> A potential problem with lunar eclipses is that the cycle repeats every 18 > and a bit years, and this has been known for a long time. So a really > ingenious faker could have cut out an appropriate number of years. Seems a > bit of a leap though to realise that eclipses could be used to verify dates.
I don't think the dating would depend on *lunar* eclipses, but on *solar* eclipses -- particularly total or near-total eclipses. These are quite rare in any particular location, but are spectacular and do get chronicled. So matching them up should be quite definitive -- and make it very hard to pad 300 years into the record, to say the least. See, e.g., Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation: http://uk.cambridge.org/astronomy/catalogue/0521461944/default.htm (a detailed examination of 400 solar and lunar eclipses from 700 BC to AD 1600) I doubt 300 years off the calendar escaped F. Richard Stephenson's notice, when he was working to calculate variations in the exact length of the day. Incidentally, a propos of the supposedly missing 300 years and the nonexistence of Charlemagne -- Charlemagne's own son, Emperor Louis, is historically recorded as having witnessed the total solar eclipse of May 5, 840 seen in France, Bavaria, Austria, and northern Italy: http://www.sternwarte.de/esop-99/abstract/42zawil3.htm And King Alfred the Great of England recorded the precise hour of a total eclipse that was seen in London on October 29, 878 (a few months after he defeated Guthrum the Dane at the Battle of Edington). See: D G Scragg, 'The Solar Eclipse of Wednesday, 29 October A.D. 878. Ninth-century Historical Records and the Findings of Modern Astronomy', in: Alfred the Wise, Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the occasion of her 65th birthday. 1997. ISBN 0 85991 515 8 <http://www.boydell.co.uk/164.HTM> I wonder how Otto III and Pope Sylvester II managed to arrange for *these* little bits of fakery? Mark Leisher wrote, a few skeins back in this thread: > Herr Krojer takes Illig, and by extension, Niemitz to task quite effectively, > in my opinion. I think we can agree to consider Illig and Niemitz to be certified historical cranks now, and perhaps get on with our Unicode business. ;-) --Ken P.S. For those who didn't take a stab at Krojer's debunking of Illig, it might be interesting to note that what made him, as a German, change from his earlier stance of cavalier dismissal of Illig's cooky historical theory, to take it seriously enough to deserve a thorough, researched and published debunking, is the undercurrent of sinister historical revisionism in German historiography that touches on the rather more sensitive years 1934-1945, rather than the distant dark past of 600-900.
