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Uwe Topper 2008 paper read at international meeting of chronologists,
Potsdam "Cataclisms are the reason for our wrong chronology"
at http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/

currently 1 degree every 71.6 years (wiki)

quoted

Our actual value (since the Renaissance) of the speed of precession is 72
years for one degree displacement of the spring equinox. This was not
always like that.

In the Middle Ages the speed was a bit quicker. As Arab astronomers wrote,
the precession speed at their time was around 65 to 66 years per degree,
starting from al-Battani (around 880 AD) to Kushayr and as-Sufi until
Haraqi (1112 AD). An anonymous contemporary of Zarqallu (11th century)
noted likewise 66, and the Latin book of Alfonso X, the Wise (13th
century) gives the same value.

We can retain: All values for about four hundred years oscillate around
66. As chronology criticisers we doubt the lapse of 400 years and even the
exact dating of those texts but it seems clear to me that they pertain to
the time before the Renaissance. The astonishing uniformity of the value
cannot be explained by copying [errors] because the values differ very
slightly and are often declared to be the result of painstaking
calculations. Even a slow change within this interval can be noticed.

Let us step back into classical time: Ptolemy gave the speed as exactly
100 years per degree (and the Arabs confirmed this for Ptolemy). It might
seem this is just a round number but the mistake can only add up to a few
years, as this value had been handed down by Hipparchus as well nearly
three hundred years earlier.

Recently even older dates have been discovered: Dennis Rawlins found an
old manuscript in 1981 (published only in 1999) that shows that
Aristarchus 130 years before Hipparchus had nearly the same value of 100.
(Quoted in German by Sepp Rothwangl, internet). This means once again that
an original value for the precession speed had been handed down by the
Greeks over something like four centuries. Again I have to admit that we
now don't know when this really was and for how long the speed was
uniform. But since the Arabs knew this value it must have been calculated
some time before them.

Stepping back again until Babylonian time we suddenly are confronted with
the value 50, as Rothwangl asserts quoting cuneiform tablets. The big year
of precession, he continues, of the astronomer Kidinnu amounted to 18.000
years thus corresponding to what was passed on by Greeks concerning a
phrase of Heraklitus which can only be found in Aetius. Here now the
tradition is very weak and contestable, yet lacking other information we
can resume the following: From Kepler to us there is the factor 72, while
it is 66 for the Arabs and 100 for the Greeks of post-Alexander time; for
the Babylonian epoch it was supposedly 50.

To call these figures rounded to fit magical purposes is not logical as 72
is our real value and yet this figure couldn't be more symbolical for a
Christian scientist. I regard all these values as calculated by
astronomers on the base of real observations in their own time. The
calculation can depart from the difference between sidereal and tropical
year or using information of generations past about the location of stars
on the ecliptic. Both methods had been used.