Surely everyone at least once in his life asked himself where did the time go. Perhaps it flew by unnoticed while talking with a friend or at work.
Sometimes an hour can seem like a minute, a week as a day, and a year as a month. For those who lived from 614 to 911 AD. e., it may seem that this period of 297 years never happened.
Let's start from the very beginning … the beginning of the countdown. It is believed that the oldest calendar in the world dates back to 8000 BC. BC: hunters and gatherers who lived in the territory of modern Scotland created a primitive calendar that took into account the change of lunar phases and seasons. As it developed, each civilization in the world created its own calendar, which also most often took into account the phases of the moon - this was the case in Babylon and the Maya.
In 2013, the world's oldest calendar was discovered in a Scottish field. The calendar includes a set of 12 pits (depressions), each likely containing one wooden post for each month of the year. The monument was used to map the phases of the moon in order to track the lunar months.
In the 1st century BC. e. The Roman Empire imposed its own calendar on the conquered peoples. He appeared in 46 BC. e. and was based on the movement of the sun. It had 365 days and 12 months - this is the famous Julian calendar. This calendar was used in most of Europe for the next 1600 years, until Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582.
There were three reasons for this: he wanted Easter to always coincide with the vernal equinox; it was necessary to remove the ten-day error, since according to the Julian calendar, 11 minutes and 14 seconds were missing every year; it was also necessary to change the rules for a leap year - now there was no extra day in years that were multiples of 100, if they were not multiples of 400. The changes introduced stuck, and we still use the Gregorian calendar.
In 1911, the German historian Herbert Illig published a hypothesis according to which we are now living not in 2013, but in 1716 - there are “not enough” 297 years. These missing years have disappeared either by accident due to misinterpretation of documents, or due to deliberate falsification. Of course, a certain amount of time was really lost, which may be due to the replacement of calendars over the centuries - human errors and miscalculations are inevitable here.
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Pope Gregory XIII did make a mistake, but he lost only 13 days, not 297 years. The error was minor. But 297 years really "disappeared": built in 800 AD. e. architectural structures, for example, were no different from buildings 200 years later. There is no documentation of the rise of Islam in Persia and Europe during this period, and there is no record of the actions of the Jewish people during the great upheavals - these 297 years have been "absent" from many civilizations.
However, for some reason, the “loss of time” did not affect Asia: for example, in China, in the period from 618 to 907, the Tang dynasty ruled, about which written evidence remained. Thus, someone in medieval Europe had to convince the Chinese to create a fake dynasty, which was quite difficult.
Believe it or not - everyone's personal business. It's like with Santa Claus: if there is no evidence of his existence, this does not mean that he does not exist.