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While imagining changing the entire world's calendar today is too large by a couple orders of magnitude, imagine the task of A: getting an entire continent to change its calendar B: using the by-modern-standards utterly terrible and slow communication methods C: getting absolutely nobody to hold out despite the incredible ease of doing so and the general inclination of people to do so D: leaving no written evidence, commentary in the time, or anything else written that would survive to later dates to make it clear this happened, despite the fact that the only way to communicate this change is via written documentation.
For D, it isn't just about whether the evidence would survive to today, it's about whether it would survive to, say, the grandchildren of the time, who might comment on it themselves.
D is, IMHO, what really clenches it... there is simply no way to do this without a ton of text being generated. You might think, "ah, just tell everyone to destroy the evidence afterwards", but, first rule of history, past people are just as human as you are. There's no way you'd get 100% compliance today; imagine the internet commentary today, imagine telling everybody on the internet to delete all the evidence of a change like this. Not gonna happen.
It's an amusing theory, as I quite enjoy a good conspiracy theory, but it makes no sense. Even the putative motives don't begin to justify such work. Historically speaking, if you are the sort of person who wants to be important to the calendar, you don't put gaps in to line up to nice round powers-of-ten, you call yourself a new calendar and start out with a fresh Year 1.
I don't know about this particular phantom time theory, but if you don't have a good calendar you need to keep inserting random days, leading to greater and greater confusion. Changing the calendar was not a big deal under those circumstances, it was normal behavior. Apparently so much so that in Egypt they had the Pharaoh swear he wouldn't change the calendar again upon taking office:
"It must have been, then, that there were local attempts to retain the coincidences between the true and the calendar year — intercalation of days or even of months being introduced, now in one place, now in another ; and these attempts, of course, would make confusion worse confounded^ as the months might vary with tlie district, and not with the time of year.
That this is what really happened is, no doubt, tlie origin of the stringent oath required of the Pharaohs in after times, to which I shall subsequently refer.
[...]
When the year of 365 days was established, it was evidently imagined that finality had been reached ; and, mindful of the confusion which, as we have shown, must have resulted from the attempt to keep up a year of 360 days by intercalations, each Egyptian king, on his accession to the throne, bound himself by oath before the priest of Isis, in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, not to intercalate either days or months, but to retain the year of 365 days as established by the Antiqui.^ The text of the Latin translation preserved by Nigidius Figulus cannot be accurately restored; only thus much can be seen with certainty.
To retain this year of 365 days, then, became the first law for the king, and, indeed, the Pharaohs thenceforth throughout the Avhole course of Egyptian history adhered to it, in spite of their being subsequently convinced, as we shall see, of its inadequacy." https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnast...
Don't forget E: convincing other continents to change their calendars too, lest any historical or astronomical events shared between your cultures reveal the terrible secret.
Reports of astronomical events are missing though: http://astrogeo.oxfordjournals.org/content/44/2/2.22/F7.expa...
Even if there were no verifiable astronomical records during the period in question, wouldn't there still be discrepancies related to events from before that period?
Apparently there are:
http://www.setterfield.org/Dodwell_manuscript_1.html
Edit: I have no idea how accurate any of this stuff is. From my little experience trying to figure out the origins of historical claims I have learned it is very difficult to do so. Poor citing practices abound.
What do you mean, "missing," and what's the relevance of that graph?
Do you not see the gaps of hundreds of years with no known eclipse data?
I see one gap of about 250 years, at a time irrelevant to the idea in question. And note that continuity is not required, merely commonality: if two distinct civilizations observe the same astronomical event then that gives you a point to synchronize their calendars.
Failing to record eclipses doesn't seem very remarkable. There are on average about 1.5 lunar eclipses per year. Clearly people throughout history were not recording every single one. Even the densest parts of your graph are missing most of them.
Edit: also note that this graph is "timed" eclipses only. I take that to mean that it only includes eclipses which were not only observed and recorded, but for which the record includes the local time of day of the event. This is necessary for measuring the Earth's long term change in rotation, as that slide does, but unnecessary for synchronizing calendars.
Thanks for the feedback. I think those are the "high-quality" reports, but I wonder what the date distribution of the other eclipses looks like.
On the off chance you are familiar with this type of research, do you have any conception for how accurate dates like these are and how they were arrived at? I find it very difficult to find out what the ground truth evidence is for any historical (ie pre-printing press) data.
There are a few of these floating around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Rohl%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_in_Chaos
A common theme is attempting to tie the Bible in with the rest of history.
The Fomeko chronology is entertainingly batshit, with a history-rewriting conspiracy of crazy scope and petty motivation. It makes vanishing a few centuries look like small potatoes.
I think the touch that the New Testament actually refers to events prior to those of the Old Testament is particularly fun.
Fine example of a Wikipedia page where the discussion page is a much more informative and interesting read than the article itself.
One of the amusing aspects of Game of Thrones is that while constructing an intricately detailed timeline going back thousands of years, George RR Martin then leaves clues that the timeline may be off by thousands of years.
https://books.google.com/books?id=tYUsrknjhbEC&pg=PA46#v=one...
"Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend." - Hoster Blackwood, to Jaime Lannister
GRRM does love his unreliable narrators. Jon and Sam have an interesting conversation about how many Lord Commanders there were before him, and there's a few fan theories spun off out of that. And A World of Ice and Fire is a "historical" document written by an in-universe character who presents the history through his own biases.
I'd be interested in speculations on the impact of an off timeline. Surely it affects the "mundane" very little - most people likely do not care about anyone outside living memory (probably a couple hundred years, since a lot of time is reckoned from genealogy).
Classic example of the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. On Saturday night I was trying to explain this theory to someone and I couldn't remember the name of it or the time period.
That's the one where you buy a car, and shortly thereafter discover that there seem to be more cars of the same model on the road than before.
In reality, there are the same number as before--plus one if you bought yours newly manufactured--but your brain is now primed to notice them more often. Before, they blended in with the myriad of other car models, but now you notice that other people are driving your car.
That's in general but it doesn't necessarily work for that example unless you are talking about a more general classification of a car like a ford or maybe a ford fiesta (do they still make thos? ah the 90's!).
If you just bought a brand new 2016 model BMW 525i there's a good chance that if you start seeing more of them it's because there are actually more of them now. :)
I like crank theories as much as the next guy, but only good crank theories. This particular theory requires you be entirely ignorant of Chinese history. Muslim history, too.
I am not an adherent to any of these missing time theories, but did get interested in the idea awhile back when watching a documentary about ancient Rome. It seemed like the same details were being repeated over and over, like the same story repeated many times. Of course there are many reasons for that, so please do not get defensive.
Anyway, can you cite the specific evidence for eg chinese eclipses and their associated dates? Wikipedia cites this page which has that awful scholarship I've found is typical of chronology discussions: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/Phantom%20Time.HTM
I can't cite all of Chinese written history for you. There's a lot of it, with precise dating.
The fact that articles like this even exist is one of the top problems with Wikipedia today. One guy with a crazy theory can generate enough "evidence" and "citations" to make any random bullshit encyclopedic, and there's no "this is provably false" way to get rid of it.
That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as the article is open enough for the "This is provably false" information to be attached to it right alongside the data. Information about untrue things is still useful; a lot of human-generated data is fundamentally fantastical in some way (consider the vast swaths of Wikipedia that are the "histories" of completely fictional characters).
The risk comes in when the people who have the time to curate and shape the article are the ones whose beliefs are demonstrably untrue, and the counter-evidence gets stripped from the article.
To be fair, it is presented very clearly as a conspiracy theory.
Two people does not make a noteworthy conspiracy theory.