New Chronology (Fomenko)

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Cover of History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 1
Cover of History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 1

The New Chronology of Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is an attempt to rewrite world chronology, based on his conclusion that world chronology as we know it today is fundamentally flawed. The ideas of the New Chronology are a direct continuation of earlier ideas of Nikolai Morozov, and may have had their origin in the theories of the French scholar Jean Hardouin. The chronology is commonly associated with the name of Fomenko, although it is, in fact, a collaboration of Fomenko with several other Russian mathematicians, including Gleb Vladimirovich Nosovsky.

The "New Chronology" is radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all of ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages and Antiquity, and the Dark Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, the history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, we have almost no information about events between AD 800-1000, and most historical events we know took place in AD 1000-1500.

These views are entirely rejected by mainstream scholarship. While some mainstream researchers have offered revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical history which do shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages," none of these revisionist chronologies are as radical as Fomenko's: the events which are traditionally assumed to have happened in the centuries before AD 1 are still thought to have happened thousands of years ago, not hundreds of years ago as in Fomenko's timeline.

Contents

[edit] History of New Chronology

The idea of chronologies different from the conventional chronology can be traced back to at least the early 17th century. Jean Hardouin then suggested that many ancient historical documents were much younger than commonly believed to be. In 1685 he published a version of Pliny the Elder's Natural History in which he claimed that most Greek and Roman texts had been forged by Benedictine monks. When later questioned on these results, Hardouin stated that he would reveal the monks' reasons in a letter to be revealed only after his death. The executors of his estate were unable to find such a document among his posthumous papers.[1] In the 18th century, Sir Isaac Newton, examining the current chronology of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East, expressed discontent with prevailing theories and proposed one of his own, which, basing its study on Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, changed the traditional dating of the Argonautic Expedition, the Trojan War, and the Founding of Rome.[2][3]

In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.[4] In 1909 Otto Rank made note of duplications in literary history of a variety of cultures:

...almost all important civilized peoples have early woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities—in short, their national heroes. Especially the history of their birth and of their early years is furnished with phantastic [sic] traits; the amazing similarity, nay literal identity, of those tales, even if they refer to different, completely independent peoples, sometimes geographically far removed from one another, is well known and has struck many an investigator.[5]

In 1939 Sigmund Freud attempted to reconstruct biblical history in accordance with his contributions to social psychology.[6]

Nikolai Morozov was the first to claim the existence of correlations between the dynasties of Old-Testament kings and Roman emperors and to suggest that the entire chronology prior to the 1st century BC is wrong.[citation needed]

Fomenko became interested in Morozov's problematic theories in 1973. In 1980, together with a few colleagues from the mathematics department of Moscow State University, he published several articles on "new mathematical methods in history" in peer-reviewed journals. The articles stirred a lot of controversy, but ultimately Fomenko failed to win any respected historians to his side. By early 1990s, Fomenko shifted his focus from trying to convince the scientific community via peer-reviewed publications to publishing books. His books range from popular to rather involved, yet accessible to educated readers.

By 2005 his theory had grown to cover all of the Old World, from England and Ireland to China.

[edit] Fomenko's claims

[edit] Brief summary

Fomenko claims

  1. 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;
  2. That all these events, actual and fictional alike, end up incorporated into conventional chronology;
  3. That, as a consequence, the chronology universally taken for granted is simply wrong, and it mainly repeats events from 900 AD onwards;
  4. That this chronology was essentially invented in the 16th and 17th centuries;
  5. That archaeological dating, dendrochronological dating, paleographical dating, carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependent on traditional chronology;
  6. That there is not a single document in existence that can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century;
  7. That Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy;
  8. That the Old Testament is probably a rendition of events that occurred in the Middle Ages, and that the New Testament is actually older than the Old Testament;
  9. That currently accepted chronology has just as many inconsistences as new chronology, but these are generally overlooked and ignored, giving the perception that there are no problems;
  10. That Egyptian horoscopes give dates of 1000 AD and up to as late as 1700 AD;
  11. That the book of Revelation is describing a horoscope that is dated to after 1000 AD.

[edit] Detailed description

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.

[edit] Fomenko's methods

[edit] Statistical correlation of texts

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.[7]

For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary history of Rome written by Titus Livius with a modern history of Rome written by Russian historian V. S. Sergeev, calculating that the two have high correlation, and thus that they describe the same period of history, which is undisputed[8]. He also compares modern texts which describe different periods, and calculates low correlation, as expected[8]. However, when he compares, for example, the ancient history of Rome and the medieval history of Rome, he calculates a high correlation, and concludes that ancient history of Rome is a copy of medieval history of Rome, thus clashing with mainstream accounts[9].

[edit] Statistical correlation of dynasties

Sample Fomenko parallelism
Sample Fomenko parallelism

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.

[edit] Astronomical evidence

Fomenko examines astronomical events described in ancient texts and suggests that the chronology is actually medieval. For example:

  • 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.

[edit] Rejection of common dating methods

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; Fomenko specifically points to a break of dendrochronological scales around 1000 AD[10].

Fomenko also cites a number of cases where carbon dating of objects of known age give wildly incorrect results, as well as of undue cooperation of physicists with archaeologists in obtaining the dates. Most radiocarbon dating labs accept only samples with date idea suggested by historians or archaeologists. Fomenko concludes that carbon dating is not accurate enough to be used on historical scale. Fomenko also claims that carbon dating over the range of 2000AD to 0AD is inaccurate because the carbon dating hypothesis has too many sources of error that are guessed at or completely ignored, and that calibration is done with a statistically meaningless number of samples.[11].

Other dating methods, such as coin dating, archaeological dating etc. are shown to be dependent on traditional chronology.

[edit] Popularity

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.[12] Fomenko's theories became accessible to the Western public with the publication of the first two volumes of the seven volumes series History: Fiction Or Science? vol. 1 and vol. 2 in English.

[edit] Criticism

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.[13] Another similar book is titled, in English, Myths of the New Chronology: Conference in the History Department of the MGU: December 1999.[14] While these books are available for purchase, they are only available in Russian and have yet to be translated into English.

[edit] Overlooked convergence of uncertainty in archaeological dating

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, the uncertainties associated with each will usually converge to produce similar ages for objects from the same layer of a given archaeological site. Independent scientific dating methods include thermoluminescence dating, optically stimulated luminescence dating, and in some cases palaeoentomology.

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.

[edit] Inadequate quantification of history and forced pattern matching

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.[15]) On the other hand, while discarding the narrative detail of such accounts, Fomenko tacitly accepts as credible many of the numbers presented in those documents as to the movements of planets, the length of dynasties, and the durations of the reigns of individual rulers.

Critics allege that many of the supposed correlations of regnal durations are the product of the selective parsing and blending of the dates, events, and individuals mentioned in the original text.[16]

[edit] Unaccounted astronomical phenomena

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 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.[17] In addition to all of this, mainstream scholars agree that a large number of Babylonian and Chinese eclipses can be dated consistently with conventional chronology at least as far back as 600 BC, if not further, contradicting Fomenko's claims [18].

[edit] Magnitude and consistency of conspiracy theory

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 persons). Those are said by Fomenko to have been introduced into the original text by later editors.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Robert Grishin and Vladimir Melamed, "The Medieval Empire of the Israelites", published 2003; ISBN 0973757604

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Diacu, Florin (2005). "Chapter 2. A New Science", The Lost Millennium: History's Timetables Under Siege (in English). Alfred A. Knopf. 
  2. ^ Diacu, Florin (2005). "Chapter 3. Swan Song", The Lost Millennium: History's Timetables Under Siege (in English). Alfred A. Knopf. 
  3. ^ Newton, Isaac. "Chap. I. Of the Chronology of the First Ages of the Greeks.", THE CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT KINGDOMS AMENDED. To which is Prefix'd, A SHORT CHRONICLE from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. (download) (in English). Retrieved on October 26, 2006. 
  4. ^ Johnson, Edwin. "Preface", Atiqua Mater (PDF) (in English). 
  5. ^ Rank, Otto. Der Myths von der Geburt des Helden (in German). 
  6. ^ Freud, Sigmund. "Part II. If Moses Was An Egyptian...", Moses and Monotheism (in English). 
  7. ^ T. Fomenko, A.. "1. функция объема исторического текста. Принцип корреляции максимумов.", Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (краткая справка) (.txt) (in Russian). Retrieved on September 12, 2006. 
  8. ^ a b T. Fomenko, A.. "2. вычислительный эксперимент. Примеры зависимых и независимых исторических хроник.", Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (краткая справка) (.txt) (in Russian). Retrieved on September 12, 2006. 
  9. ^ T. Fomenko, A.. "2. Загадочные хроники-дубликаты внутри "учебника скалигера-петавиуса".", Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (краткая справка) (.txt) (in Russian). Retrieved on September 12, 2006. 
  10. ^ T. Fomenko, A.. "15.1. Непрерывная шкала дендрохронологического датирования протянута в прошлое не далее десятого века новой эры", Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (краткая справка) (.txt) (in Russian). Retrieved on September 9, 2006. 
  11. ^ T. Fomenko, A.. "16. надежны ли радиоуглеродные датировки?", Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (краткая справка) (.txt) (in Russian). Retrieved on September 9, 2006. 
  12. ^ Diacu, Florin (2005). "Introduction", The Lost Millennium: History's Timetables Under Siege (in English). Alfred A. Knopf. 
  13. ^ http://www.panrus.com/books/details.php?langID=1&bookID=3683
  14. ^ http://www.panrus.com/books/details.php?langID=1&bookID=4434
  15. ^ http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06791c.htm
  16. ^ http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id13.html
  17. ^ http://www.dioi.org/vols/w43.pdf
  18. ^ http://www.ras.org.uk/pdfs/Stephenson.pdf

[edit] External links

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