In the last chapter of his book, Emmet Scott 'Muhammed and Charlemagne Revisited', the author says there is a problem with chronology. He is looking at the dark ages, and wondering why Muhammed is out of kilter with the supposed date of barbarian inspired recession in Europe - and he presents quite a good argument. The real break-off point, he claims, between Classical civilisation (ending in the collapse of the Roman empire) and the medieval world (the Abbasid empire) is 614ad, the year of the commencement of the Persian War when the last of the Sassanids attacked Roman Syria, the Levant, and eastern Anatolia. It was this event, and in the years immediately thereafter, that the great cities of Asia Minor and Syria were destroyed and abandoned - never to rise again. There was no attempt to repair them he reassures us, even when the war ended in 627. You would have thought some kind of attempt would be made to restore life to those cities as it was not until 638 that the Arab hordes fell upon both the Roman Christian world and the Sassanid rivals. This is roughly a 12 year gap - where has that cropped up before? Scott even suggests the Arabs were actively making mayhem prior to 627 - so is it a 15 year gap?
We know that when the Sassanids took Jerusalem there was a bloodbath against the Christians living there - but this is usually put down to religious differences between the two rival empires. Scott touts the idea the Sassanians had put their cause in an alliance with the Arabs, if not at first, somewhat later - prior to 627. The Sassanians, on the back foot, may have seen the Arabs as worthwhile allies confident they could contain them at a later date. They didn't. However, the Abbasids, he argues, were culturally Persians, something the Omayyad successors went out of their way to suppress. Does the origin of Arab/ Persian animosity go all the way back to the beginnings of Islam? What he is saying is that it is unlikely that Arab bedouin tribesmen, by themselves, could have conquered two empires, the Roman and the Persian. How many bedouin were there scratching a living in the sand dunes? In contrast, we may note the Arabs had been highly successful during the first millennium BC and right up to the rise of Christianity in around 300ad - if only on the trade in myrhh and incense (every temple in the classical world consumed this commodity and when Christianity became dominant that market disappeared). Southern Arabia had quite a large population but in Keys book, Catastrophe, this changed after 536ad - large numbers moving north. In fact, the family of Muhammed appear to have part of that population movement. So, a little bit of leeway here, although the main thrust of Scott might have some mileage. Whether they were backward and illiterate tribesmen is a matter of interpretation, but they had a long history of fighting amongst themselves - and anybody at the peripheries. The orthodox interpretation of the Persian War differs. The Sassanians were in the end not successful and the Romans were able to gain some kind of control over the situation - but then, all of a sudden, came the Arabs. However, if as Scott proposes, the Arabs arrived in the 620s (and Steve has argued about a small error in chronology, elsewhere) this hypothesis might get off the ground, providing us with a quite different view of the past. It would explain, for example, why Roman/Byzantine cities failed to renew in any way after the major battles in 614 and 611ad. By the domino effect there would also be an effect on European chronology, he assures us, but cites just the cessation of European contact with the Mediterranean world (trade and shipping etc). He then claims that it was at this point that the dark ages began - and that is a big difference, more than just 12 or 15 years of revision.
Scott is on better footing when he says, 'it cannot be stressed too strongly that the chronology of this obscure period is much less secure than generally imagined. Often a date is upheld by little more than guesswork, or by analogy. There is a tendency to stretch archaeological finds into the middle or later 7th century' in order to have something to fill what might very well be a gap. Precisely the same thing can be demonstrated at the other end of the dark age where historians have already noted a tendency to assign material of the 10th century to the 9th, in order to plug a gap. This situation, it seems, is panning out in favour of Steve, as a series of small phases of erroneous chronology might add up to something significant.
Scott goes on to outline briefly the Illig theory - which is what this thread is all about. This is where it all gets rather confusing - but I might be biased. Illig's theory requires a revision of about 300 years. Scott then homes in on the so called climatic downturn event in, he says, the 7th century. He claims Clube and Napier in the 1980s and Baillie in the 1990s/2000s have misinterpreted the evidence - but fails to mention the narrow growth tree ring event that is central to this hypothesis. Why he dates the climatic downturn to the 7th century is a puzzle in itself as 536-45ad is clearly in the 6th, and relatively early at that. He seems to have tripped over his own feet as it is him saying the abandonment of sites in the 7th century = the climatic event. As far as I know, he should be saying the 536-45 event weakened the Romans and the Persians, and by fighting amongst themselves they weakened themselves still further, providing the Arabs with a perfect window in which to attack them. If he has taken onboard arguments made by Illig on this issue he has not made that very clear. In addition, he fails to give adequate attention to the Justianian plague, also in the 6th century (and not the 7th as once again he seems to imply), as this could have reduced population numbers considerably. Scott, it seems to me, is arguing for a much larger revision, one along the lines of Illig, but is shifting the 6th century events, most ably outlined by Keys, more so than the others, into the 7th warranted? I don't know. More information is required than what Scott uses in his concluding chapters. The key here, I suspect, and maybe he says it earlier in the book, the European dark age is a century or so too early to fit into the argument he wants to make, it was the Arabs that brought the ancient world to an end, and the introduction of a religion based on pastoralism rather than agriculture.If so, how does he propose to revise Roman chronology in the Near East to fit into such an hypothesis - he must have to delete some considerable parts thereof but he doesn't quite explain how this might come about.