Professor Gunnar Heinsohn died on February 16, 2023. He taught sociology and economy in Gdansk, where he was born, lived and died, and in Bremen, where he founded a Rafael Lemkin Institute for comparative genocide research. His qualification was, no doubt, based on his declaration of faith that the Holocaust is “uniquely unique”. His book S öhne und Weltmacht (“Sons and World Power”), first published in 2003, attracted the attention of military strategists, and Heinsohn became a member of the NATO Defense College and a frequent guest speaker on “war demography” (see here for example). When s peaking on current events a few months ago, Heinsohn actually sounded like a NATO spokesman. In this review of Söhne und Weltmacht, Göran Therborn writes:

The book was written in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, of which Heinsohn was an ardent supporter, and contains its share of sombre meditations on “genocidal dictatorships” and “weapons of mass destruction”. … In fact, Heinsohn’s first international love seems to be Israel [where he lived from 1976 to 1978], or more deeply Judaism, seen by him as an ethical example. (This is not an expression of any ethno-religious chauvinism, but an ideological choice. As the son of a Third Reich submarine captain, Heinsohn is unlikely to have had any important Jewish ancestry.)

From this brief introduction, you will wonder why I think this Gunnar Heinsohn is worth a tribute on The Unz Review. I am, in fact, interested in another Gunnar Heinsohn: the first millennium revisionist, whose work has fascinated me for some time (long before I became aware of his geopolitical and holocaustic views). That both Heinsohns are one and the same may be regrettable, and some will conclude that chronology revisionism is a NATO psyop. I just think that even highly intelligent and curious men can have their cognitive inhibitions, resulting from personal, family or national history. If life goes on beyond death, then Gunnar may still learn a few things in the Valhalla, and soon be able to tell his father Heinrich, as did Monika Schaefer to her mother, “Sorry Dad, I was wrong about the Holocaust.” He never met his father in this world, by the way, being born in Nazi Dantzig (Gdansk) six months after he disappeared with his U-Boat off Canada’s Newfoundland in May 1943. Surely such a start in life imprints something into your destiny. In any case, I am glad I had a chance to exchange with him by e-mail, and that I made him an occasional reader of The Unz Review.

Heinsohn had original theories about many things. I was impressed, in particular, by his theory about the 16th-century witch-hunt as being really a war against midwifes’ age-old secrets in contraception and abortion, at a time when demography had become a state policy. His theory is discussed in the best book on the subject, John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, Harvard UP, 1997.

But as I said, this tribute is to Heinsohn the theorist of a stratigraphy-based chronology that cuts down the first millennium AD by two thirds. After studying for some years his articles translated in English, cross-checking their information, and connecting them with other approaches, I published four articles on The Unz Review under the name “The First Millennium Revisionist,” the last two being mostly based on his work.

I chose not to sign them because I consider this field of research experimental, inconclusive, and unessential, and I didn’t want it to be used to harm in any way the much more consequential quest for truth to which I lent my name with my research on JFK, 9/11, and the Biblical-Zionist world conspiracy. I now take responsibility for these articles, and have collected them in book form, under the title Anno Domini: A Short History of the First Millennium AD. (They have benefitted from the contributions of many UR commenters, to whom I express my gratitude.)

My main reason for signing them now, besides the fact that my authorship has transpired here and there, is that I find it difficult to keep my inquiries into the distortions of Western historiography separate from the hypothesis of a chronological dimension to these distortions. And I think it is important, at this turning point in the history of Western civilization, to dig as deep as possible into the root causes of the West’s predicament, and to unveil the full extent of how we have been deceived by the “People of the Lie”, directly or indirectly through Christianity. In this article, I will update my “First Millennium Revisionist” articles with additional remarks.

But before I get to the first millennium AD (or CE, to be consistent with Heinsohn’s terminology), I will start with BCE chronology, as an opportunity to introduce one domain of Heinsohn’s research that I have not mentioned before. Long before he started deconstructing the standard chronology of the first millennium in 2013, Heinsohn had questioned the dates of ancient pre-Roman civilizations, starting with his 1988 book Die Sumerer gab es nicht (“The Sumerians did not exist”), followed in 1990 by a book co-written with Heribert Illig titled Wann lebten die Pharaonen? (“When did the Pharaohs live?”). I have no special expertise to judge Heinsohn’s dating of ancient empires, so it is open for comments.

You cannot travel time as you can travel space. That makes a huge difference between geography and chronography. Anatoly Fomenko, a mathematician, once said that historians don’t know what history is, because they never question the basic timeline of world history that they have been taught in primary school. Without giving it any thought, they simply assume that it is as securely established as the maps on their classroom wall. I have never read, in any recent book by a professional historian, any question about the accepted date of this or that event, give or take a few years. Historians simply don’t deal with chronology. They leave it to chronologists. But chronologists are an extinct species. The last ones were spotted in 1770, working on “the art of verifying the dates of historical facts from the charts, chronicles and other ancient monuments since the birth of Our Lord by the means of a chronological table etc.”

Today, this art is lost, because it is not needed anymore. Chronology is a bit like going to the moon: we did it, but we forgot how we did it. The difference is that there has been no official plan to do it again. Why do it again? Dates are all “verified” now, aren’t they? Wikipedia tells you exactly what year Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, or what day Julius Caesar was born. Not when it may have happened , but when it did happen.

The main architect of this sophisticated clockwork mechanism that tells you precisely when everything happened everywhere in the world, was a French scholar named Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), who set out to harmonize all available chronicles and calendars (Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian). His main works on chronology are De Emendatione Temporum (1583) and Thesaurus Temporum (1606). Isaac Newton (1642-1727) thought Scaliger was wrong by a few centuries, and wrote so in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. He was ignored, and we are now told to trust Scaliger as if he had a time-travel machine equipped with a digital clock.

The most important challenge to the Scaligerian chronology in the 20th century has come from the disciples of Russian-born scientist Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979). For an overview of this research, I recommend P. John Crowe’s 1999 article titled “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective.”

Heinsohn entered the field as a disciple of Velikovsky, but rejected Velikovsky’s reliance on the biblical framework, and built a method of research totally compatible with academic standards, relying exclusively on stratigraphy, the only scientific method for dating relatively archaeological finds based on the depth of strata.

Heinsohn’s first synthetic paper on ancient civilizations was “The Restoration of Ancient History,” delivered in 1994 at a symposium in Portland, Oregon, now archived here. A detailed discussion of it in 26 parts can be read on Brendan Ward’s blog harlotscurse, starting here. I will quote mostly from these two sources, although I recommend, for a more thorough and updated version, two papers published by Heinsohn in 2006 for the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies (CAIS): “Empires Lost and Found: Stratigraphy and Today’s Search for the Great Powers of the Past”, and “Cyaxares: Media’s Great King in Egypt, Assyria & Iran.” Also of interest is his paper presented at some International Congress of Egyptology in 1993, “Who Were the Hyksos?”

The main problem outlined by Heinsohn is that the timeline of ancient Mesopotamian history that is taught in universities today is more or less identical to the timeline which biblical fundamentalists deduced from the Bible in the 17th century. The keystone of this construction is Babylonian king Hammurabi, identified with King Amraphel of Genesis 14, a contemporary of Abraham, whom the Bible places in the third millennium BCE. For example, in 1857, biblical archaeologist William Kennett Loftus uses Abraham’s birth in 2130 BC as an anchor point in his Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana.

This chronology is twice as long as the chronology recorded by the Greek Classical historians such as Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, or Diodorus Siculus. But Christian historians favorably prejudiced toward the Old Testament have given preference to the Jewish computation. This, according to Heinsohn, was the original sin of our ancient historiography.

It began with the comparative history of Greeks and Jews. This comparison focused on the question if Moses was more ancient than Homer. … Since dates used in the Bible simply were earlier than the Greek dates, the latter lost the competition for the earlier periods of civilization. … the Greek dates cut the biblical ones down to about one-third. When their dates were replaced by the biblical ones, the following picture emerged. Suddenly, the historians were confronted with a gap of 1,500 years. It was created by equating biblical Nimrod of Abraham’s -3rd millennium with Herodotus’ Ninos of the -8th century. … Biblical dates … openly dominated comparative world chronology up to about 1870 and—in a disguised manner—are used up to the present.

To fill the gap, ancient empires have been discovered by archaeologists that Classical historians knew nothing about. Meanwhile, those empires they knew well were said to have left hardly any archaeological trace, so that their existence was questioned. Heinsohn noticed that these two types of discrepancies came in matching pairs. It starts with Chaldaea, the first civilization according to Herodotus, founded by Ninos around -750.

Students of Chaldaea are stunned by the archaeological absence of the most learned nation of antiquity which the Greeks considered as the cradle of knowledge. … Yet, the same researchers take great pride in the discovery of the Sumerians (1867) in the very heartland of Chaldaea. These Sumerians became teachers of mankind. Yet, they were so ancient that even the best historians of antiquity had never heard of them.

For Heinsohn, the Sumerians are none other than the Chaldaeans wrongly dated. He drew another parallel between the Gutians discovered by modern archaeologists and the Scythians of Classical history.

In the last 150 years the learned world was time and again struck by the discovery of lost nations and forgotten empires which were so ancient that even the best historians of antiquity had never heard of them. This caused great surprise because these superancient civilizations were found in territories which were otherwise well known to the historians of Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Yet, the surprise did not end there. The nations and empires which were described by the classical authors in great detail could hardly be verified by the spade. One and a half centuries of excavations, thus, brought as much desperation as it did provide success stories for European scholars. Modern archaeologists… dug in vain for the scientific splendor of the Chaldaeans on the Persian Gulf but hit the scientific splendor of much older and mysterious Sumerians. They dug in vain for marauding Scythians in Mesopotamia but hit the much older and mysterious Quthean/Gutaean marauders.

A third example is the Medes. Since the 1980s, historians question the existence of their empire mentioned by all Classical historians and described by Diodorus Siculus as “the mighty empire of the Medes.” For lack of archeological evidence, this empire is now declared “elusive”. Wikipedia now informs us that in an international symposium in 2001, “it was generally agreed that there was no proof of the existence of a Median ‘empire’ and that it should therefore be considered a hypothesis.” Meanwhile, the ancient state of the Mitanni has been discovered in Upper Mesopotamia and dated between 1500 BCE and 1260 BCE. The Classical historians knew nothing of these Mitanni. Heinsohn’s solution is, of course, that the Mitanni are the Medes wrongly dated, just like the Sumerians are the Chaldaeans, and the Gutaeans are the Scythians; “none of the newly discovered nations is new at all but merely provide the archaeology of the nations known since antiquity. Because they applied erroneous dating schemes, modern scholars failed to recognize their findings as the remains of the nations they only apparently looked for in vain.”

According to Heinsohn, Herodotus was basically right. Upper Mesopotomia, the region centered on the River Tigris and known to Classical historians as Assyria, was the nucleus of three successive empires prior to the conquest of Alexander the Great: the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians, with possibly a period of Scythian domination interrupting the Empire of the Medes. Heinsohn’s stratigraphy-based chronology erases 1500 ghost years created by Bible-based chronology.

Because it lies outside of the biblical world, China has never been forced into the false chronological frame tied to the biblical birthdate of Abraham the Patriarch. Scholarship therefore assumes that China has been a backward civilization until it entered history, about 1500 later than Assyria. According to standard chronology, Heinsohn writes:

When the Eurasian land mass entered the Iron Age around -1600/-1400, China slowly moved into the Bronze Age. The Chinese waited an additional millennium-around 600/-400- before they could bring themselves to work iron. The Chinese did not seem to care about falling millennia behind. … Modern students of Ancient China have no way of comprehending the behavior of such a gifted nation.

In reality, China is dated correctly, like India and pre-Columbian Central America. “It, therefore, can be used as an interesting measuring rod for the true age of the beginning of the Bronze Age.” When brought in line with China’s chronology, it turns out that “the emergence of post-Neolithic high civilization does not come about before the turn to the 1st millennium BCE. This reduction brings China, the Ganges Valley as well as Mesoamerica (Olmecs) etc., into line with the rest of the world.” Heinsohn’s corrected chronology can be summarized with the following chart (reproduced from Ward’s model):

Although European scholarship has stopped relying explicitly on the biblical narrative, the chronology built on biblical dates has remained the basis of our textbook historiography. In other words, the Western world views—and has taught the rest of the world to view—the history of mankind through the lens of the Hebrew Bible. But the Hebrew Bible was a work of historical deception, partly designed to give the Chosen People precedence over all other nations. It is largely admitted today that the Torah was not written before the end of the Babylonian exile, during the Persian period, and that the Tanakh was standardized under the Hasmonean kings of the Hellenistic period.

The flawed biblical chronology was passed on to the Christian world by Eusebius of Caesarea, who supposedly wrote in the decades after 300 CE in the Palestinian city of Caesarea. With his two-volume Chronicon, Eusebius is credited with the first systematic chronology of world events synchronizing the varied pasts of ancient Assyria, Egypt, Israel, Persia, Greece and Rome into a single work. As Anthony Grafton explains in Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (2009), Eusebius used key synchronisms between Greek, Roman, and Jewish history “as the grounds for arguing that Moses was older than any Greek writer. Both the Jewish religion and its Christian offspring emerged from this argument as older than, and accordingly superior to, the traditions of the pagans.”

Once edited, translated into Latin, and brought up to date by Jerome, Eusebius’s tables provided the model for Latin world chronicles for centuries to come. … Even in the early seventeenth century, when Scaliger wanted to create a new structure for universal history, he set out to do so by reconstructing Eusebius’s work.

Interestingly, Grafton portrays Eusebius as living, working and writing like a Renaissance scholar. He compares him to Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), a Benedictine abbot, scholar and forger, who assembled vast libraries and compiled histories of the Church. Grafton insists on “the close parallels between the activities of Eusebius and Trithemius.” and claims that the similarities indicate “a deep structure of Christian scholarship, forged in late antiquity, then reproduced again and again in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.” “Eusebius,” writes Grafton, “specialized in producing works that required massive help from collaborators.” “By 320 or so, we would argue, Eusebius’s workplace must have become a substantial research institution, at once an archive, a library, and a scriptorium.”

Eusebius was building on the foundation of his predecessor Origen, who is said to have authored more than 800 works, with the support of his wealthy disciple Ambrose, who “provided his teacher with an enviable support staff, including more than seven shorthand secretaries to take Origen’s dictation as he composed, scribes to work up the secretaries’ notes, and even [according to Eusebius] ‘girls trained in beautiful writing,’ whose task was presumably to prepare copies to be presented to Origen’s dedicatees and other privileged readers,” not to mention “Jewish informants” and “assistants literate in Hebrew as well as Greek.”

Origen and Eusebius, according to Grafton, “were themselves impresarios of the scriptorium and the library, and developed new forms of scholarship that depended on their abilities to collect and produce new kinds of books.” They were the founders of Christian scholarship: “the model of ecclesiastical learning that took shape in the library at Caesarea shaped the whole, millennial tradition of Christian scholarship, in subtle but vital ways. In many respects, we are still the heirs of Origen and Eusebius.”

From this description, the skeptic will suspect that neither Origen’s nor Eusebius’s works can possibly date from a time when Christians were still persecuted by imperial authority. They reflect a situation of state-sponsored erudition. Eusebius’s Chronicon may very well have come out of the papal scriptoriums of the early Middle Ages, for although it was supposedly written in Greek, it is attested only in a medieval Latin translation, until Greek versions appeared in the 13th century.

The same is true of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History in ten volumes, our main source for the early history of the Church up to Constantine the Great. As for Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, our main source for the life and policy of the founder of Constantinople, its modern editors inform us that:

it has proved extremely controversial. Some scholars are disposed to accept its evidence at face value while others have been and are highly skeptical. Indeed, the integrity of Eusebius as a writer has often been attacked and his authorship of the VC [Vita Constantini] denied by scholars eager to discredit the value of the evidence it provides, with discussion focusing particularly on the numerous imperial documents which are cited verbatim in the work.

Eusebius’s Life of Constantine appears to be part of the popes’ industry of counterfeit history. The centerpiece of that program was the Donation of Constantine. As I wrote in my latest article, “it is no exaggeration to say that European history was, to a large extent, shaped—and doomed—by this single papal forgery.” This false Donation was the keystone of a great historical hoax by which Rome claimed universal supremacy over Constantinople. Significantly it was not until the mid-15th century, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, that the Donation was recognized as a forgery. As I argued in “A Byzantine View of Russia and Europe,” it is important for the future of Christendom that we in the West recognize that our point of view on this centuries-old rivalry has been shaped by papal propaganda.

The deception, I came to suspect, has been so thorough and systematic that it has tampered with the chronology—the ADN of history, so to speak—, resulting in a historical sequence of events from Rome to Constantinople which has never ceased to puzzle historians. Consider for example that, according to Ferdinand Lot, a respected pioneer in the study of Late Antiquity, “the foundation of Constantinople is a political enigma,” for which Lot finds no other explanation than: “Constantinople was born from the whim of a despot in the grip of an intense religious exaltation.

New Rome, in his mind, was to be all Roman. He transported part of the Senate there and had palaces built for the old families he attracted there. The laws were all Roman. The language of the Court, of the offices was Latin. … And here is what happened: Constantinople became a Greek city again. Two centuries after its foundation, the descendants of the Romans transplanted into the pars Orientis had forgotten the language of their fathers, no longer knew anything of Latin literature, considered Italy and the West as a half-barbaric region. By changing their language they had changed their soul. Constantine thought he was regenerating the Roman Empire. Without suspecting it, he founded the Empire so aptly called “Byzantine”.

My suspicion that this scenario is unrealistic has kept growing as I learned, among many other things listed here, that Constantine was a native of the Balkans who had never set foot in Rome before he conquered it from Maxentius. Nor had his predecessor Diocletian, who was also from the Balkans and resided in Nicodemia, on the east shore of the Bosphorus, at a time when Rome was “a dead city.” And isn’t it awkward that that Romans saw themselves as descendants of immigrants from Asia Minor, a belief illustrated by Virgil’s Aeneid and by the very name of Rome (Romos is a Greek word meaning “strong”). One source I hadn’t mentioned is the Latin historian Herodian (c. 170-240), who tells a revealing story about the Romans’ attachment to the goddess Cybelle, “mother of the gods”, and their sense of kinship to the Phrygians from Anatolia:

When Roman affairs prospered, they say that an oracle prophesied that the empire would endure and soar to greater heights if the goddess were brought from Pessinus to Rome. The Romans therefore sent an embassy to Phrygia and asked for the statue; they easily got it by reminding the Phrygians of their kinship and by recalling to them that Aeneas the Phrygian was the ancestor of the Romans. (Book 1, chapter 10)

One of the most puzzling issue is the enduring controversy about the use of the term “Romans” (Rhomaioi) by which the “Byzantines” named themselves, and this controversy is symptomatic of a deeper cognitive dissonance. Let me illustrate this with a recent book by Greek-American historian Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (2019). The author takes issue with the habit among Byzantinist scholars to underestimate the significance of the Byzantines’ self-identity as “Romans”. In reaction to one typical statement by those he calls “denialists” that, despite their “shrunken circumstances,” the Byzantines “found it difficult to abandon their sense of being Rhomaioi, ‘Romans’,” Kaldellis writes: “This sounds instead like a displaced metaphor for what is going on in modern scholarship: We would like to abandon the term Roman in dealing with the Byzantines, but we cannot quite do so, because it is written all over the sources.”

Kaldellis shows that the Byzantines understood their Romanness in an ethnic sense: in Constantinople and in its surrounding provinces lived a majority of “Romans” together with minorities such as Slavs, Rus’, Jews, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Franks, Bulgars, Goths, who were citizens of the Empire, but were not regarded as “Romans”. Having convincingly established that “the Romans of Byzantium saw themselves as an ethnic group or nation,” Kaldellis asks:

Did the Byzantine Romans believe that they were collectively descended from the ancient Romans too? / This is harder to document. It probably formed only a vague aspect of Romanness in Byzantium; I doubt many people thought about it in explicit terms. But it was presupposed in many discursive practices. Merely by calling themselves Romans they asserted a continuity between themselves and the ancient Romans, whose default, unreflexive mode in traditional societies was generic.

Kaldellis’ insistence that Byzantines were implicitly referring to their ancestors from Italy when calling themselves “Romans”, coupled with his inability to give any evidence of it, shows that it is an unsubstantiated presupposition. A mong the eight “snapshots” Kaldellis provides to “highlight the ethnic aspects of Romanness in Byzantium,” none of them indicate that Byzantines thought they descended from Italian or even Western immigrants, and three of them indicate the exact opposite:

1. In a story from the Miracles of Saint Demetrios of Thessalonike, we hear about people captured in the Balkans by the Avars and resettled in Pannonia, on the south bank to the Danube. Although they married local women, sixty years later, “each child received from his father the ancestral traditions of the Romans and the impulse of their genos,” and “this large people longed to return to its ancestral cities.” By their ancestral cities, these “Romans” meant the Greek-speaking Balkans.


2. In 1246, the population of Melnik wanted to be ruled by the Roman basileus rather that the Bulgarian tsar because, they said, “we all originate in Philippopolis and we are pure Romans when it comes to our genos.” Philippopolis is a Greek city founded by Philip II of Macedon, about 200 miles west of Constantinople, in today’s Bulgaria.


3. Basileios I (867-886) settled people from Herakleia in his newly founded city of Kallipolis (Gallipoli) on the coast of southern Italy. A twelfth-century addition to the history of Ioannes Skylitzes comments: “This explains why that city still uses Roman customs and dress and a thoroughly Roman social order, down to this day.” Herakleia, or Heraclea Pontica, is a Greek city on the Black Sea coast, about 200 miles east of Constantinople.

In the first two instances, we have people equating their being Roman to their origin in the Balkans, not in Italy. In the third instance, we have people living in Italy calling themselves Romans specifically because they originate from Asia Minor—and presumably regarding their Italian neighbors as non-Romans.

So Kaldellis reads in his sources the exact opposite of what they say, because he takes as an unquestionable postulate that “Roman” means “from Rome, Italy”, or in a vaguer sense, of Western descent. If he had been consistent and unprejudiced in his quest for the ethnicity of the Byzantine Romans, he would have noticed that they referred to Italians not as Romans, but as Latins. (He should also have taken note that even the inhabitants of today’s Greece, from Late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, called themselves either “Romans” or “Hellenes”, never “Greeks”.)

Kaldellis himself documents that the Byzantines not only called themselves Romans, but called their Greek language Romaic: “for most of their history the Byzantines did not think that their language made them Greek; to the contrary, their ethnicity as Romans made their language ‘Roman,’ or Romaic.” Still, Kaldellis accepts the premise that “they were Romans who had lost touch with the Latin tradition,” and concludes, “The Byzantines had two Roman languages, one the language of their ancestors (Latin) and another their language in the present (Romaic),” without even trying to solve the mystery of how they forsook their ancestors’ language, despite their strong ethnic sense of identity.

These embarrassing facts, and many more mentioned in previous articles, point to a very fundamental misunderstanding which can easily be traced back to a sleight of hand by the medieval papacy, who tried to copyright the name “Roman” by erasing its eastern origin, and, with a fabricated legend of saint Peter, usurp Constantinople’s prestige as being the cradle and the capital of Christian civilization. The mystery of the original “Romans” ties up with some other historical mysteries such as the real ethnic origin of the Goths, or with a possibly related occultation of the historical role of the Slavs in Western civilization, theories which have been brought up in interesting comments under my previous articles, but about which I have yet to get a sufficient grasp.

Sticking to the controversy of who were the original Romans, I was more than intrigued when I learned that, based on stratigraphy alone, Heinsohn argued that the chronological sequence between Rome and Constantinople has been falsified. (Anatoly Fomenko makes the same claim based on a different and questionable method of investigation, arguing for a “Roman-Byzantine shift” of 333/360 years.) This is illustrated by the sequence of construction—from bottom to top—of the so-called Arch of Constantine in Rome, which is so inconsistent with the standard chronology that scholars assume that the three top stages were fitted with reliefs looted from earlier but unknown imperial buildings. This illustration, reproduced by Heinsohn in his very last article, “Constantine the Great in 1^st Century AD Stratigraphy,” dated February 2023, is from the Wikipedia page. The temporal paradox is also illustrated by the aqueduct built by Hadrian (117-138 AD) in Byzantium. “This is considered a mystery,” Heinsohn notes, “because Byzantium’s actual founder, Constantine the Great (305-337 AD), did not expand the city until 200 years later.” In Heinsohn’s corrected chronology, “Hadrian’s aqueduct carries water to a flourishing city 100 years after Constantine, and not to a supposed wasteland centuries earlier. The mystery disappears. When Justinian renovates the great Basilica Cistern, which gathers water from Hadrian’s aqueduct, he does so not 400 years, but less than 100 years after it was built.”

One of the aims of papal propaganda was to usurp the elder’s birthright from Constantinople. But the distortion it introduced into world chronology took a life on its own, and, by no small paradox, it was widened between the 12th and 14th century, when the citizens of Rome, allied with the Germanic emperor (of the Holy Roman Empire) in their rebellion against the pope, advertised their new republic as the restoration of an ancient order. French medievalist Robert Folz writes about this:

In 1143, the Capitol became the residence of the Council of the Commune of Rome. Its foundation is part of the movement which carried the Italian cities towards the emancipation of their lords: Rome follows, with a lag of more than half a century, the example of the cities of Italy of the North. But in Rome, the enterprise was singularly perilous, because of the exceptional importance of the city’s lord, the pope, capable of asserting venerable texts in his support, and of mobilizing powerful alliances against the city. Moreover, in an environment where the past was the object of such a passion as in Rome, any attempt at new creation had necessarily to take the aspect of a restoration of the past: the council of the commune was called senate, the senatorial era was used in the dating of acts, while the sign SPQR also reappeared. It all happened as if we were returning to the tradition of republican Rome.

As I pointed out, there is actually much mystery about this SPQR acronym, which is said to have been used in the Roman Republic from the 1st century BCE and kept in use by the emperors. Although we are told that it means senatus populusque romanus (“the Senate and the Roman people”), contemporary evidence of that is lacking. In 1362, the Roman poet Antonio Pucci believed it stood for the Italian words Sanato Popolo Qumune Romano (“The Senate and People of the Commune of Rome”). Forty-two other medieval Italian cities used the acronym SPQ followed by the Initial of the city’s name, as SPQP for Pisa, SPQT for Tusculum, or SPQL for Lucera. This raises the suspicion that SPQR was never used in Rome before the founding of the Commune of Rome in the 12th century. This supports the hypothesis that I presented in my first article on chronology, that the ancient Roman Republic and its imperial glory are, to some extent, a fabulation of the Middle Ages. That would explain why, apart from churches, medieval remains are nowhere to be found in Rome: they are in fact everywhere, but predated by a millennium. (The counterpart of this situation is in cities like Avignon, with its abundance of medieval buildings, but lack of Roman remains, despite its putative Roman antiquity.)

Among clues that the ancient Roman Empire, as we picture it (with the appearance it has in Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator, for example) belonged to the category of Middle Age and/or early Renaissance fiction, I have mentioned the name Caesar, supposedly the nickname—of unknown meaning—of a Roman general, that became synonymous with “emperor” although Julius Caesar was never emperor. That etymology has long been recognized as dubious. If the ancient Roman Empire was a ghost of the Holy Roman Empire, then Caesar may in fact be the Italianized form of Kaiser—rather than the opposite . According to Wikipedia, Kaiser derives from the Proto-Germanic kaisaraz and is still a common surname in Germany, with variations such as Kayser, Keiser, Kiser, and Kyser.

As crazy as it sounds, all this is consistent with Heinsohn’s conclusion of the contemporaneity of ancient imperial Rome and early medieval imperial Aachen. To explain the confusion introduced in our first millennium chronology, I have stressed geopolitical motives, but Heinsohn is reluctant to consider such realities; in the tradition of Velikovskian catastrophism, he invokes a sort of millennium bug resulting from a cosmic cataclysm in the tenth century, that caused a loss in collective memory (a theory that finds support in Patrick Geary’s Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium), but also in technology—check for example this recent article on Science Advances, that begins like this “Ancient Roman concretes have survived millennia, but mechanistic insights into their durability remain an enigma.”

To conclude, Heinsohn’s own summary of his theory in “Heinsohn in a nutshell” is worth repeating here:

According to mainstream chronology, major European cities should exhibit — separated by traces of crisis and destruction — distinct building strata groups for the three urban periods of some 230 years that are unquestionably built in Roman styles with Roman materials and technologies (Antiquity/A>Late Antiquity/LA>Early Middle Ages/EMA). None of the ca. 2,500 Roman cities known so far has the expected three strata groups super-imposed on each other. … Any city (covering, at least, the periods from Antiquity to the High Middle Ages [HMA; 10^th/11^th c.]) has just one (A or LA or EMA) distinct building strata group in Roman format (with, of course, internal evolution, repairs etc.). Therefore, all three urban realms labeled as A or LA or EMA existed simultaneously, side by side in the Imperium Romanum. None can be deleted. All three realms (if their cities continue at all) enter HMA in tandem, i.e. all belong to the 700-930s period that ended in a global catastrophe. This parallelity not only explains the mind-boggling absence of technological and archaeological evolution over 700 years but also solves the enigma of Latin’s linguistic petrification between the 1^st/2^nd and 8^th/9^th c. CE. Both text groups are contemporary.

Having here added a few elements to the arguments developed in my “First Millennium Revisionist” articles, now collected in my book Anno Domini: A Short History of the First Millennium AD, I repeat, in conclusion, that this type of chronological revisionism, to which Professor Heinsohn has contributed more and better than any other, is still in the experimental stage: although there are no definitive conclusions, it raises questions and possibilities that are waiting to be answered and tested by other scholars.

Notes

German articles here: http://www.xn--zeitensprnge-llb.de/ Many of Heinsohn’s articles are now downloadable on : https://independent.academia.edu/GHeinsohn

Gunnar Heinsohn, « The Restauration of Ancient History ».

According to Kwang-Chih Chang (The Archaeology of China, 1963, p. 136), quoted by Heinsohn, “the known beginning of civilization in China is approximately a millennium and a half later than the initial phases of Near Eastern civilization.”

Anthony Grafton, Christianity and the transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, Harvard UP, 2009, p. 136.

bid., p. 175.

Ibid., p. 18.

Ibid., p. 212.

Ibid., p. 215.

Ibid., pp. 69 and 111.

Ibid., p. 5.

Ibid., p. 244.

Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon, 1999, on p. 1.

Ferdinand Lot, La Fin du monde antique (1927), Albin Michel, 1989, p. 49-50.

Ibid., p. 2.

Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 20.

Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, Belknap Press, 2019, kindle l. 629-641 .

Ibid., l. 1489.

Ibid., l. 217-229.

Ibid., l. 288.

Ibid., l. 883.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Greece

Kaldellis, Romanland, op. cit., l. 2136-2226. Kaldellis, in l. 2088, adopts the dubious claim, made by Carolina Cupane, that when Byzantines mention “the language of the Romans