Enquête-Codes of Chronological Duplicates and Biographical Parallels. Three Chronological Shifts: The Byzantine-Roman 333-Year Shift, The Roman 1,053-Year Shift and the Greco-Biblical 1,800-Year Shift

Abstract

The skeleton of historical chronology was constructed by analyzing the chronological data of ancient sources, based on which we have to study the problem of their origin. No complete detailed survey of the circumstances in which ancient manuscripts were discovered has been made by modern historiography, and only the general fact is noted that the overwhelming majority of the documents did not become known until the Renaissance after the “Dark Ages”. We studied this process in more detail and saw that the appearance of all of the manuscripts occurred in an environment which did not help analyze the finds critically. We illustrate this by a representative example, viz., the story of Tacitus’ Histories which is now one of the most important sources in the history of the emperors of Rome from Tiberius to Vespassianus [245]. The lifetime of Tacitus is regarded traditionally to fall into the period 55–120 A.D. In 1882–1885 and 1878, respectively, two historians, P. Hochart in France and J. Ross in England, published their studies in which they asserted and substantiated that Tacitus’ Histories allegedly had been written by the famous Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) [292]. Without discussing here the problem of the authenticity of Tacitus’ History (in our opinion it is an original, has not been falsified, and describes authentic events) we give the survey of this criticism, following [247], and illustrate the atmosphere in which many an antique dovument was unearthed.