Missing Centuries A.D. | | | Gunnar Heinsohn gave us a preview of his work in progress on the 3rd Century A.D. catastrophes. |
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My friend Illig, who originated the idea of a phantom period between 600 and 900 A.D., was shocked by me after I had supported him with twenty major articles covering stratigraphies from Sweden to Sicily. He was shocked when I approached him with the idea that 300 phantom years in the first millennium A.D. are not enough. That we may be closer to 600 phantom years in the first millennium A.D. Just to give you the most shocking news in the beginning.
So what I am showing you here is something that everybody knows but that we hardly think about. So you all learn that the Western Roman empire ends in 476 A.D. But if you go to Rome, and ask about these 142 last Roman emperors, 77 of them so-called "barracks emperors," and another 65 Roman emperors dated 284 to 476, you will find that not one of the 142 emperors was ever living or dying in Rome. So you say: so what? But it's strange that the capital of the empire had no emperors living there and no emperors dying there for a quarter of a millennium.
The last emperor buried in Castel Sant' Angelo is Caracalla who died 270, the last emperess, his mother, Julia Domna. She is buried in the Augustus mausoleum, and Elagabalus, originally king of Palmyra, in Syria, he is the last emperor ever who has lived on Mount Palatinus, that gave the languages of the world the word "palace," because the imperial palace in Rome was built on Mons Palatinus, Elagabalus was the last emperor to reside on Mons Palatinus.
Those of you familiar with ancient pre-Christ history know that the decisive dating item of all the period of the Bronze Age is the so-called Armana correspondence, letters written in cuneiform on clay tablets found in the 1880s, in a place called Amarna in Egypt. Woever gets the date of the Amarna correspondence right, gets the dates of another twenty nations right, because the letters go from Egypt to Anatolia, to Mesopotamia, to Greece, to Israel, to Syria, to Armenia, wherever you want, there letters go there and if you give the right date to Amarna, you give the right dates to the entire period of the ancient Near East, and just to put it in practice, I deviated from Velikovsky in 1987 when I figured out that he had understood of course that you have to date the Amarna correspondence correctly, and he had dated it to the 9th century BCE, and by doing this, he had solutions for a very powerful nation in the Amarna correspondence that is called the Mitani nation, a nation of Indo-Aryan horsemen. He identifies the Mitani correctly, I think as the Median empire preceding the Arabian Empire, but by placing this empire in the 9th century BCE, he ended up with two Median empires divided by three hundred years. So he had an empire in the 9th century, and the Greek historians had the Median empire preceding Cyrus the Great in the 6th century. So, when I understood that we cannot live with two Median empires one after the other, I decided to date the Amarna letters to the 6th century. And by doing so, I could identify the Mitani nation mentioned in the Amarna letters in the cuneiform and semitic languages, with the Medes written about in Greek letters in Greek history. So, this body of letters has a companion for the first millennium. And that is the body of letters written by Cassiodorus. Cassiodorus was the great chancellor in Ravenna for the Gothic king Theodoric the Great, and he wrote letters to France and to Africa and to Sicily and to Constantinople, and wherever Cassiodorus is dated, all the other kings he is writing letters to in the name of the Gothic king have to go with him. So Cassiodorus was born in Riace, Calabria, and when you visit Riace, Calabria - that's what I did last year to check on him - he describes his native place as if it belongs to the 3rd century. You see: he is dated to the 6th century, 385 to 580. So he is dated 300 years later than the city of Riace which he describes in his own autobiography. That's a small point for the time being, but it's an interesting one.
The most famous friend of Cassiodorus was the last master of the Latin language, the philosopher Boetius with his most famous book on the consolations of philosophy, De consolatione philosophiae. Both authors, Boetius and Cassiodorus, the most learned Latin writers of their time, with a body of text looking that big on a modern shelf - like this - they mention lots of Roman history, they live in the 6th and write in the 6th century, but the last emperor they know of in Rome is Caracalla, Roman emperor Caracalla, and you remember - you're back to the page before - Caracalla is the last emperor to be buried in Rome. In the 3rd century! These authors, supposedly writing 300 years later, they know him as the last emperor. They have no idea of Diocletian, Constantine the Great who supposedly gave the stamp of approval to turning Christianity into Roman state religion, they know nothing of him. And when they have to describe the ideal ruler, Cassiodorus as well as Boetius, they name emperor Trajan, who died in the 2nd century.
Okay? So that is the last emperor they really admire. And the last emperor they know is Caracalla.
So now we have already a few strange points. That the Western Roman empire for a quarter of a millennium has no emperor and no tomb in the capital of the empire, that the most learned Latin writers of the 6th century have no memory whatsoever of Roman history between 220/230 and 530, and that the city of Cassiodorus, Riace in Calabria, is described by him as if it existed in the 3rd century, not in his 6th century and historians and archaeologists like to laugh about him - the man was very smart but he was not that observant, because he describes the city in the 3rd century, he should please have described the same city in the 6th century. |
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If we go to Rome, and we know that the last emperor buried there was Caracalla in 218, we may ask: if there was not ever again an emperor in Rome, maybe that it was impossible, maybe that something bad had happened to Rome. What I show you here is the so-called Campus Martus, that's the Marsfeld in German, the Mars Field in English, and it is on low ground, right on the side of the river, of the Tiber. Not all of Rome is built on hills, I don't know how many of them, there are seven or eight of them for sure, there were more, but not all of Rome was built on the hills. So, the most densely built-up part of Rome was just built in the knee of the river, flat (slaps his knee) like here. And we look at this, and we concentrate on this theater, it's called the theater of Balbi, Balbus, genitive Balbi, and its known from the literature, but its location was completely forgotten. And it was only securely established with the first ever scholarly excavation in the city of Rome. So you believe there was so much excavation in Rome, there must have been stratigraphy after stratigraphy after stratigraphy - they have one! And they have it since 2010 - two years ago! And it's not yet - we are in Italy - on the Internet... (to Emilio) forgive me!
But the exhibition in Rome is wonderful, and you just can take photos of what they put in the exhibition. And you hope that some day someone will put it on the net. So what you see here - if you go to Rome, this the Theater of Marcellus, this is the theater of Pompeius, in the middle there's a smaller one, that's where they made the first scholarly excavation in the history of Italy.
We go back to the theater, close-up, up left, that is what they excavated. And the archaeologists did a very fine job. After they excavated, they found that the theater, and the entire Campus Martus was smashed, was covered under 8 to 13 meters of mud. They tried to reconstruct how the people tried to win back a living after that event that brought mud and destruction. This is what it looked like: you see here the higher rows of the theater are cut away and in the audiences rows, here, they built small huts. So the blows were so tremendous that even the most destructive bombing raids of the Second World War against Tokyo, or Hiroshima, or Hamburg or Dresden don't give you an image of what happened here, because here you do not only witness destruction, but also a layer of mud on top of it. And the people coming out of it had to go back to a primitive life, because their water had to come out of wells and out of cisterns, there were eleven huge acqueducs feeding Rome with water, a city of more than a million, and all the eleven were torn, all of them, and the first one was repaired in the 15th century by the Pope Nicholas the Fifth, so it took up to the 15th century for the first aqueduct to be repaired. So this - my wife took this photo - is in the exhibition of the Theater of Balbus, or Balbi, and I have to explain to you what you see. So, the pink, see here, the pink stratum is the stratum of the 2nd century A.D., 100 to 200 A.D. Then the theater was rebuilt and repaired, and it was in a magnificent state. And then the Italian excavators have these two strata and they are what they just call "deposito," archaeologically sterile pebbles, six-seven meters high. And on top of that, you have these little houses, creeping out of the theater. So, if you ask yourself, what could the strata be? What jumps to mind is a tsunami wave that washes in and fills up the spaces still surrounded by walls - walls and basements - and after a while, it's washing out again, and it leaves another deposit. It's my speculation. I don't know if anyone else has reflected on the origin and on the quality of these deposits. And this is what you have. And since we only have this state of information for two years, there has not been much time to think about the event behind. But, if you just go briefly back to the stratum, if we ask ourselves why for a quarter of a millennium no emperor was ever residing in Rome, or having a tomb in Rome, it was because Rome, that Rome we refer to as "Imperial Rome," was wiped out for ever.
You keep in mind that what you see here, these small houses, churches, is dated to the 9th century. I go back to the stratigraphy: this is dated 2nd century, and this is dated 9th century. So you ask yourself: how do they count the six centuries in between? Why do they give six centuries to the two deposit layers? These layers without remains, human or architectural remains, why do they give them six centuries, why not six weeks? Because, as usual, they know their chronology. They know that between the 2nd century and the 9th-10th century, some six or seven centuries have to pass. And they divide the evidence over the centuries. You would do the same thing, though in your mind, if you were a geologist, and looked at these strata, you would say: why should they get six hundred years? But that's not your job as an archaeologist. As an archaeologist, your job is to get the evidence clear, and then you give it to other people, the chronologists, they think they know how to take care of it, because they date it by coins, they find a coin, they go to the catalogue of coins, and that gives a date, you take down the date; or they find a pot, they go to the catalogue of potery, they look up a similar pot, the pot has a date, 700 AD, it's okay to the archaeologists, whose first job is excavating, but they do not have the courage to date on their own grounds.
So now you ask, there is something that happened, there should be some reports - there are reports, but there are not that many and we even know - I have an idea why there are not that many reports - because the culture that springs up after the catastrophe, after some stratum on the pavement, over cities all over Europe, when the catastrophe struck, the Jupiter columns were toppled and we know that on many sites the pagans tried to reerect them, but they lost the fight against the Christians. And the Christians, they didn't need to write a report, because they had the Book of Revelation, and the Book of Revelation, and the iconography of the apocalyptic sceneries in Revelation, that was the intellectual material with which the Christians coped with what had happened.
But still there are reports: here is one by Ammianus Marcellinus, his History of Rome is dated, you can see it up there, to 366, so again, his book is dated for the time you have the deposit layers in Rome, but he is in the period between the 3rd and 9th century for which every historian knows there are six centuries to be filled. If you ask me now: what about the manuscript of this book, isn't there a codex of the manuscript? There is, from the 10th century, and it is readable, but they believe that for four centuries it was copied by hand and copied by hand a hundred times, but all the copies and all the originals were lost to the last but then, the 10th century copy was never lost again. So if you have the innocent idea to say: but there's nothing but the text of the 10th century...? you are already deviating from your scholarly obligations and that means to obey a chronology and not the evidence on the ground.
So he just describes a tsunami as you have it described when such a catastrophe happens. Like Japan last year. There was curious lightning, the sea went backwards, you could walk on the sea ground, the very depths were uncovered, so that many marine animals were left sticking in the mud, "in the depth of its valleys and the recesses of the hills, which from the first origins of all things have been lying beneath the deep waters, now beheld to be..." etc. So people run out to pick the fish, the wave comes back, everybody gets killed, and there are other reports that ships were lifted onto the roofs of temples and we have on certain places the ships still rotting on roofs - so there is not a total absence of evidence.
So let's now go back to that, it doesn't work, but it does work, what I try to do is to show a spot on Q-MAG that checked cities from Leicester in England to Cairo in Egypt, that's 3,600 kilometers as the crow flies, or from Leicester, England to Carthage in Northern Africa, that's also close to 3500 kilometers as the crow flies, and you have destroyed Roman cities or towns, or just villas which we find as agricultural Roman space all over the place, and you have different kinds of material, on the Roman layer of around 230 AD. So here's a guy called Schofield, he writes "Inside the city one knows practically nothing of the period from the end of the Roman administration around 410 to the resettlement by the Saxons under Alfred the Great in the 9th century" - for which finds are equally missing. How the space was used during all these centuries, while the great Roman building slowly disintegrated, remains one of the great and to this day unsolved mysteries of London. Around 410, the built surface within the walls was already enormously reduced. Whole areas had been stripped of buildings and buried under a layer of dark mud (often referred to as ‘dark earth'). This shows that the soil had been made over for agriculture or cattle-raising. The dark earth mud may therefore have formed itself already in the 3rd century"
British archaeologists were the first to take the dark-earth layers on top of the imperial Roman stratum of 230 - many archaeologists have found it but they moved it away, because they were in the way of finding the goodies, but the British, some 12-15 years ago, they started to take it seriously, because they found it in so many sites. And now we have them in Paris, and we have them in Cologne, and we have them in Vienna, and we have them in Germany, we have them in many places, and its a novel thing, so its a layer that has ashes in it, small pieces of wood, which are charred, so if you flood a city with a tsunami, all the buildings of a city have wood stoves, and the water going out will drag out the remains of wood and the remains of kitchen refuse, they found kitchen refuse all over the place, from Leicester to Vienna. So there is even a theory that the maids stopped to work and thereby pushing the dirt all over and bringing down the Roman empire. So I don't show you this here because of what I just mentioned, but because of this stratigraphy: When I said that in Rome the two layers of deposit are dated to cover 600 years, then you say, okay, 600 years, there may have been a catastrophe - it certainly was a catastrophe, that wiped out the largest city on the globe - but when you start moving now to major catastrophes of the first millennium AD, there are literally hundreds of them, and they all fall between 230 and 900, tsunamis, earthquakes, you name it. So you wonder if there were actually that many catastrophes, or if reports from the same catastrophe were dated differently to cover the long period. So how do you test this question?
So if, let's say, there were five major catastrophes, between 230 and 900, you would look for a Roman city that at least, and very modestly, has two catastrophes scars, so you look for the Roman imperial period ending in 230, so here we have the layer of dark mud, dark earth, mud and what not, then we decide okay, we are 250 here, but history has to continue, first up to 600. You ask, is there a second level topped with Roman imperial buildings that again was struck by rolling mud?
If any of you will ever find it - I have not found it!
So if you look at any imperial city, there is one desctruction. If you look at textbook chronology, there is a series of destructions. These are just a few examples here. Aachen, Antwerp, Constantinople, Memphis, Nijmegen, Olympia, Rome, Vienna... since Anne-Marie put it on Q-MAG, you will be aware that Olympia was excavated twice, by Germans. Once in the 19th century, by Curtius, and then again in 2006 to 2011 and the team, the recent German team, carefully looked at the situation and they remembered that when Curtius came to Olympia, he was very disappointed. He was looking for tall columns, high rising temples, he saw almost nothing, it was all under the ground, a little bit sticking out maybe here and there. And so they checked the soil and they found that there was six meters of soil on the holiest shrine of Greece - 6 meters, and they decided that the small river, we call it Bach, a stream, a small stream is running through Olympia, and it just doesn't have the volume to throw six meters of dirt on top of the columns. So that is the most recent thing we know on this situation, and you can see that in the cities, you not only find mud, but you also find sand and also you find water, like here in Naxos, the Naxos that was destroyed in that period is under water, you can see it in the harbor, I was startled by that yesterday, I didn't know it, I have checked it on Google, so we are still working on a survey of what is under water.
So, let's go to Memphis, capital of Egypt. Memphis did not turn into an "eternal" city like Rome, because Memphis was so heavily covered with sand, that Cairo had to be built close by. Rome, of course, was wiped out on the flat grounds, but the hills were still there, Rome could continue to be termed as an Eternal City, Memphis could not. But we all learned so much about the ancient history of Memphis, and so did I of course, but I never asked myself how did Memphis come to an end? So, okay, you look up Memphis tonight and you find out yeah, somehow, sometimes between 400 and 600 and 900, we don't know exactly, it disappeared under the sand. So there the evidence of what destroyed the cities is very different from place to place. If you go to Cologne, that had the largest Roman city on the continent, in Germania, it had the palace of the Praetor, the Praetorium, that's a 160 meter long palace, with foundations of rocks each one two meters long and half a meter wide and high, so the excavators quite recently have found that these rocks were torn up, so you must have had earth crust movements, too.
Here I just refer to a book of 1923 by two Germans called Gams and Nordheim, and they, already in 1923, they tried to come up with a catastrophe sequence from the Neolithic to 1919, they were geologists by profession. And, as it were, the finest of their period. And what you see here... So they can see up to A.D. 180, let's say around 200 after Christ, what they call the Gallo-Roman period, and then they have the period to 350, recorded as Byzantine-early Germanic period, and all they have is moor-mumies, and Roman roads buried under mud. No buildings... So, in actual fact, between let's say 200 and 350, they don't have buildings, and then they go on, from 350 to 600, the actual period of the displacement of peoples, the Great Invasions, stratigraphically not evident. There is no strata. And then, from 600 to 900, no stratigraphic indication. So there is evidence here, in this 1923 book, that after something like 200, and up to 900, there is no building. If you go to the books, they are full of dates and emperor names, yes, but if you go to the ground, there are no buildings. Okay, enough...
Okay now, so this is Bath, in England. And there is a Saxon poem called The Ruin. When I sent this to my American friend Clark Whelton, an etymologist by training, an anglicist and etymologist by training, he had never heard of the poem The Ruin, which was written in Old Saxon, therefore in a German dialect, Anglo-Saxon dialect you can say, and there is a modern translation into english, and I don't think I will be able to read this to you...You have to go and check this in Q-MAG. It begins:
These ruins must have been built by giants...
These germanic tribesmen, they stood in awe before it. They could not believe that someone normal was able to build these huge marble structures. So I cut that short...
So now I go to a city most of you have heard about, some of you have visited: Petra, in Jordan, famous for temples carved out of the rock and tombs carved out of the rock. So here I tested, I did it on other sites too, but here I first tested my idea that five different catastrophes dated between 300 and 900 are actually just different datings for the same catastrophe. And I tell you what my test consists of: I look for a site that shows at least two destructive layers. So this is Petra, and you see here in this period, 222 to 235, some sudden catastrophe. So that's the summary of the excavation, some catastrophe, they have no idea what kind, and they are not into comparative catastrophes. They look at their site and they are happy with that. Okay. And so what you see here too, is that at this period you have the end of two periods, so they found many tombs but the last tombs are in the very same period, 208 to 235. And then, you see, you have Catastrophe Two, Three, Four, Five and there is even a Sixth here, so we have a list of catastrophes that you find in the textbooks under "history of Petra," and if you go to the stratigraphy of Petra, you have but one destruction and one last moment for tombs. And you don't have destruction, rebuilding, tombs, destructions, rebuilding, tombs, no, you have just one.
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So now, I go to Tavogliere, as the Italians call it, that's the plain around Foggia. Breadbasket of Italy, that's were the gran duro comes from, out of which Italy manages to make the best pasta in the world.
Emilio: It comes from the Mahgreb!
...Three thousand square kilometers of flat land. When they built a dam, in 1990, they called on the archeaologists of the Universities of Bari, Lecce and Foggia to do an excavation. I met one of the excavators, Giuliano di Felice, three weeks ago in Foggia and he said: "The first thing you have to know is, we found this site which is a huge Roman villa with two Christian basilicae on it!" - they had never heard of them, just when the bulldozers were moving, they appeared. Now, I also spoke to their aerial photographer... now, in this area of 3000 square kilometers, they had 200 Roman agricultural sites still under the soil, by aerial mapping they can draw it down to the foundations. Twoo hundred! so then we discussed this - it took three hours of discussion - then I said: "Isn't that strange, but you write in your excavation report, the city was suddenly destroyed, and you said, this was done by war, by the Gothic nation." And I told them: "Now, if you go to Rome, and you ask the Roman archaeologists, who destroyed the eleven huge aqueducts?" - it's again the Gothic nation, a nation of 10,000-12,000 people, half of them women and children, have you ever seen an aqueduct in Rome? Try to pull it down... It's a big job, it's a big job! So he started laughing. Di Felice, he started laughing right away. He is a smart man. He said: "But what can we do? We have the base written!" - "How do you have the base written?" - "It's easy, we have coins, of the period of Cassiodorus..!" You remember Cassidorus? The letter writer who is a laughing stock today because he describes his native city as a 3rd century place, whereas we know it's a 6th century place, "...we have the coins of the time of Justinian, who was the great law giver..." - we'll come back to him - "...who perennialized Latin law, 540-550...!" so I said: "Okay, that's the coins, but what about your own expertise?" He started laughing: "If I apply my expertise...," he couldn't stop laughing, "...my expertise, he said, if I apply my expertise, I am at war with the entire field of history, because if there is just..., if just at one Roman site, you date it according to your expertise and not to coin catalogs, you have to rewrite world history."
If it is accepted in San Giusto that the stratum he dates to 550 is in fact 250, if this is accepted, every other site is to be dated the same way. So here you have to do the Amarna test once again! You have to pull everything down... And I don't have the time to do that...
So now, why do I show you this? And you already understand why, and where this man and his colleague Giuliano Volpe, great men, great Italian archaeologists, where they were forced to go astray. Look at this: They have periods one to six, and for the first period, they have a few coins, 30-40 years; they have 90 years here, sixty here, here there is a period that is 420 years, so you wonder: period 1 and 2 form one period with structures unaltered, invariabile, built by the nobility, so I asked why do you give this period so many centuries and again their answer is: "because here, in this period, we have coins dated via Cassiodorus, so they are around the 5th century!" What can they do? If this is the 6th century, then this has to end about 500, because there is no other way, because there can be no interruption of time... so he does a chronological overscratch to meet the chronology, he doesn't dare to tell the chronologists sorry, you ask me to give this period 420 years, I am sorry, I can give it 50-60 years. He said: "If I do that, I am at war!" And he laughed. And then we did this play I always do: I asked: "When your students ask to name one person in the year 1000 AD, name a man, or a woman, name a person who in the year 1000 A.D. was telling his contemporaries we are in the year 1000 A.D. because that and that and that..." he said: "Of course, that person doesn't exist!" And if a student were asking that question, he would hush him up, because he understands that the most dogmatic part of the humanities is chronology, he learned it at school, he wanted to be a good pupil, we know this chronology by heart, better than the contemporaries did, we know this, and we don't remember, we don't remind ourselves, that in the whole world there is not one lecture course where you can learn that in the year 1000 A.D. there would have been a way of knowing that one was in the year 1000 A.D. But don't you dare touch the chronology.
But now I go on to the history writers, and I could list you a hundred sites from England to Africa... but this is in Basilicata, a place called the Muro Lucano, Muro Lucano, wonderful excavation, I recommend you to go there! So what do they write to get a little bit of attraction for people to come to their place, something that makes a little bit of propaganda: "Ththere was a time when Basilicata enjoyed a great prosperity, it was while all around an empire was collapsing, we are the voice of 5th century A.D.!" When Rome was losing its dominion over the world, at the same time, the economy was flourishing in the territories of Basilicata. So now if we go back to San Giusto, we can tell the same story here: Rome was going under, and San Giusto was flourishing! But that's this period, 420 years, that begins in 80, and then it stretches... but what if it doesnt end in 500, but also in 200? So only that overstretching can help... this is the way the problem is dealt with...
I show you another: Siponto. This is the 3000 square kilometer plain, with the 200 Roman agricultural estates, still today its the bread basket of Italy, but up to the 19th century it was a swamp. And the kings of Napoli and Palermo, they had the swamps drained. And they turned it into agricultural soil. But up to the 19th century, it was a swamp. And now, if you check again, what I said, it's not to hard to understand why ancient Roman estates are under agricultural soil, first they were under mud, and then when the mud was drained, in the 19th century, the mud became agricultural soil. So we look at this place here: Siponto was famous in antiquity. Horace visited it, many great Romans visited, it was one of the finest natural ports in this area of the Roman empire, and you can see here two lagoons, and you can see these are still lagoons with the barriers island all intact. And this was the same situation here, but they are gone. And ancient authors write about it.
We go to the upper image, this is dated 4th-9th century before Christ, the date comes from the museum of Manfredonia, so you ask yourself what eliminated these islands - they were there in antiquity and they are not here today... so something is required coming in from here, to eliminate these islands. And something has come, because the island were covered, and Siponto disappeared in the mud. One more place disappearing under mud. So, this is the 1.7 kilometer wall, and here you can see something interesting: you see a building excavated from under the soil, and you see Santa Maria Maggiore di Siponto, that quadrangular church on the right, that was not under the mud, it was visible, the interesting thing is, that this building was started in the 11th, at the earliest in the 10th century. And the big building that was invisible was finished here in the 4th and 5th century. So you ask yourself: why was the buried building dated to the 6th century? Because of the coins, dated by way of Cassiodorus! As you can see again, we have, between the destruction and the new building, we have a long stretch with nothing, no archaeological evidence whatsoever.
If we return to the stratigraphy of Siponto, and I don't go back to antiquity, I start here, that's the Roman city since 190 B.C.E and that's when it's blossoming, we have an inscription of Antoninus Pius around 160, and then we have 255, and then the city has a mysterious hiatus, there is nothing there, and then we have the same thing we heard before, when Rome was going under, we had the most splendid blossoming of Siponto... And then we have another mysterious hiatus of a 160 years, and then it was again destroyed...
So we go back to Siponto - Siponto was hit many times, by tsumani, a garden variety - this a is a garden variety of tsunami, it is reported in 1731... this what we are dealing with here must have been much, much, much bigger than the tsunami that covered the Tavogliere. The tsunami that destroyed the cities from Leicester to Memphis.
(...)
I show you another city, Egnatia, it's between Bari and Brindisi and in its time, it was one of the finest ports of the roman empire, and here you see again the mysterious interruption in development, and here the blossoming, and how like the others, when Rome is falling, we are starting to thrive! I could repeat it, and repeat it, but you must understand that the archaeologists always are doing a good job, always, and then they give over to the chronologists, and the chronologists open the catalogues with the coins and you are ending with these bizarre situations, here too we have mysterious interruptions, but what is interesting in Egnatia is that Emperor Trajan in 109 built a great road right by the sea, passing right by the city, and right after the road is put in, the city goes into a standstill. The achaeologists are bewildred. The road should have brought greater development, and here the very opposite is true. The road is built in 109, and afterwards you have no developent whatsoever for 200 years. And then suddenly development begins. And it does begin in the very same way that you would have expected, in 320 after Christ. Of course, the style of the new buildings and mosaics are as they were 200 years before, a little bit different, just a little bit.
So this is the reconstruction by the archaeologists. This is Egnatia, here is the ocean, and here you see the road of Trajan. After which, supposedly for 200 years, there was no development. And then it starts, right on the other side of the street, and you can already ask yourself: is this possible? That right after this break of 220 years, they started building on the other side of the street in the same style as they had stopped building 200 years before? And this is the Roman basilica, and this is a Christian basilica on the other side. And that's important now, this Christian basilica, if you date it according to archaeological expertise, would have had to be built very soon after 109, when Trajan built the road, not in the 4th century. You ask the archaeologists: why do you date the blossoming in the 4th century? It's because of the coins, they are dated after Cassiodorus.
We teach our students that Christianity was the only religion in the history of mankind that in the first 300 years of its existence, up to 330, did not have sacred places. With the one exception of a house church that existed in Dura Europos in 20 A.D. Christianity in its first 330 years was the only religion in the history of man without sacred places. But we surprise our very same students with saying that when church-building began in earnest in the 4th and 5th century, its architects fell back on the style of the 1st and 2nd century, nobody can explain why these style came back after having fallen out of fashion for three hundred years. So for 300 years, no churches, and when they start, they go back to where they had left 300 years before.
You can make a rime on that?
I can go back only to the 2nd century, to the Church Father from Carthage, Tertullian, who writes that "on the construction sites of the Christians, churches are rising high." Now we can say: he was alive in the 4th century! Tertullianus was alive! Because we know that there are no churches before 330, and if he writes in 180 that the Christian churches are rising high, he must have been alive then, which is impossible, he was alive in 180. We cannot imagine that we can be in error, but if you go back to Egnatia, you have the pagan basilica here, you have the Christian basilica here, and if this road was built in 109, and if Tertullian is writing in 180, this basilica is rising on the other side and our chronology is correct.
So, remember: no churches for 300 years and when they start, they start 300 years back. Up there you see the Roman basilica, built under emperor Trajan, the Roman pagan basilica in Egnatia. This is a classical roman basilica.
And what you see here, is the interior of Santa Maria Maggiore. And it is built, as you can see, three centuries later, between 420 and 423. And at first glance, the two appear somewhat similar, we agree to that. But you will remember one more thing, when Rome was wiped out by the two layers of deposito, and you look at the reconstruction effort, small houses in the rows of the theater, you say my god, in the ruins of the theater just such small houses, and out here a building like that, who had the technology, who had the manpower to do it? They had to take their water out of wells and cisterns, because the aqueducts were ruined, and suddenly they built these huge structures? But this is not all. Here we have 40 columns, 40 columns, intact and every historian of the architecture of the 2nd century knows they are not of the 5th century, so they must be spoliae... Which means, they were taken from a destroyed temple, and then were transported to Santa Maria Maggiore, - there are many churches which developed out of transformed pagan temples, but to take 40 impeccable columns and schlepp them around to another site, and build a new building, that doesn't make sense. Any we don't know where they could have come from, and there is not a ruin anywhere where we might have only one this columns left over. So this is a quote by Mrs Miles of Harvard University, a art historian, who says that Santa Maria Maggiore so closely resembles a 2nd century imperial basilica that it has sometimes been thought to have been adapted from a pagan basilica for use as a Christian basilica. She tried a way out, it looks like 2nd century, but we know its dated to the 5th century, we know it because its dated after Cassiodorus, so there is expertise that has not been pushed through, because of the chronology.
Giuliano de Felice, he resides at Bari like many Italian professors, who don't live in the small cities where they teach, he can't live in Foggia, he lives in Bari - so this is the famous cathedral San Sabino in Bari, and I show you here in Bari, they did a very fine excavation job, stratigraphically argumented, in the same time they excavated the Balbi Theater in Rome, and we can go down under the floor of the church, we can see it, that is, we can see in the stratigraphy, a Roman house, then here, you know, that road again, of Emperor Trajan, we see that road on this site too, Via Egnatia, then you have Latin inscriptions of the 2nd century, then you have a gap from the 2nd to the 3rd century, then you have the first Christian church, so this is the blossoming, "while Rome was going down, we were blossoming...," then there is another gap from the 5th to the 9th century, they don't give any apologies, so suddenly the excavators had their word, not in the dating but in indicating what they found, they did not indicate anything else but what they really found, so they said okay we have the higher layers, we have the gap, and that is the situation as it stands. So now if you take out the gaps, you have the Roman house, the road of Trajan, the Roman inscriptions, nothing has changed, first Christian church, about 150-160, and now we go to the other side of the road, a Byzantine church, the Church of San Sabino. Now that's more or less how we have it, and you have the idea that we are dealing with superfluous years, between 100 and 600...
... we have a change in the water level here, we have Justinian's comet, and a large array of comet stones, in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, where there is a bad situation around the birth of Muhammad, that's in the 6th century, Allah dumps clay stones at elephants, using birds to carry tem, a very enigmatic part of the Coran. So then we have Roman cities buried, and Roman strata covered in dark mud in the 6th century, then you have the plague coming from Egypt, to be even more precise, the plague coming out of the Roman port of Pelusium in Egypt, in the time of Justinian, also in the 6th century...
Now we come to an important archaeological item, #16, we excavate Germanic graves of 600 A.D., not just one German tribe, of franks and Alamans and others, all dated after coins from Cassiodorus, all the graves, first there are only the tombs of the Franks, that's okay, that's a habit of the Franks to have imperial coins laid in their tombs, okay, so the first archaeologists find coins from before 230 in a Frankish tomb, the coins are termed archaica, we believe that the shape of the coins was attractive to the Germanic chiefs, now they find all the other Germanic tombs with the same coins, it's a bit of a strain to say that they all had the same habit, and they must admit that, yes, the coins were excavated from Roman tombs of before 230, and then in the 6th century they were reburied in Germanic tombs, so you must posit that the Germanic tribes undertook excavations? We have no time for that...
Here you have Roman laws from before 250, they are much like the Justinian laws, the Justinian laws supposedly written in 530. The staff around Justinian, the people who ruled over Constantinople, they call themselves Romani, so of course historians are puzzled over this, and they say: this shows how they stressed the tradition, but they call themselves Romani because they held onto Roman status symbols, that's like the Second World War, when the Germans took Paris and the government was moved to Vichy, France, the leading class of the French government under Pétain, they moved from Paris to Vichy, and in Vichy they were called the Parisians, so the staff of Justinian was called Romani, they had to move out of Rome, and to Constantinople and to other places, that's why they were called Romani, and that's what explains to us why in the heart of the Greek world, in Constantinople, Justinian could write the Roman laws in Latin, nobody could read Latin any more, and Justinian is very proud, he himself writes an introduction to the laws, and it is the finest law for the people, and he is even on record for having had translated the first laws into Greek. So he wanted to cater to the Greeks, but his staff was Latin so they wrote the laws in Latin. He could not yet know, could he, that he would not win back the Western part of the empire, he finished off the Gothic nation, but he didn't win the empire back, and so for twenty years, he was preparing for a re-emergence of the empire, and so he was starting to write in Greek...
So we go to some experts of the laws of Rome, we go back to Justinian's laws, and I quote Johnson - "it a compilation of excerpts made several hundred years earlier..." And how is Justinian dated? After Cassiodorus...
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| Tuesday, October 02, 2012 | contact: d e g r a a m i @ g m a i l . c o m |
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