Cambridge/Mass & London: Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 52. See in detail G. Heinsohn, Wie viele Jahre hat das erste Jahrtausend?(How many years there are in the 1st millennium?), Detmold; private print; October 2013, chapters IV and V). His duty was to protect the empire’s borders. Therefore, he was determined not to allow anybody, himself included, to cause trouble in its central capital.
[Chronological Table]:
Late 1st c. BCE Hellenistic gate with round arches and triangular gable from Aphrodisias
(http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_654/13246038651E0UkJ.jpg)
Late 3rd c. CE rebirth of Hellenistic gate with round arches and triangular gable under Diocletian at Split. (Foto J. Sidorczak-Heinsohn)
[End Chronological Table]:
Let us return to Late Antiquity’s churches? Hard evidence for Christianity comes with two myterious enigmas. (1) Since its foundation it has to make do without temples. (2) When, in the 4th/5th c., churches are erected on a massive scale their architects are forced to build them in the 1st/2nd c. style of Roman basilicas. However, there is no known order by Constantine the Great (with his 4th c. statues in 1st c. style, too) or by anybody else telling architects to use design and building techniques that have been out of fashion for 300 years. Yet, “Santa Maria Maggiore so closely resembles a second-century imperial basilica that it has sometimes been thought to have been adapted from a basilica for use as a Christian church. Its plan was based on Hellenistic principles stated by Vitruvius at the time of Augustus.” 1818 M. R. Miles, "Santa Maria Maggiore's Fifth-Century Mosaics: Triumphal Christianity and the Jews", Harvard Theological Review, vol. 86, no. 2, 1993, 155–172/158.
[Chronological Table]:
- Interior of Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore (423-440) with a line of 300 year older perfect columns that are not taken from ruins. They look 2nd c. because the building is 2nd c. (Foto: Joanna Sidorczak-Heinsohn)
- Interior of Rome’s Santa Sabina (422-433) with 24 perfect but 300 year older columns of the 2nd c. that are not taken from ruins. (wiki/File:Santa_Sabina_2008.jpg).
[End Chronological Table]
The confusion about Christian churches (.pdf) [is.gd/aWnwHn] is corroborated by Jewish history: "Very few Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible have come down to us from the 'Silent Period' – between the 2nd century, when the last of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, and the 10th century, when the Aleppo Codex was produced" (Israel Museum, ed., "Piecing Together the Past: Ancient Fragments of the Song of the Sea", 2010) [archive.fo/WAxpI].
Most bewildering is the chronologically forced abolition of 1st to early 3rd c. synagogues. i.e for a period with rich and dramatic Jewish history: “Whereas these finds had once been dated to the first centuries CE, today it is generally agreed that they stem from the third to fifth centuries" (L. I. Levine, Jewish Archaeology in Late Antiquity: Art, Architecture, and Inscriptions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 538. Reference pointed out by Fank Wallace).
This most massive revisionism within Jewish chronology is not yet completed. The 4th-6th c. period with hardly any Jewish history receives the bulk of Jewish archaeological substance whereas well known 1st to early 3rd c. Jewish is made to look like a fantasy with no hard evidence to support it:
"An even further revolution in the dating of Galilean synagogues may be currently in the making as a result of a series of articles by Jodi Magness, who dates a number of these synagogues (Capernaum, Gush Halav, Khirbet Shema) to the fifth and even sixth centuries on the basis of ceramic evidence. If she is correct, many of these buildings would have to be dated some 100–300 years later than previous estimates. Needless to say, the historical implications would be enormous" (L. I. Levine, Jewish Archaeology in Late Antiquity: Art, Architecture, and Inscriptions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 538).
Not merely “enormous” but also bizarre because synagogues moved to Late Antiquity retain their 1st/2nd c. Roman outline. Thus the synagogues’ style would perfectly fit the period where the Jewish action is. It is their new chronology that denudes genuine Jewish history:
"Late archaeological data exist alongside earlier artistic forms and styles. Much more work, however, remains to be done before this issue can be put to rest / The architecture and decoration of the Galilean-type building drew heavily from Roman public buildings that flourished in the East in the early centuries CE" (L. I. Levine, Jewish Archaeology in Late Antiquity: Art, Architecture, and Inscriptions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 539/541).
Once we acknowledge that Antiquity and Late Antiquity are two aspects of the same period lasting some 230 years (1-230=290-520) that stratigraphically belongs to the 700-930 time slot, the bizarre teachings on the history of church and synagogue building can simply be discarded. The same is true for our texbook views of entire cities that begin and end (catastrophically) in the 1-230-period as they do in the 290-520 period as always has been sensed by the best minds in the field:
„The climax of the physical development of the classical city was reached in some areas at the end of the second century, more generally in the first two decades of the third century. After that the great flood of private munificence displayed in public buildings, banquets, distribution of money for food, games statues and inscribed monuments subsided everywhere, and never recovered to anything remotely approaching its former level. The Empire was passing through the crisis of the third century. / During the sixth century the cities of the Greek East were hit by a series of severe blows; earthquakes, Persian invasions (Foss 1990), and, perhaps most serious of all successive waves of bubonic plague, the first in 541. […]. The effect was like the crisis of the third century” (W. Liebeschuetz, “The End of the Ancient City“, in J. Rich, ed., The City in Late Antiquity, London & New York: Routledge, 1992, 1-48 [3f. / 34]; bold GH).
I will complete this answer to Palmer’s critique by returning to his doubts about the “severe blows” and “plagues” that finished the Roman Empire, whatever date that cataclysm receives (230s, 520s or 930s). Although the evidence is, against their stratigrapic contemporaneity, currently dated to different periods, signs of the annihilation of Rome are overwhelming. [3] At each “fall” of the empire the corroborating literature is there, too: the 230s with, e.g., Cyprian’s On Mortality, the 520s with, e‘s. g., Justinian’s plague plus comet or Allah’s elephant stones thrown from the heavens; and the 930s, e.g., with the Slavic realm’s “rapid, sometimes catastrophic, collapse of many of the pre-existing tribal centers. These events were accompanied by the permanent or temporary depopulation of former areas of settlement” (A. Buko, Archeoligia Polski. Wczesnosredniowiecznej: Odkryccia – hiptezy – interpretacje, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2011, p. 464).
A look at a Roman situation before and after the 230s (=520s=930s) may illustrate that one would have been quite happy to see the devastation rather coming on one of Rome’s hills (where the basilicas survived) than in the Tiber lowland where only the Pantheon and a few circular theatre walls remained standing, walls behind which survivors in simple shacks tried to hide not only from wild animals but from other people who were competing for survival, too:
- Part of Rome’s Mars Field in the 220s before the cataclysm.
- Same area of Rome’s Mars Field after modest new beginnings of survivors that had turned the theater-ruin into a fortress. (ca. 280s=980s; "X-XI secolo"; L. Venditelli, ed., Crypta Balbi: Guida, Roma: Electa, 2012, p. 15).
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