Did we invent 300 years of history? This is the phantom time hypothesis #History #conspiracytheory #fyp

There is a theory that the year 614 to 911 AD never actually happened. That nearly three centuries of human history were simply made up. So we're not in fact living in 2026, we're living in 1729. And the arguments are more compelling than you might think. This is called the Phantom Time Hypothesis. And it was put forward in 1991 by a German historian called Heriber Illig. The old Julian calendar assumed a year was 365 and a quarter days long. And the extra quarter day is accounted for with leap years. But a year is actually about 11 minutes shorter than that. And over centuries, those 11 minutes add up. So by the 1500s, the calendar had drifted about 10 days out of sync with the seasons. So Pope Gregory the 13th corrected it by chopping 10 days out of October that year. People went to bed on the 4th and woke up on the 15th. But Heriber Illig did the maths. And he worked out that if you count back to 325 AD, which was when the calendar had last been aligned, the drift should have been closer to 13 days, not 10. Three days were missing. Or rather, about three centuries worth of 11 minutes were missing. So where did they go? His answer was that they never existed. That roughly 297 years of history had at some point been inserted into the record. And the calendar hadn't drifted because the time hadn't actually passed. And so we started looking for more evidence. The early middle ages, he said, are suspiciously thin on the ground archaeologically. There's a stretch where building techniques seem to regress and then mysteriously pick back up where they left off. Romanesque architecture in the 11th century looks according to Illig like it's carrying on directly from late Roman work, as if the bit in between hadn't happened. Written sources for the period are sparse, and many of the ones we do have were produced centuries later. Then he looked at Charlemagne, who was crowned Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800. He had supposedly unified most of Western Europe, but he left behind much less physical evidence than you would expect for someone as important as he was. Illig argued that he was a complete fabrication, just a heroic figure like King Arthur, invented to fill in the blank space. The proposed culprits were holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II, working together around the year 1000, or as far as Illig's concerned, about the year 700. Illig believes that Otto desperately wanted to reign during the turn of the millennium. And so he basically fabricated three centuries of history to put himself in the right spot in the timeline. It's a fun theory. It's also to be clear, complete nonsense. The reason we know its nonsense is that the rest of the world also existed during this period, and they were keeping their own records. Chinese astronomers documented Halley's comet passing through in 837 AD. There are incredibly detailed Islamic histories that Tang Dynasty is one of the most thoroughly documented periods in Chinese history. And then there are tree rings and ice cores and plenty of other pieces of natural evidence. So for Illig to be right, you'd need the Tang Dynasty to be on it. You'd need every Islamic chronicle to be on it. You'd even need the trees to be on it.