What are the biggest mysteries of the Dark Ages?

[Wyrd]

This is just silly. There are a lot of things to debate in the early history of Islam, but the fact that it came from the Hejaz is definitely not one of them. Isn’t it a lot easier to assume a bit of poetic language (in the Qur’an, of all things), or that Muhammad and his followers might have exaggerated the influence of his hometown than it is to assert that literally everything we know about the geography of early Islam is wrong?

Where is the Kaaba in this scenario? How about Medina? And why did this immense historical mistake or falsification happen in the first place?

It's a reasonable hypothesis. Olive trees only grew around the Mediterranean at this time. You have to ask yourself why would Muhammad, if he lived in the Hejaz, discuss things that his audience might be unfamiliar with (olive trees and the growing of grapes)? Archaeological and pre-Islamic written sources suggest Mecca was relatively poor and insignificant in comparison to Northern Arabia, yet several Qur'anic verses imply Muhammad was addressing an audience who were familiar with the wealth and complex farming culture of Northern Arabia. The Qur'an also makes mention of a nearby battle (Surah 30.2) between the Byzantines and Sassanids (which the Byzantines lost). This information wouldn't be relevant to the inhabitants of Central Arabia. There are also Syriac loanwords in the Qur'an and a garbled story of Alexander the Great which is paralleled in Syrian legends.

The Kaaba is mentioned in the Qur'an but the details that are given about it are vague. For example, the story of Muhammad smashing the idols in the Kaaba isn't mentioned in the Qur'an. The name of a location called Bakka, which appears in the Qur'an, is sometimes said to be the Kaaba or Mecca but this is debatable. Though, the mentioning of Medina does give support to the traditional notion that Muhammad and his companions lived in the Hejaz.

Why this might have happened is perhaps the greatest weakness of this theory. Some scholars have suggested Muhammad was a Syriac or came from Petra and there was a coup in the early Islamic period by more militarised tribes from the Hejaz who altered the location of Muhammad's birth and life details.

 

[Gloss]

Franconian is considered a High German dialect despite being a descendant of Frankish like dutch due to the consonant shift.

I'm not sure it makes sense to consider Frankish, Alemannic and Saxon as actual distinct branches before the sound changes in high and middle German during the early middle ages.

All of The areas you mentioned had Substantial Romance Minorities .

None of which survived outside the Balkans.

Dacia was probably the same but the Dacian Speakers assimilated or died out. Also Substratum influence tends to be rather low to varying degrees . As I mentioned before a Trans Danubian community could have mixed with Balkan Romans.

The thing is when you invoke a trans-danubian migration to explain things ad hoc you render the necessity of having a local Romanized Dacian populations useless.

I will give this to you . I was wrong . Its more likely non -Roman Dacians assimilated to the Invaders.

Why only them? Seems arbitrary.

going to need a source for genetics.

Any PCA plot will suffice, they have just as much Slavic ancestry as eastern south Slavs do which is not little.

Also Slavic Place names can be easily explained by the Bulgars , Avars , Various Slavic tribes and as I mentioned, my opinion is that the ancestors of the Romanians were concentrated around the Carpathian Mountains, only later moving east and assimilating Slavs .

This again is in direct contradiction with the linguistic evidence, the Slavic influence in Romanian is firmly of the South Slavic type and there is relatively little to none Hungarian influence and the fact Romanians were consistently Orthodox also makes it less likely that they were located firmly in place east of the Carpathians.
Also if that were the case why is the one single Romanian branch rather than 2? You would expect that the Carpathian would act as a barrier big enough that you would one branch in the Pannonian side and 1 branch in the Balkan side where Moesian and Thracian communities lived and yet that's not the case, the common Romanian branch remains more homogeneous than you would expect.

It's homogeneous now. And I don't think the absence of East German / Turkish in current East Romance is necessarily indication of no contact at all even though I grant it's unlikely.
That however doesn't prove or indicate that East Romance was confined to one single location and that that location is Dacia. All it proves is that their ancestral speakers likely didn't have extensive cultural contacts with Turkics or East Germanics, which meshes with what we know of their migrations in the Balkans and Pannonian plains.

You misunderstood me, my opinion is that the Common Romanian branch was located mostly south of the Danube and it only later migrated northwards around the time of the first Bulgarian empire and Byzantine reconquest.

 

[WilliamOfOckham]

It's a reasonable hypothesis.

It's really not. It's an ad-hoc proposition that weaves a handful of intriguing tidbits together. Those are really common on the Internet and in pop history, pop science etc. because they appear plausible if you limit your scope to those tidbits. But, like all these pseudo-explanations, it falls to pieces when you take in the actual scope of the field. How the small minority of scholars who ever advocated this nonsense kept their posts, let alone acquired them because of it, I'll never know... but I digress.

Olive trees only grew around the Mediterranean at this time. You have to ask yourself why would Muhammad, if he lived in the Hejaz, discuss things that his audience might be unfamiliar with (olive trees and the growing of grapes)?

"The royal arms of England have lions on them. There were no lions in medieval England. Therefore, the 'England' of the Plantagenets must have been much further south than today - at least as far as Morocco."

Even if Mecca wasn't the world-renowned trading hub that later Muslim traditions sometimes suggest it was, its inhabitants were at least aware of olives and grapes. There were, if nothing else, thousands of Jews and Christians living in the Hejaz in Muhammad's time. And even if nobody there ever used them at all, and Muhammad's olives and grapes comments are totally beyond the pale of everyday seventh-century Hejazi life, who's to say that it isn't just a now-obscure poetic usage? There are tons of those in the Qur'an - most way more interesting than that.

Archaeological and pre-Islamic written sources suggest Mecca was relatively poor and insignificant in comparison to Northern Arabia, yet several Qur'anic verses imply Muhammad was addressing an audience who were familiar with the wealth and complex farming culture of Northern Arabia. The Qur'an also makes mention of a nearby battle (Surah 30.2) between the Byzantines and Sassanids (which the Byzantines lost). This information wouldn't be relevant to the inhabitants of Central Arabia. There are also Syriac loanwords in the Qur'an and a garbled story of Alexander the Great which is paralleled in Syrian legends.

Arabs, whether Nejdi Bedouins or Hejazi urbanites, got around in the seventh century. They still do today, to some extent. Of course the noble and relatively wealthy Arabs Muhammad was addressing were familiar with the wealth and complex farming culture of Northern Arabia, at least secondhand. And why shouldn't they be at least cursorily aware of the affairs of the two world-dominating empires to their north? And why shouldn't they at least understand a few vague references from Syriac culture?

This hypothesis has gone from challenging the alleged cosmopolitan primacy of the Hejaz to imagining it a complete wasteland!

Though, the mentioning of Medina does give support to the traditional notion that Muhammad and his companions lived in the Hejaz.

I'll say. When a city is explicitly mentioned in a historical document (and the Qur'an and well-attested ahadeeth are historical documents - not unproblematic, but still vitally important as such), it takes a lot to explain that away. A lot being, like, "we have other records of a city with the same name". Or "that city had ceased to exist three centuries before the alleged event". Not "it would be really nice for this cool hypothesis if that event didn't take place in that city, like the historical document says it did."

Why this might have happened is perhaps the greatest weakness of this theory. Some scholars have suggested Muhammad was a Syriac or came from Petra and there was a coup in the early Islamic period by more militarised tribes from the Hejaz who altered the location of Muhammad's birth and life details.

At some point you can suggest almost literally anything.

 

[Nivek]

This hypothesis has gone from challenging the alleged cosmopolitan primacy of the Hejaz to imagining it a complete wasteland!

And forgetting all the climate changes the world has so far(for example there was a climate crisis a little after the prophet(PABUH) died too)

 

[Hannibal The Bannable]

And forgetting all the climate changes the world has so far

i cannot stress this enough. Iraq and syria were way more fertile than they used to be and that Is something that’s undeniable . If you looked at Iraq now , you could say that it Always was a desert When it was one of the richest and most advanced places on the planet ( almost always until the Mongols).

grapes)? Archaeological and pre-Islamic written sources suggest Mecca was relatively poor and insignificant in comparison to Northern Arabia, yet several Qur'anic verses imply Muhammad was addressing an audience who were familiar with the wealth and complex farming culture of Northern Arabia.

Mecca was relatively poor compared to Northern Arabia . Its main claim to fame was being a permanent settlement and being a place where violence was not allowed and also being closee to the Red Sea and almost being in the middle of Arabia ,making it an rather attractive place to trade . Go on a pilgrimage and make some money with assurance of not getting robbed . Sounds like a good deal to any Central/Southern Arab. This doesn’t mean it rivaled Northern Arabia but it does seem to be a rather important city. Also Muhammed was a merchant, he made travels to the Levant and Northern Arabia Before and He himself almost definitely knew of the farming structure of North Arabia . Its also likely that a lot of Muhammed’s intial followers were Merchants or had gone to North Arabia or at the very least , knew of it( since a lot of Meccans were Merchants).

 

[Nivek]

i cannot stress this enough. Iraq and syria were way more fertile than they used to be and that Is something that’s undeniable . If you looked at Iraq now , you could say that it Always was a desert When it was one of the richest and most advanced places on the planet ( almost always until the Mongols).

Yeah people tend to think history is static, when everyone favorite empire(romans) destroyed the fertile crescent when conquered and was downhill since.

 

[Gloss]

It's really not. It's an ad-hoc proposition that weaves a handful of intriguing tidbits together. Those are really common on the Internet and in pop history, pop science etc. because they appear plausible if you limit your scope to those tidbits. But, like all these pseudo-explanations, it falls to pieces when you take in the actual scope of the field. How the small minority of scholars who ever advocated this nonsense kept their posts, let alone acquired them because of it, I'll never know... but I digress.

It's kind of insane to suggest that people should lose their job or shouldn't get them just for having the wrong opinion according to you. That's not how it works, people always have different opinions and history is not a popularity contest, there are always different perspectives.

I'll say. When a city is explicitly mentioned in a historical document (and the Qur'an and well-attested ahadeeth are historical documents - not unproblematic, but still vitally important as such), it takes a lot to explain that away. A lot being, like, "we have other records of a city with the same name". Or "that city had ceased to exist three centuries before the alleged event". Not "it would be really nice for this cool hypothesis if that event didn't take place in that city, like the historical document says it did."

At some point you can suggest almost literally anything.

Can you make an actual argument as to how the Quran that actually defends the consensus about the geography of early Islam? Especially without the support of later biographies and texts which we can't date back to the 7th century CE.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

What did Pope Leo say to Attila?

 

[WilliamOfOckham]

It's kind of insane to suggest that people should lose their job or shouldn't get them just for having the wrong opinion according to you. That's not how it works, people always have different opinions and history is not a popularity contest, there are always different perspectives.

To be clear, I'm not advocating that anyone be (or rather should have been) sacked for "having the wrong opinion". I'm saying that if you write a book - Hagarism, for example - that is (1) totally unfounded trash and (2) a slap in the face to the entire academic community working on the subject (let alone to the entire Islamic scholarly tradition), you should face serious consequences for your academic credibility. And yes, that might include not having the privilege of lecturing at a prestigious institution on that very subject.

Can you make an actual argument as to how the Quran that actually defends the consensus about the geography of early Islam?

The Qur'an's references to people, places, and phenomena of the Hejaz are so frequent and so explicit that I can really only recommend reading it.

 

[Gloss]

To be clear, I'm not advocating that anyone be (or rather should have been) sacked for "having the wrong opinion". I'm saying that if you write a book - Hagarism, for example - that is (1) totally unfounded trash and (2) a slap in the face to the entire academic community working on the subject (let alone to the entire Islamic scholarly tradition), you should face serious consequences for your academic credibility. And yes, that might include not having the privilege of lecturing at a prestigious institution on that very subject.

Just because the majority disagrees with some argument it doesn't mean it's "unfounded trash", otherwise why would these people have kept their jobs? Reviews of the book are more nuanced than that.
It's almost as if you are incredibly biased and don't understand that pushing extreme views isn't exactly uncommon, many scholars ended up pushing wrong theories their entire lives and yet we don't consider them to be worthless and the debate that started with the book is on-going to this very day even when the authors of the book didn't exactly hold unto all of the claims they made.

The Qur'an's references to people, places, and phenomena of the Hejaz are so frequent and so explicit that I can really only recommend reading it.

I've seen the exact opposite argument, that the Quran is very light on specific mentions of places and political events.

 

[Hannibal The Bannable]

when everyone favorite empire(romans) destroyed the fertile crescent when conquered and was downhill since

Romans Destroyed the Fertile crescent ? I thought it was the Mongols and whatever happened after them.

 

[Carter I'm Yog]

What did Pope Leo say to Attila?

More like, did the conversation really happen or was it fabricated hagiography?

 

[Hannibal The Bannable]

Just because the majority disagrees with some argument it doesn't mean it's "unfounded trash", otherwise why would these people have kept their jobs? Reviews of the book are more nuanced than that.
It's almost as if you are incredibly biased and don't understand that pushing extreme views isn't exactly uncommon, many scholars ended up pushing wrong theories their entire lives and yet we don't consider them to be worthless.

There is a limit to what theories you can propose . If you say the Earth is flat or a dinosaur , do you expect to be taken seriously. However the Theory Tom Holland (and Patricia Crone) Proposes seems to be within the realm of possibility . The Theory Dan Gibson gives implausible and really hurts his academic credibility ( he is bit of an amateur compared to others) . However I don’t think he in the ” he should be fired from his job” territory yet ( I don’t know much of his theory anyway) but he is really stretching it by saying Mecca was Petra by using Qibla Directions .

In my opinion both the theories are very unlikely , the latter more than the former and i tend to agree with the consensus that Islamic tradition was mostly accurate with some errors and fabrication . However i think it’s important that people just don’t ignore unpopular opinions and listen to them . However the posters seem to have atleast gone through a overview of the theory .

 

[Carter I'm Yog]

I'm saying that if you write a book - Hagarism, for example - that is (1) totally unfounded trash and (2) a slap in the face to the entire academic community working on the subject (let alone to the entire Islamic scholarly tradition), you should face serious consequences for your academic credibility.

Hagarism is widely cited by many modern historians of early Islam, including Bernard Lewis, Robert G. Hoyland, Reza Aslan, G. R. Hawting, Herbert Berg, Francis Edwards Peters, S. N. Eisenstadt, Ziauddin Sardar, Malise Ruthven, Richard Landes, and John Wansbrough, as well as critics (like Ibn Warraq). It is on the suggested reading list of the School of Oriental and African Studies of London and other various major universities' Middle East studies reading lists .

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) is a controversial book on the early history of Islam written by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. Drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac...

religion.wikia.org

Looks like a long list of people to fire.

 

[Gloss]

There is a limit to what theories you can propose . If you say the Earth is flat or a dinosaur , do you expect to be taken seriously. However the Theory Tom Holland (and Patricia Crone) Proposes seems to be within the realm of possibility .

The Revisionistic school is nothing like conspiracy theories or one single pseudo-historian pushing his own thesis, it's a group of people with heterogeneous opinions united solely by a general critical approach which is a needed contrast to other takes that existed before the 70s.

The Theory Dan Gibson gives implausible and really hurts his academic credibility ( he is bit of an amateur compared to others) . However I don’t think he in the ” he should be fired from his job” territory yet ( I don’t know much of his theory anyway) but he is really stretching it by saying Mecca was Petra by using Qibla Directions .

We should divide the interpretations from the data and discuss them separately, is it true or not that early Qiblas consistently pointed at Petra or Jerusalem? If that's correct at the very least it indicates that the prayer direction to Mecca wasn't yet a thing even if it doesn't mean we need to re-interpret the geography of the Quran and Muhammad's life.

 

[Just Another Night]

What we know of Norse myth comes mostly (if I recall correctly here - feel free to expose my ignorance if I blow it) from what was recorded by Christian scholars, since the Norse didn't really do written records. As a result, there's an almost inescapable level of Judeo-Christian influence (see, for example, all the references to the Christian god in Beowulf, or Loki suddenly becoming way more evil late in the road-to-Ragnarok stories).

I sometimes wonder what Norse myths were like to the people who originally told them.

 

[davidsmith]

Yeah people tend to think history is static, when everyone favorite empire(romans) destroyed the fertile crescent when conquered and was downhill since.

Was the desertification of Iraq due to the overuse of aquifers or gradual climate change?

 

[Yorel]

The exact origins of the Merovingian dynasty as well as their genealogy.

We know the Franks were a confederacy of germanic tribes that formed around the Third Century. We know the names of some of their early Kings as well as the fact the Salian Franks romanized and served as feodorati in the Roman Empire. But we have no idea how these various leaders are related and only have hypothesis... We're also not sure which of the characters mentionned in Frankish history are completely historical. And thus we don't know really how the Merovingians came to be.

The first historical ruler we have proof of is Childeric I, father of Clovis I, because we found his tomb and have records about him. But why did he become King? Who were his parents? How is he related to other historical figures? That we don't know for sure.

Supposedly, Childeric's father is Merovee, the King who gave his name to the dynasty and who supposedly fought alongside the Romans against Attila in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields. Merovee is a name that regularly shows up later in the genealogy of the Merovingians so an ancestor of them bearing that name is likely. And we know there were Franks that fought alongside the Romans in the Catalaunian Fields, so there is a historical likelyhood for Merovee's existence to be true. Him being Childeric's father also seems likely given that Childeric died in 481, 30 years after the battle of the Catalaunian Fields: so that leaves room for his father to have been around and fought in the battle. But even with all of that it's pure conjecture: there are no concrete proof to all of this.

And even with that, that doesn't answer where Merovee comes from and why he fought alongside the Romans. Various historians have formed hypothesis that hold some merit because they could explain the level of romanization of the Salian Franks. But it's mostly guesswork trying to reconnect the dots we have. The leading theories is that the Merovingians are descendants of Richomer, a frankish leader serving as a roman officer in the late Fourth Century. Richomer is also the uncle of Arbogast, who himself might be the brother to Empress Eudoxia, wife of Arcadius. This would offer a pretty interesting reason as to why the Salian Franks were so heavily romanized and a reason for them to have had such importance in Northern Gaul given their lineage. But it's highly hypothethical and relies on shaky sources.

To make matters worse, we also have to contend with Legendary or Semi-Legendary figures that were added to the genealogy by zealous writers tying to put the Franks and their Kings on a pedestal. This is how we get the figure of Pharamond, the supposedly very first King of the Franks, who is acknowledge to have been a creation of chroniclers. But to which level is he purely fictionnal? Pharamond is a name we have record of and the way it's form is close to others names you'll find in the dynasty later on... So there might be a historical basis, a real Pharamond that lived and breathed, but either whose name was retaken to create the fictionnal King Pharamond or whose story was overblown to make him the glorious King Pharamond.

But even when you get to Childeric and Clovis, there are mysteries about the genealogy of the Franks. Clovis for example became the sole King of the Franks by eliminating all his rivals, many of which are acknowledged/suspected to be his relatives. But how exactly are they related? There lies a mystery. Hypothesis have been made but like everything I've just talked about, they are only hypothesis.

And finally, you also have to take into account the eventual fate of the Merovingian dynasty and the later period. By the late 7th Century, the dynasty had lost its power and was no longer really ruling the Franks since the true power lied with the various Mayor of the Palaces. Said mayors having a tendency to get a Merovingian out of a monastery to crown him King... This makes following the lineage of the various late Merovingian Kings a bit of a challenge. No one knows for sure for example where the last Merovingian King, Childeric III, comes from: was he a son of Thierry IV? Of Dagobert III? Of Chilpéric II? Of Clotaire IV? All we know that he was taken out of a Monastery by Pepin the Short to placate the Frankish aristocracy before Pepin found a way to make himself King of the Franks... and sent Childeric and his son Thierry back into a monastery as a result.

Pure Folklore, seems was Wishful thinking of a British Julius or Augustus on a fashion, as Britain would have It Rough in the post roman era.

To my understanding, King Arthur is admitted by historians to be more of a composite character of various things brought together. It's likely you had several briton leaders that fought in the war against the Saxons for example and we have definite proof their conquest of England was stopped for a while. This got translated later into the idea that there was a King that united the Britons against the Saxons and defeated them repeatidly, but most likely it's more that various briton chiefs were fused together into the figure of Arthur. The name itself might come from one of those leaders, which is why you have hypothesis about who the "historical" Arthur is.

So it's not really pure folklore: parts of the Arthurian legends have a historical basis. It's just that we have too little sources and archeological traces to know the exact historical truth and determine exactly where the figure of Arthur comes from.

Later additions to the Matter of Britain of course don't help because Arthur got turned into this great heroïc figure and the ideal King rulers should be modelled after, whose knights went on many adventures and fought off monsters. But that also happened to Charlemagne with the Matter of France, and we know Charlemagne was a historical character. So it's possible Arthur got a similar treatment to Charlemagne... We just don't have as many sources on the former than we have on the later to know fact from fiction.

More like, did the conversation really happen or was it fabricated hagiography?

Don't we have records that show Attila did meet the Pope? And that he did turn away after that?

 

[Carter I'm Yog]

Was the desertification of Iraq due to the overuse of aquifers or gradual climate change?

Both.

Don't we have records that show Attila did meet the Pope? And that he did turn away after that?

fabricated hagiography?

Besides Attila was getting his ass burned by Markianos shoving a few thousand men into his empire. Attila should have got the news by the time he was done ruining the Po valley.

 

[Gloss]

Was the desertification of Iraq due to the overuse of aquifers or gradual climate change?

I still see no actual proof about this supposed "desertification", does anyone have any actual source explaining the chronology of this supposed event? Surely there must be something.