CENTURIES OF DARKNESS

The Old World has posed too many riddles to archaeologists, the most tantalizing of all being that of the so-called Dark Ages, an era characterized by economic and cultural depression that lasted 400 years, from 1200 to 800 BC. Or is it not? The dates we have for the Near East and the Mediterranean world are derived from the dating used in Ancient Egypt, which is highly regarded. Has this same dating been miscalculated though? This radical theory is proposed by James, Nikos Kokkinos and their colleagues as the product of years of extensive and complex research. Deciphering the evidence from papyri and pottery, the authors – all of them expert researchers in their field – study every piece of evidence and every layer of the vast excavation wealth that has been unearthed in an enormous region, from Spain to Iran and from Denmark to Sudan, to finally get to the root of this labyrinthine puzzle in Egypt. And it is here that they discover a “ghost story” that spans 250 years. Once these years are removed, new perspectives open up not only on the actual history of the Dark Ages, but also on the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, the origin of the Greek alphabet and the Golden Age of Solomon. Centuries of Darkness is a leading work that overturns the image we have of the ancient world using scientific evidence.