Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2016–2018years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've not heard it called the Phantom Time Hypothesis. The one I was referring to is described in this series of books:
https://www.amazon.com/History-mathematical-statistics-Eclip...
A lot of the stuff in there is dubious, but it's a vast series of books and an absolutely fascinating collection of historical mysteries even if you don't subscribe to the theory one iota.
Some of it is available online from the authors. Here's the chapter that deals with medieval Athens:
http://chronologia.org/en/seven/1N07-EN-410-445.pdf
With respect to "most of the books were destroyed", indeed there aren't many from this time, but that's part of what makes it so hard to figure out if ancient history is properly understood. Somehow there's a wealth of books from the early Roman and Greek civilisations thoroughly preserved by endless armies of monks, but a dearth of them much later. Fomenko's theory states that this is because many of the books we believe were written in ancient Rome were either mis-dated or flat out forged. Doubts about historical texts are not a new phenomenon: Isaac Newton was famously sceptical and here's a book from the 1800's that studies one of the big works of Roman literature:
- That book might be History: Fact or Fiction by Anatoly Fomenko, originally published in Russian [1]. It sounds pretty wacky.
