Forgeries, Fakes and Phantom Time
How and why the past is described as just...weird.
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This is a riff on an Alexander Lee History Today article by the same name from February 2025
According to some, written history began in the 14th Century. It may seem ridiculous, but the Phantom Time conspiracy theory has serious implications. Except for those that include aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. Some people believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the Illuminati assassinated JFK, and the Merovingians descended from Christ.
But none of these come close to the weirdness that Jean Hardouin dreamed up. A 17th Century French priest, Hardouin convinced himself that almost every book written before about 1300 AD—including the Gospels, holding that all Greek and Latin literature—was a forgery.
Down the rabbit hole
Hardouin did not start out as a conspiracy theorist. Born in 1646 in a little town near Brittany’s Atlantic coast, he had shown promise as a classical scholar. After joining the Jesuits and completing his studies, he published groundbreaking editions of Themistius’ speeches and Pliny’s Natural History. He pioneered the ‘scientific’ study of numismatics. Louis XIV even commissioned him to write a history of the Church councils.
Do you think that I’d have got up at 4 AM my whole life, just to say what others had already said before me?
Hardouin
Hardouin’s brilliance was his undoing, and became desperate to say something new, something all writers can relate to. He could not resist the unusual, even if it bordered on the ridiculous. He took pride in his “infallible” nose for heresy and believed he had discovered a truly objective yardstick for history in numismatics—the study of coins.
It was this that led him down the rabbit hole. In August 1690, he suspected that something wasn’t quite right with the works of the Church Fathers. Their chronology didn’t stack up with what the coins seemed to suggest. Worse still, their orthodoxy was dubious, as was the authorship of some of their texts. For almost two years, he slogged away, hoping to assuage his doubts. By May 1692, he concluded that the only explanation for these anomalies was that everything was fake.
In Introduction to the Critique of Ancient Writings (Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prolegomena), Hardouin explained that the Christian Church Fathers transmitted their doctrine orally for the first 1,300 years of the Church’s history and not set down in writing. In the late 14th Century, “atheist” monks suddenly undermined the Church’s authority by introducing heresy into its teachings. To do this, they fabricated all the works traditionally ascribed to the Church Fathers and the Scholastics. According to Hardouin, they had then buttressed their deceit by forging almost the whole of classical literature, too. In fact, other than a few inscriptions, the only ‘genuine monuments of Latin antiquity’ were Cicero, Pliny’s Natural History, Virgil’s Georgies, and Horace’s Satires and Epistles.
The implications of Hardouin’s theory were even weirder.
If someone forged thousands of years of documents, did they also invent people or events that external evidence (coins, inscriptions) did not confirm? If people invented single events and personalities, why not entire centuries?
For a long time, these implications lay dormant. But shortly after WWII, the Russo-American psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky used apparent discrepancies between ancient texts to suggest not only that Egyptian history needed completely redrawing but also that the Greek “Dark Ages” never happened. About 40 years later, a German editor called Heribert Illig took this a step further. Shifting his focus further forward in time, Illig claimed that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II invented the entire period 614-911 AD as part of a vast conspiracy to position themselves at the symbolically significant year 1000.
It gets worse.
In a sprawling, seven-volume screed entitled History: Fiction or Science?, Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko argues everything before 1000 AD was simply “invented” by early-modern scholars like Joseph Justus Scaliger. Fomenko claims that whenever Scaliger came across an event that was described in two different sources, he ascribed it to two different dates, and sometimes even two different locations. Similarly, a single figure could be split into two, or a new person created out of several others. Soon enough, Scaliger ended up with two chronologies: one covering more recent history was real; the other covering everything before a ‘phantom copy.’ In this version, Jesus was born in 1152 AD and died in 1185. Plutarch was the same person as Petrarch, and Solomon was Suleiman the Magnificent. Fomenko thinks these claims are perfectly obvious because we only know most ancient texts from medieval copies, and that many of the eclipses mentioned in “antique” documents could not have happened when they are said to have.
Turtles all the way down
How have perfectly intelligent people, like Hardouin, come to embrace such bizarre theories? Psychological factors certainly play a part. Like any conspiracy theory, the phantom time hypothesis identifies a villain responsible for something wrong with the world. Once the heroic truth-teller exposes this fraud, it will reveal an even deeper truth. Then there is the lack of faith in authority. Hardouin lived amid the birth pangs of modern Biblical criticism and published his Prolegomena shortly after Louis XIV’s clampdown on Protestant heresy. Fomenko developed his ideas while the USSR was in the grip of glasnost.
But a far more important reason seems to be the nature of history itself. Or rather, the difficulty of separating history from pseudo-history. At root, this is a question of truth. Although historians are notionally interested in establishing the truth, testing the past isn’t easy. Our evidence simply doesn’t provide us with the impersonal facts that might allow that. Rather than being a window onto a past reality, documents—our primary source of evidence—are components of that reality. It doesn’t matter what sort of text we are dealing with: a chronicle, a political pamphlet, or a shopping list. They are all an attempt to structure, shape, or supplement the world from which they sprang, even if they purport to just describe it. Even the words they use can be tricky. As many post-modern philosophers have argued, words do not have a fixed relationship to the external world but derive their meaning from use. There is no hard truth in the sense that scientists might recognize. Every element of every document depends on its meaning on every other. As Terry Pratchett put it, it’s turtles all the way down.
If we are to understand any document, we need to understand how it functioned as part of a whole and worked in relation to other documents. To do this, we need some criteria for evaluating the sources. But where the boundary of reason lies isn’t always obvious. Take Hardouin. He was looking for a scientific way of overcoming the difficulties with which documents were fraught. He saw coins as solid, external evidence with which to fix dates. Since the philological techniques he had used on Pliny had served him so well, he saw no reason not to apply them to a wider range of documents. The same methods had detected forgeries before.
In the 15th Century, Lorenzo Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine, which the papacy had long used to justify its claims to plenitude of power, as a forgery. So why not the others? Fomenko has done much the same, except with astronomical data and mathematics.
The weakness of this, of course, is its myopia. However reasonable such scientific methods may seem, they are uniquely unsuited to the messy business of history. Hardouin failed to recognize that, in seeking to judge texts against a fixed standard of quality—whether in Latin, Greek, or matters of orthodoxy—he was reading them subjectively and anachronistically. So too with Fomenko’s use of eclipses. But once we use such methods to establish that texts are forged, we cannot evaluate any single document against any other. The very basis of historical reasoning collapses, and this destroys any possibility of refutation. That leaves only conspiracy theories.
Phantom time
So why does this matter? None of these phantom time theories has ever carried much weight with historians. The academic establishment rejected Hardouin’s Prolegomena almost as soon as it came out. Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze wrote not one, but two attacks on him; the Jesuit Order urged the pope to ban his writings altogether. He repudiated his theory in public, but in private he continued to churn out similar ideas until his death. Every historian who has come across their work also vilified Velikovsky, Illig, and Fomenko.
But there’s still a hard core of people who believe them, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov among them. And that is dangerous. Not because history can’t sustain vigorous debate. It can. Rather, because entertaining such ideas legitimates them.
If it is legitimate to doubt the existence not just of events, but of entire centuries, with no possibility of refutation, it is legitimate to dispute everything and use false histories for anything.
The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries
Dealing with sources is hard enough; working through the charlatans of the history trade just makes it harder. Maria and Curtis, working with unique sources, also have to watch for the possibility that everything they were working with had no substance…until they found their proof.
And Finally...
On 28 March:
1854: Britain and France declare war on Russia, joining the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. Disputes over control of holy places in Jerusalem (Catholic vs. Orthodox) and Russia’s growing power threatened both British trade routes and Ottoman sovereignty.
1949: Astronomer Fred Hoyle coins the term “big bang” on BBC Radio in London, England. Meant as sarcasm, the term was a way to describe the opposition to the single-point origin of the universe.
And today is NATIONAL SOMETHING ON A STICK DAY, which strikes me as odd because it seems the whole point of going to the State Fair is to eat something deep fried and on a stick…and around here, the State Fair is in late summer.
"Even the words they use can be tricky. As many post-modern philosophers have argued, words do not have a fixed relationship to the external world but derive their meaning from use."
Oh, yes. Look how easily people throw around terms like 'liberal' and 'conservative'. Now, try to come up with a universally acceptable definition of those terms.