History of New Chronology Fomenko's claims In volumes 1, 2 and 3 of
History: Fiction or Science?, Fomenko and his colleagues claim:
That different accounts of the same historical events are often 'assigned' different dates and locations by historians and translators, creating multiple "phantom copies" of these events; these "phantom copies" are often misdated by centuries or even millennia and end up incorporated into conventional chronology;
That this chronology was largely manufactured by
Joseph Justus Scaliger in
Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and
Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360;
That this chronology was completed by jesuit Dionysius Petavius in
De Doctrina Temporum, 1627 (v.1) and 1632 (v.2);
That
archaeological dating,
dendrochronological dating,
paleographical dating, numismatic dating,
carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependent on traditional chronology;
That there is not a single document in existence that can be reliably dated earlier than the
11th century;
That histories of
Ancient Rome,
Greece and
Egypt were crafted during the
Renaissance by
humanists and
clergy mostly on the basis of documents of their own making;
That the
Old Testament is a rendition of events of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, containing 'prophecies' about 'future' events related in the New Testament, which is a rendition of events of 1153 to 1186 AD;
That the history of religions runs as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the XI century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (XI-XII century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (XII-XVI century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, and Islam;
That currently accepted chronology has many inconsistences, but these are generally overlooked and ignored, giving the perception that there are no problems;
That the
Almagest of
Claudius Ptolemy, traditionally dated to around 150 AD and considered to be the corner stone of classical history, was compiled in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from astronomical data of the ninth to sixteenth centuries.
That 34 complete Egyptian horoscopes found in Denderah, Esna, and other temples have unique valid astronomical solutions with dates ranging from 1000 AD and up to as late as 1700 AD;
That the
Book of Revelation we know of contains a horoscope that is dated to 25 September - 10 October
1486 compiled by cabbalist
Johannes Reuchlin.
That the horoscopes contained in Sumerian/Babylonian tablets have solutions every 30-50 yrs on the time axis and are therefore useless for purposes of dating;
That the Chinese tables of eclipses are useless for dating as they contain too many eclipses that did not take place;
That powder and guns, paper and print, and all major inventions made in the tenth to sixteenth centuries are of European origin;
That
Ancient Roman and
Greek statues, showing perfect command of the human anatomy are fakes crafted in the Renaissance when, according to Fomenko, such command was for the first time attained;
Brief summary Fomenko's theory claims that the traditional chronology consists of four overlapping copies of the "true" chronology, shifted back in time by significant intervals (from 300 to 2000 years), with some further revisions. All events and characters conventionally dated earlier than
11th century are either fictional or, more commonly, represent "phantom reflections" of actual
Middle Ages events and characters, brought about by intentional or accidental misdatings of historical documents. Before the invention of
printing, accounts of the same events by different eyewitnesses were sometimes retold several times before being written down, then often went through multiple rounds of translating, copyediting, etc.; names were translated, mispronounced and misspelled to the point where they bore little resemblance to originals. According to Fomenko, this led early chronologists to believe or choose to believe that those accounts described different events and even different countries and time periods. Fomenko justifies this approach by the fact that, in many cases, the original documents are simply not available: most of the history of ancient world is known to us from manuscripts that are conventionally dated centuries, if not millennia, after the events they describe.
For example, Fomenko claims that the historical
Jesus is a reflection of the same person as the Old-Testament prophet
Elisha (850-800 BC?),
Pope Gregory VII (1020?-1085), Saint
Basil of Caesarea (330-379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven" - emperor of
Western Xia, who reigned in 1032-1048). Further,
John the Baptist baptized Jesus, someone named Maxim baptized St. Basil, the prophet
Elijah was the predecessor of Elisha, and
John Crescentius was in some way a predecessor of Pope Gregory VII; consequently, according to Fomenko, all of them are also reflections of the same person. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and timeframe of the authors of said accounts and biographies.
Merging together the biographies of the aforementioned people requires also to merge
cities, because conventional history places them throughout the entire ancient world, from Jerusalem to Rome. Fomenko identifies all their cities: "New Rome" =
Constantinople =
Jerusalem =
Troy. The Biblical
Temple of Solomon was not completely destroyed, says Fomenko - it is still known to us as the
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The historical Jesus may have been born in 1152 and was crucified around 1185 AD on a hill overlooking the
Bosphorus(Г.В.Носовский, А.Т.Фоменко Датировка Рождества Христова серединой XII века). The city that we now know as
Jerusalem was known prior to the 17th century as a nondescript Palestinian village of Al-Quds.
On the other hand, according to Fomenko the word "Rome" can signify any one of several different cities and kingdoms. The "First Rome" or "Ancient Rome" or "Mizraim" is an ancient Egyptian kingdom in the delta of the
Nile with its capital in
Alexandria. The second and most famous "New Rome" is Constantinople. The Italian Rome is at least third in the list of cities known as "Rome"; it was allegedly founded around
1380 AD by
Aeneas. Similarly, the word "
Jerusalem" is a placeholder rather than a physical location and can refer to different cities at different times.
Parallelism between
John the Baptist, Jesus, and Old-Testament prophets implies that the
New Testament was written before the
Old Testament. Fomenko claims that the
Bible was being written until the
Council of Trent (
1545-
1563), when the list of canonical books was established, and all apocryphal books were ordered destroyed.
As another unrelated example, according to Fomenko,
Plato,
Plotinus and
Gemistus Pletho are one and the same person - according to him, some texts by or about Pletho were misdated and today believed to be texts by or about Plotinus or Plato. Similar duplicates include
Dionysius the Areopagite,
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and
Dionysius Petavius.
Detailed description Fomenko's methods One of Fomenko's simplest methods is statistical
correlation of texts. His basic assumption is that a text which describes a sequence of events will devote more space to more important events (for example, a period of
war or an
unrest will have much more space devoted to than a period of
peaceful, non-eventful years), and that this irregularity will remain visible in other descriptions of the period. For each analysed text, a
function is devised which maps each year mentioned in the text with the number of pages (lines, letters) devoted in the text to its description (which could be zero). The function of the two texts are then compared..
Statistical correlation of texts In a somewhat similar manner, Fomenko compares two
dynasties of rulers using statistical methods. First, he creates a
database of rulers, containing relevant information on each of them. Then, he creates "survey codes" for each pair of the rulers, which contain a number which describes degree of the match of each considered property of two rulers. For example, one of the properties is the way of death: if two rulers were both poisoned, they get value of +1 in their property of the way of death; if one ruler was poisoned and another killed in combat, they get -1; and if one was poisoned, and another died of illness, they get 0 (there is possibility that chroniclers were not impartial and that different descriptions nonetheless describe the same person). An important property is the length of the rule.
Fomenko lists a number of pairs of seemingly unrelated dynasties – for example, dynasties of kings of
Old Israel and emperors of late
Western Roman Empire (
300-
476 AD ) – and claims that this method demonstrates correlations between their reigns. (Graphs which show just the length of the rule in the two dynasties are the most widely known, however Fomenko's conclusions are also based on other parameters, as described above.) He also claims that the regnal history of the
17th-
20th centuries never shows correlation of "dynastic flows" with each other, therefore Fomenko insists history was multiplied and outstretched into imaginary antiquity to justify this or other "royal" pretensions.
Statistical correlation of dynasties Fomenko examines astronomical events described in ancient texts and suggests that the chronology is actually
medieval. For example:
He associates the
Star of Bethlehem with the
1054 AD
supernova (now
Crab Nebula) and the
Crucifixion Eclipse with the total
solar eclipse of
1086 AD. Such a pair of astronomical events separated by 32 years (the approximate age of
Jesus at the time of his death) is extremely rare.
He argues that the
star catalog in the
Almagest, ascribed to the Hellenistic astronomer
Claudius Ptolemy, was actually created between
600 and
1300 AD.
He refines
Morozov's analysis of some ancient
horoscopes, most notably, the so-called
Dendera Zodiacs—two horoscopes drawn on the ceiling of the
temple of Hathor—and comes to the conclusion that they correspond to either the
11th and
13th centuries AD. Traditional history usually either interprets these horoscopes as belonging to the
1st century BC or suggests that they weren't meant to match any date at all.
In his final analysis of an eclipse triad described by the ancient Greek
Thucydides in
History of the Peloponnesian War, Fomenko dates the eclipses to
1039,
1046 and
1057 AD. Because of the layered structure of the manuscript, he concludes that Thucydides actually lived in medieval times and in describing the
Peloponnesian War between the
Spartans and
Athenians he was actually describing the conflict between the medieval
Navarrans and
Catalans in Greece from
1374 to
1387 AD.
Astronomical evidence Dendrochronology is rejected on the basis that it, for dating of objects much older than the oldest still living trees, isn't an absolute, but a relative dating method, and thus dependent on traditional chronology;
Template:Non-sequitur Fomenko specifically points to a break of dendrochronological scales around
1000 AD. Consequently, Fomenko concludes that carbon dating is not accurate enough to be used on historical scale. See
the article on radiocarbon dating for an expanded discussion of Fomenko's assertions about archaeological, dendrochronological, and radiocarbon dating.
Rejection of common dating methods Despite criticism, Fomenko has published and sold millions of copies of his books in his native
Russia. The list of his supporters includes such famous figures as former Chess World champion
Garry Kasparov. Kasparov met with Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko's conclusions concerning certain subjects were the same as his own. Specifically, regarding what is called the Dark Ages, Kasparov was incredulous towards the commonly held notion that art and culture died and were not revived until the Renaissance. Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans living under the banner of Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Fomenko's theories became accessible to the Western public with the publication of the first three volumes of the seven volumes series
History: Fiction Or Science? vol. 1,2,3 in
English.
Popularity Although Fomenko is a well-respected
mathematician, his historical theories have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as
pseudoscience. His critics claim he chooses only the facts and sources of data that he finds convenient for his theory and ignores the rest.
Critiques of Fomenko's New Chronology have been published by reputable Russian scholars. One book, titled, in English,
History and Counter-History: Critique of Academician A.T. Fomenko's "New Chronology", is a collection of papers and articles published by opponents of Fomenko's theory, which include prominent historians of Russia, Antiquity, and of the Middle Ages, as well as archaeologists, astronomers, physicists and mathematicians. While these books are available for purchase, they are only available in Russian and have yet to be translated into English.
Criticism The vast majority of archaeologists, conservators, and other experts dispute Fomenko's rejection of scientific dating methods. They accept that
radiometric dating methods can only provide approximate dates, but they note that the uncertainty associated with each method is known and limited. When many dating methods are used in conjunction, they will usually converge to produce similar ages for objects from the same layer of a given archaeological site. Independent scientific absolute dating methods include
thermoluminescence dating,
optically stimulated luminescence dating,
archaeomagnetic dating, and in some cases
palaeoentomology, as well as relative dating techniques, relying on
stratigraphy or the
seriation of different artifact types.
Critics reject Fomenko's assertion that
dendrochronology fails as an absolute dating method because of gaps in the record. Two dendrochronological sequences beginning with living trees, one from the southwestern United States and the other from southern Germany, exist that respectively extend back 8,500 and 10,000 years into the past. Sample of the wood from these
incremental dating chronologies have been subjected to radiocarbon analysis as a way of calibrating and checking that method.
See
carbon exchange reservior for a discussion of his unproven conclusions that
Archaeological, dendrochronological, paleographical and carbon methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts are both non-exact and contradictory, therefore there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artifact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century. Overlooked convergence of uncertainty in archaeological dating Opponents of Fomenko's theory note that his method of statistically correlating of texts is necessarily very rough, because it does not take into account the many possible sources of variation in length outside of "importance". They maintain that differences in language, style, and scope, as well as the frequently differing views and focuses of historians, which are manifested in a different notion of "important events," make quantifying historical writings a dubious proposition at best. What's more, Fomenko's critics allege that the parallelisms he reports are often derived by forcing the data – rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern.
For example, on the one hand Fomenko asserts that the vast majority of ancient sources are either irreparably distorted duplicate accounts of the same events or later forgeries. In his elision of Jesus and Pope Gregory VII he ignores the otherwise vast dissimilarities between their reported lives and focuses on the similarity of their appointment to religious office by baptism. (The evangelical Jesus is traditionally believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his encounter with John the Baptist. In contrast, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years and was born 8 years after the death of John Crescentius, according to the available primary sources.
Inadequate quantification of history and forced pattern matching Critics say that solar eclipses are relatively frequent events: total solar eclipses occur on average every 300-400 years at any given point, and much more often if we consider, say, all
partial eclipses visible somewhere within the borders of the ancient
Roman Empire; thus multiple datings of any given eclipse or even sequence of eclipses are possible. What's more, ancient western astronomical observations cannot be assumed to be reliable to the degree of precision needed to use them for dating as Fomenko does. Although Fomenko does account for some possible errors, astronomer Dennis Rawlins points out that Fomenko's statistical analysis got the wrong date for the
Almagest because he took as constant Earth's obliquity when it is a variable that changes at a very slow, but known, rate. He explained this in DIO 4.3, 1994, p. 119..
Unaccounted astronomical phenomena Fomenko claims that world history prior to
1600 was deliberately falsified for political reasons. The consequences of this conspiracy theory are twofold. Documents that conflict with NC are said to have been edited or fabricated by conspirators (mostly Western European
historians and
humanists of late
16th to
17th centuries). The lack of documents directly supporting NC and conflicting traditional history is said to be thanks to the majority of such documents being destroyed by the same conspirators.
Consequently, there are many thousands of documents that are considered authentic in traditional history, but not in NC. Fomenko often uses "falsified" documents, which he in other contexts dismisses, to prove a point. For example, he analyzes the
Tartar Relation and arrives at the conclusion that
Mongolian capital of
Karakorum was located in Central Russia (equated with present-day
Yaroslavl.) However, the Tartar Relation makes several statements that are at odds with NC (such as that
Batu Khan and Russian duke
Ieroslaus are two distinct people). Those are said by Fomenko to have been introduced into the original text by later editors.
Many of the rulers that Fomenko claim are medieval doppelgangers moved in the imaginary past have left behind vast numbers of coins. Numismatists have made innumerable identifications of coins to rulers known from ancient sources. For instance, several Roman emperors issued coinage featuring at least three of their names, consistent with those found in written sources, and there are frequent examples of joint coinage between known royal family members, as well as
overstrikes by kings who were known enemies.
Ancient coins in Greek and Latin are unearthed to this day in vast quantities from Britain to India. For Fomenko's theories to be correct, this could only be explained by counterfeit on a very grand and consistent scale, as well as a complete dismissal of all numismatic analyses of hoard findings, coin styles etc.
See also Plenum Publishing Corporation. 1987. USA, Consultants Bureau, New York and London.
Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1990.
Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1988.
Gordon and Breach, 1990. (Studies in the Development of Modern Mathematics.)
Gordon and Breach, 1988. Second edition 1995.
USA, American Mathematical Society, 1991.
Gordon and Breach, 1987.
USA, American Mathematical Society. In: Translation of Mathematical Monographs. vol.93, 1991.
USA, American Mathematical Society, 1991.
Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1997.
Springer-Verlag, GTM 93, Part 1, 1984; GTM 104, Part 2, 1985. Part 3, 1990, GTM 124.
Kluwer Acad. Publishers, The Netherlands, 1990.
Vol.1: The Development of the Statistical Tools. Vol.2: The Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Records. – Kluwer Academic Publishers. The Netherlands, 1994.
Almagest. Together with V. V Kalashnikov., G. V. Nosovsky. – CRC-Press, USA, 1993.
Mathematical Impressions, by A. T. Fomenko and
Richard Lipkin,
American Mathematical Society, 1990, 184 pp.
ISBN 0-8218-0162-7 A.T. Fomenko
et al.:
History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 1,
Introducing the problem. A criticism of the Scaligerian chronology. Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs. ISBN 2-913621-07-4 A.T. Fomenko
et al.:
History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2,
The dynastic parallelism method. Rome. Troy. * Greece. The Bible. Chronological shifts. ISBN 2-913621-06-6 A.T. Fomenko
et al.:
History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 3,
Astronomical methods as applied to chronology. Ptolemy's Almagest. Tycho Brahe. Copernicus. The Egyptian zodiacs. ISBN 2-913621-08-2 A.V.Bolsinov and A.T. Fomenko :
Integrable Hamiltonian Systems: Geometry, Topology, Classification (Hardcover) ,
ISBN 0-415298-05-9 Differential Geometry and Topology
Variational Principles in Topology.Multidimensional Minimal SurfaceTheory
Topological variational problems. – Gordon and Breach, 1991.
Integrability and Nonintegrability in Geometry and Mechanics
The Plateau Problem. vols.1, 2
Symplectic Geometry.Methods and Applications.
Minimal surfaces and Plateau problem. Together with Dao Chong Thi
Integrable Systems on Lie Algebras and Symmetric Spaces. Together with V. V. Trofimov
Geometry of Minimal Surfaces in Three-Dimensional Space. Together with A. A.Tuzhilin
Topological Classification of Integrable Systems. Advances in Soviet Mathematics, vol. 6
Tensor and Vector Analysis: Geometry,Mechanics and Physics. – Taylor and Francis, 1988.
Algorithmic and Computer Methods for Three-Manifolds. Together with S.V.Matveev
Topological Modeling for Visualization. Together with T. L. Kunii. – Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Modern Geometry. Methods and Applications. Together with B. A. Dubrovin, S. P. Novikov
The basic elements of differential geometry and topology. Together with S. P. Novikov
Integrable Hamiltonian Systems: Geometry, Topology, Classification. Together with A. V. Bolsinov Taylor and Francis, 2003.
Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and its Applications to Historical Dating.
Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations. Dating Ptolemy's
New Methods of Statistical Analysis of Historical Texts. Applications to Chronology. Antiquity in the Middle Ages. Greek and Bible History. Vols.1, 2, 3. – The Edwin Mellen Press. USA. Lewiston. Queenston. Lampeter, 1999.
A.T. Fomenko:
Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (
New empirical statistical techniques for dating ancient events, and their applications to the global chronology of the Ancient and Medieval World)
(Russian) Robert Grishin and Vladimir Melamed, "The Medieval Empire of the Israelites", published 2003;
ISBN 0973757604
being 0;
History
) that only statistical description of its properties is feasible.
Discography
Lefthit