In this episode, I conclude my chronicles of those who make grand revisions to the timeline of history by going back, to the Renaissance and the dawn of historical chronology and on into the Enlightenment, to discuss some eminent and respectable minds who also proposed outrageous revisions to the accepted timeline. As I discussed in Part Two, Joseph Scaliger, the father of modern chronological science, can himself be considered a chronological revisionist akin to some of the other recent figures I’ve discussed. But there was not an absence of chronological revisionists from the time of Scaliger all the way to the 20th century when the Russians Morosov, Velikovsky, and Fomenko developed their theories. And indeed, as I indicated in my recent Blindside patron exclusive, The Phantom of the Dark Ages, about the German writer Heribert Illig and his claim that the Western European Dark Ages and King Charlemagne were fabrications, it has not been Russian scholars only that have had doubts about the timeline and have developed elaborate revisions of it. Before Scaliger, there had already been much debate over chronology in accordance with the Bible, and about a hundred years after Scaliger, some of the most respected minds in Europe would take on what they saw as errors, or even outright falsifications, in the chronology, producing two of the most fascinating revisions of history in history. {Please join me next time} Thank your for joining me for Part Three of the Chronological Revision Chronicles: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

As discussed in Part Two, in the late 1500s, Joseph Scaliger sought to use philological and astronomical evidence to establish a cohesive and absolute timeline that differed dramatically from that which had been argued by church scholars before him, who reckoned time using dubious measures derived from scriptures, such as the extraordinarily long lifespans recorded in the Bible and other unreliable yardsticks. For example, pre-scientific chronologists looked to the prophetic data offered in the Book of Daniel, which lists numbers of days before the end times and the return of Christ, and since they couldn’t reasonably accept that Daniel had really meant them as days, since the prophecy would have long ago already failed to occur, they instead calculated these figures as numbers of years. Some forty years before Scaliger’s work, Martin Luther was writing his Reckoning of the Years of the World, which followed along these lines, and after Scaliger’s 1581 work De Emendatione Temporum, church scholars continued to tinker with their chronologies based on the Bible, computing all of history based on the notion that the world had been created only a few thousand years earlier and would come to an end within only couple more. Some of the religious chronologists to come around after the groundbreaking work of Scaliger and Petavius were English rabbinical scholar and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge John Lightfoot, who in the late 1640s proposed that the Earth had been created in the year 3929 B.C., and Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who in 1650, based on supposedly very precise calculations, published a book asserting that it had been created in 4004 B.C. on October 23rd, sometime in the evening. Now these weren’t revolutionary claims, for scholars had long thought the world began about 4,000 years before Christ, going all the way back to the Venerable Bede, who placed it in 3952 B.C., and even further, for it had long been understood that Abraham’s time was about 2,000 years after Creation, and 2,000 after that came Christ. Indeed, even the more scientific-minded Scaliger believed in a Creation date around this time, but his historical evidence also showed dynasties and events occurring long before the supposed time of Creation, a fact he struggled with and which provided his critics with their most effective ammunition against him, for here he was suggesting some history seemed to have occurred before anything actually existed!

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

But long before Scaliger’s time, there had been a different way of calculating history, using A.M. or anno mundi, the year of the world, a dating system derived from the Septuagint, the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which reckoned time continuously since a date of Creation translatable to about 5500 BCE. Indeed, long before Dionysius Petavius popularized the use of B.C. and A.D. in his 1627 work De Doctrina Temporum, or On the Doctrine of Time, the reckoning of anno domini had first been coined in the 6th century by Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus, or Dionysius the Humble, mainly, it seems, in order to deal with the issue of Christ’s return. A certain line in the Talmud had long ago established that the world would only exist for 6,000 years, so if the anno mundi reckoning had been accurate, and the Earth had been created in 5500 BCE, then Christ would have returned and the world would have come to an end 500 years after Christ was born, which it was clear by Dionysius the Humble’s time was not going to happen. Thus, it seems the first major chronological revisionists were churchmen, shifting the date of Creation by more than a millennium in order to give Jesus some more time to come back, and when Scaliger found himself dating events previous to 4000 B.C., it proved to be an insurmountable problem precisely because prophecy forbade the date of Creation from being any earlier. So we already see here that chronology has long been inextricably entangled with Judeo-Christian doctrine. And as we shall see, by looking at the fascinating cases of Jean Hardouin and Isaac Newton in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when science developed by leaps and bounds but had not yet properly divorced itself from the realm of faith, it would remain the same for a long time after Scaliger and Petavius invented scientific chronology. And this may shed light on our modern day, when evangelical fundamentalists and biblical literalists look to these historical thinkers, and to the science denial of more modern revisionists, to justify their belief in the young age of our world.

Although today Jean Hardouin is mostly remembered as a crank or madman, this characterization does not do him justice, for before he published his chronological revisionist theories, he was perhaps the most preeminent antiquarian scholar of his age. Born in 1646 in Brittany, he was introduced to letters and a life of scholarship young, for his father was a printer and bookseller. After proving himself an adept and brilliant student at a Jesuit college, he entered his novitiate period of training in the Society of Jesus at just 14 years old, and early in his career as a Jesuit priest earned himself a reputation for encyclopedic knowledge. He took a position as the librarian of the Jesuit College of Paris, and he taught many subjects, from theology to philosophy to belles-lettres, a style of literary criticism viewed itself as an aesthetic artform. And it was here he found his calling, penning a brilliant five-volume translation and commentary on Pliny the Elder in only one year, an almost superhuman undertaking that won him fame upon its 1685 publication. From that moment on he was a towering figure not only in literary and historical scholarship, but in antiquarian studies as well, for he wrote numerous well-respected works on numismatics, or the study of ancient coins, as well, and patristics, or the study of early church writings and history. Indeed, in the latter field, he produced a massive 22,000-page edition recording the acts and decrees of church councils throughout history. And here we begin to see Hardouin’s willingness to provoke controversy with his scholarship, for some in the church, not liking the implications that some passages in the work might have regarding church law, tried to suppress it, ending up only delaying its printing. But this controversy is largely forgotten whereas another scandal he stirred up still intrigues and outrages three hundred years later.

A frontispiece for one of Hardouin’s works, containing one of the only portraits of the scholar, from Grafton, pg. 246

In 1693, in a little piece of writing about coins from the dynasty of Herod the Great, Hardouin dropped a tantalizing hint that he was in the process of uncovering a vast conspiracy. He claimed that in 1690, he had begun to “scent fraud in Augustine and his contemporaries,” and as he further investigated, discovered the dimensions of this fraud to be vast, encompassing the work of all writers of antiquity. In short, he concluded, based on evidence he would slowly tease the public with for the rest of his life, that “a certain band of fellows existed, some centuries ago, who had undertaken the task of concocting ancient history…there being at that time none in existence” (qtd. in Grafton 248). Essentially, this “impious cohort” of forgers, as he called them, whom he would eventually suggest were monks, mostly of the Benedictine order, working in the 14th century, had used the only genuine works of ancient literature (the works of Homer, Pliny, Cicero, and some but not all of the works attributed to Virgil and Horace) along with information they had from ancient coins in their possession, and set about falsifying vast numbers of ancient documents on a variety of different styles of parchment, taking care to demonstrate a variation in scripts for documents meant to have been written in different times and places, building not only a canon of work by ancient masters but also innumerable ancillary works that referred to the other forgeries and thereby bolstered their credibility. In short, he claims this Impious Cohort pulled off the biggest hoax in the history of humankind… that in fact their hoax was the history of humankind. The Jesuits at first approved the work in which Hardouin first hinted at his theory, but 2 months later, after the first reactions of readers to the passage in question brought all of this to their attention, they rushed to the printer to seize every copy of it, lest it give the enemies of the Society of Jesus more fodder against them. However, this only increased interest in it, for Protestants accused the Jesuits of a stunt, trying to increase the rarity of the work and thereby inflate its value. Soon enough, despite much sharp criticism, interest encouraged Hardouin to fully develop his theories in further writings.

If the sheer magnitude of the fraud that Hardouin suspected was not enough to make his suspicions seem unreasonable, then the evidence he offered to prove his theories certainly paints a picture of a genius with a disturbed mind, one who today would perhaps be diagnosed with paranoid delusions. To illustrate, we shall look at his criticism of literary works that he claimed gave themselves away through clumsy writing. According to Hardouin, some works of Virgil and Horace were genuine, but others gave themselves away as forgeries because they were more clumsily written and simply could not have been the work of those brilliant writers. In the works of the monks of his Impious Cohort pretending to be Virgil and Horace, whom he called pseudo-Virgil and pseudo-Horace, he remarks with the cutting wit of a master critic on awkward turns of phrase in Latin, arguing that not only would the real Virgil and Horace never phrase something that way, but also that this showed the forgers were using a much different Latin than the true writers used. And he would pick apart the logic of writing, pointing to a part in the Aeneid when Aeneas retraces his own tracks in the night and objecting that Aeneas wouldn’t have been able to see the tracks in the dark, a mistake that he believes the real Virgil never would have made. Beyond “evidence” like this, he also searched for apparent anachronisms, finding, for example, that the mention of a military loss to a “Parthian despot” in the Aeneid proved everything, because it was a reference to the Battle of Carrhae, which Hardouin placed in 19 BC, the same year that Virgil died and therefore asserting that he couldn’t have written the line. The problem there is that the Battle of Carrhae actually took place in 53 BCE, about 34 years earlier than Virgil’s death. Hardouin claimed it was in 19 BC because, like many antiquarians at the time, he placed far more stock in numismatic evidence than in any documents, especially since he suspected all documents of being frauds, and there happened to be a coin depicting a Parthian holding a Roman banner that was minted in 19 BCE. In Hardouin’s mind, coins provided the only unimpeachable evidence, and since it had been minted in that year, then that was the closest date attributable to it, despite the fact that coins can obviously be minted years after the fact to commemorate events long passed.

Denarius struck c. 19 BCE that seems to have been the basis of Hardouin’s miscalculation, courtesy Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. , licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

We see this over-reliance on numismatic evidence throughout Hardouin’s arguments. For example, Josephus tells us that Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple at Jerusalem, but Hardouin claims this cannot be, for there exist no coins to celebrate the act. Thus we see the absurdity of his argumentation throughout. His literary evidence is largely a matter of style and aesthetics, and therefore entirely subjective, and his numismatic evidence overestimates what coins can and cannot tell us. Obviously events may have transpired that weren’t recorded on ancient coinage. But when Hardouin explores the motivation of his Impious Cohort, that’s when we really get to see the craziness of his conspiracy theory. He asserts that, while these devious monkish forgers made errors that reveal them, they also purposely seeded their forgeries with clues meant to be discerned. Here Hardouin practices the kind of fast and loose etymology and philology that we have seen before in the work of Anatoly Fomenko that I discussed in Part One, and that of Alexander Hislop, the author of The Two Babylons, whom I discussed earlier this year. While Hardouin was no slouch in the language analysis department, he made a lot of dubious linguistic claims, for example arguing that the language of the Talmud is not Aramaic but rather Hebrew or that he could discern Gallic peppered throughout the ancient Greek in some works. Most doubtful, though, are his claims to have found secret codes that only he has ever deciphered. He states that many of the proper names in the ancient works he says are forgeries are actually references to Jesus Christ, and that in seeding hints about Jesus throughout the supposed works of antiquity, they hoped to undermine Christianity, for when it was discovered that ancient pagans and Jews had known all along about the messiah’s coming sacrifice and had been hinting about it in all the works of ancient literature, that this would somehow reduce the importance of the Bible. Honestly, even trying to explain it now, it’s hard to make sense of these delusions, and clearly they were paranoid fantasies of the sort that might today lead a psychologist to diagnose with a personality disorder. Of course, that has not stopped chronological revisionists like Anatoly Fomenko and Heribert Illig from pointing to him as if his work provides reliable precedent or evidence for the idea of fabricated eras of history. As for Hardouin himself, he continued to write about his conspiracy until his death of natural causes in his mid-eighties in 1729, still teasing that he had the damning evidence that would prove everything and would soon be publishing it, though of course no such proof ever emerged after his passing.

Two years before Jean Hardouin’s death, another incredibly famous and respected scholar passed away in Kensington, England, and among his unpublished works was found a manuscript called The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a detailed argument using astronomical evidence to show that Scaliger and Petavius had erroneously created entire periods of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek history that never actually occurred. That man was none other than Sir Isaac Newton, and the following year, his amended chronology, which he had spent much time working on in his final years, would be among the first of his works to be published posthumously, and it would come very close to tarnishing the impressive legacy he left behind. But this was the culmination of Newton’s work on historical chronology, which he had taken an interest in early in his career, and he might have never made the effort of composing this extensive treatise had some of his earlier, far briefer writings on chronology not been pirated by unscrupulous sorts looking to make a name for themselves at his expense. Years earlier, Newton had entrusted a brief outline of his revised chronology with little indication of how he had arrived at his dates to the Princess of Wales. He called it “A Short Chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great,” and it soon found its way into the hands of a Venetian intellectual named Abbé Conti who liberally showed it to others. Soon a French scholar, Nicolas Fréret, translated it and composed some of his own arguments against Newton’s dates, and though Newton never gave his permission, Fréret’s Parisian publisher went ahead and printed the translation. Isaac Newton was livid and immediately penned an article defending his calculations for the Royal Society before getting to work composing the far more in-depth defense of his chronology in the volume that would be published after his death. In it, he showed himself to be brilliant, as expected, but the weaknesses of his argument invited much criticism. However, these weaknesses reveal perhaps less about Newton and more about the weaknesses of scientific chronology generally and how hopelessly entangled ancient history is with myth and religious faith.

Isaac Newton in old age, via Wikimedia Commons

To demonstrate Newton’s unfaltering genius, it should be noted that his work on chronology pioneered an astronomical dating technique that had never before been brought to bear. Scholars had been using astronomy to settle chronology since Mercator, but none before Newton had ever thought to use equinoctial precession to settle dates. Since the beginning of springtime comes a few minutes early every year, or in other words, the Vernal Equinox arrives a little earlier than it did the year before, then Newton realized that any ancient text that described the sun’s position in relation to the stars on the spring equinox could be accurately dated. It was a groundbreaking idea, but the problem, as we’ve seen before, is that it relied on descriptions from ancient texts, which could not be said to be very precise. For example, Newton looked to Hipparchus in the 2nd century CE, who describes the astronomical observations of Eudoxus in the 4th century BCE, so already it’s coming to the scholar secondhand, and Eudoxus maps meridians in the imagined celestial sphere on which solstices and equinoxes are tracked in relation to constellations, such as saying one curve passes through “the Tayl of the South Fish,” and “the middle of the great Bear.” It is clearly not an exact science when an astronomer is trying to place an exact meridian and the most precise direction they have is to place it somewhere “between the poop and the mast of the Argo” (qtd. in Diacu 74). But, as any dyed-in-the-wool mathematician would, Newton simply admits to some margin of error and then draws conclusions that he thereafter treats as though they are precise, when in fact they are anything but. Likewise, as with Scaliger and Petavius before him, his calculations often rely on estimates. When more definite records did not exist, Scaliger and Petavius reckoned much of their chronologies based on an average length of a king’s reign, which they reasoned would be about a generation, or 33 years. Newton, however, challenges this, arguing a better average would be about 20 years, which would mean Scaliger and Petavius added non-existent years all over their timelines. But the fact remains that all these arguments rely on best guesses and approximations, making it hard to justify calling this “scientific chronology.”

Even further demonstrating how unscientific this work sometimes was, we see that, even if Newton was not reckoning time according to scripture only, as had Ussher and the many religious scholars before him, he still based much of his understanding of ancient history on myth. He, like many in his era, accepted the ancient doctrine of Euhemerism, which asserted that the stories of mythology had some basis in truth, that the quests and adventures of Greek myth, for example, really occurred, and the major characters, including gods and monsters, had really existed, if only as normal human beings who had been deified or made monstrous in memory. So, when searching for a place to begin his chronology, Newton settled on the voyage of the Argonauts, arguing that the first Greek maps of constellations had been drawn by the first astronomer, whom he identified as Chiron, a wise and knowledgeable centaur in Greek mythology, in order to help the Argonauts navigate on their quest for the Golden Fleece. So, if he could date the first Greek celestial map based on constellation position, that would give him the date of the Argonautical expedition, and Herodotus writes that the Trojan War ended one generation later, so he could date the fall of Troy, which would then allow him to date the founding of Rome, and so on, all of it based on myth, speculation, and guesswork, but with a veneer of science. And lest one believe that Newton, known to be a very religious man, did not allow his faith to color his views on ancient history, think again, for it has been argued that his central motivation in rewriting ancient history was to minimize the contributions of pagans and give the Israelites primacy as the most important civilization of antiquity. Indeed, he does rearrange chronology to argue that there was no major Pharaonic kingdom in Egypt until after King Solomon’s time. While Scaliger and Petavius created their Egyptian timeline according to an ancient Egyptian history composed by a figure named Manetho, like Jean Hardouin, Newton dismissed Manetho’s work as a forgery and preferred to assemble his own chronology, in which Solomon was the world’s first king, and his Temple the first temple. According to his re-interpretation of myths, many figures could be identified as Judeo-Christian patriarchs; for example, Saturn was Noah, and Jupiter was Noah’s son, Shem. So after all, despite his innovation and his reputation as the father of modern science, when it came to trying to settle ancient chronology, Newton certainly relied on supposition and perhaps was driven by creed and prejudice.

A 1690 star chart used by Isaac Newton to reconstruct Chiron’s celestial sphere, from Diacu

Today we find that the most well-known and widely disputed aspect of our study of the past has to do not with human history so much, but rather with geological history and still stems from religious belief that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Despite the fossil record, there are many biblical literalists who will argue that the earth cannot possibly be as old as science tells us it is, because the Bible tells us otherwise. Religious explanations usually run along the lines that God made our planet, 6,000 years ago, with inbuilt history, fossils included, so that our faith in His Word would be tested. And that is among the scriptural literalists who accept what science tells them, for there are many who don’t believe a word out of any academic’s mouth if he or she mentions dinosaurs or evolution. And this kind of science denial is common among chronological revisionists, as well, for there are methods of confirming dates and disproving revised chronologies that these revisionists must contend with. Invariably, they deal with them by casting doubt upon their accuracy. First, there is numismatic, or hard currency evidence, which in this edition we have seen can be misused or over-relied on, as was Hardouin’s mistake, but as we saw in the recent Blindside patron exclusive on Heribert Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis actually provides irrefutable evidence of Charlemagne’s existence, disproving the claim he was an invention. Then we have the two pillars of scientific dating: dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Dendrochronology consists of examining tree rings, which makes it possible to date a piece of wood found at an archaeological site, depending on its place of origin and the type of tree it’s from, by comparing it to a catalogue scientists have compiled that can determine dates based on shared attributes of certain rings, such as low growth in drought years. Some of these dendrochronological catalogues go back more than 10,000 years, exploding the notion of a 6,000-year-old earth.

Then there is radiocarbon dating or the carbon-14 method, which dates organic material based on the decay of a certain radioactive substance that all living organisms ingest by consuming food. This is the method that proved the Shroud of Turin was medieval, which of course led to a lot of objections about its accuracy. Then again, though, to a chronological revisionist, the Shroud being much younger than originally thought would not necessarily mean it wasn’t Christ’s shroud, if one were arguing that Christ lived not as long ago as traditionally believed. But I digress. Objections to both dendrochronology and carbon-14 dating almost always rely on suggestions that results depend on the sample used and the elaborate mathematics involved, suggesting that any date may be called into question by insinuating a mistake may have been made. And indeed, there have been plenty of errors made using these methods, but what these science denialists won’t point out is that they are almost all blunders made when the science was young, and today scientists check and double check using multiple samples and comparing radiocarbon evidence to dendrochronological evidence in order to reach verified conclusions. And beyond these foundational techniques of scientific dating we can now add mass spectroscopy, archaeomagnetic dating, collagen fiber analysis, fission tracking, and bioluminescence. The science of chronological dating is growing by leaps and bounds. It absolutely disproves young Earth dogma and can be relied on to refute the grand revisionist chronologies we’ve talked about. But can it settle each little disagreement about ancient history? Can it make firm every date in our timeline of antiquity? The answer is clearly no because it relies on objects that can be tested and identified as being associated with certain historical events or periods. While there may be many such samples, there is not a sample for every moment that we want dated. So while we may be able to refute these outrageous revisionist chronologies, are we ever able to finally be certain about dates in ancient times?

Andrew Ellicott Douglass, creator of the science of dendrochronology, from McGraw, pg. 441

As we have seen, revisionists like Fomenko and even Velikovsky actually had some shrewd criticisms of established chronology, even if their proposed revisions were even less believable. And looking at the basis and foundation of consensus chronology as received from Scaliger and Petavius, we see that much of it was tinged by Christian doctrine and built on conjecture and presumptions. One needs only look at the continuous disputes over Egyptian chronology to discern how uncertain we truly are about the order and placement of ancient history. In the 19th century, after the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the beginning of Egyptology as an academic field, many began to challenge the chronology of Egypt, which previously had always seemed ironclad because of Manetho’s list of pharaohs, heavily relied upon since Scaliger. In the 1890s Cecil Torr challenged some dates, suggesting the overlap of dynasties, and his work, as well as Newton’s, inspired a group of Egyptologists and archaeologists a hundred years later. In the 1990s, led by historian Peter James, they argued for an Egyptian chronology about 250 years shorter. And then one among them, Egyptologist David Rohl, using the kind of evidence that should sound familiar by now—a papyrus listing a certain number of generations of architects calculated into dates using Isaac Newton’s assumed generational timespan of 20 years—he shaved another century or so off of Egypt’s history. Interestingly, many of these later efforts seem to confirm Newton’s assertions, but as we see, they have the same unreliability at their foundation. So in the end, we come away flummoxed, not knowing what to believe and feeling much like Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke, a political philosopher and Enlightenment thinker who, when he undertook studies in biblical chronology, expressed frustration and despair, writing, “Who can resolve to build with great cost and pain when he finds, how deep soever he digs, nothing but loose sand?” And this feeling, which I sadly come away with after my research in this taxing series, may be the most nihilistic expression of the theme of “historical blindness” that I have yet encountered.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Three: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

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