New chronology (Fomenko)
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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 theories of Nikolai Morozov. The theory is commonly associated with the name of Fomenko, although it is, in fact, a collaboration of Fomenko with several other Russian mathematicians, most important being 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 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. Unsurprisingly, these views are entirely rejected by mainstream scholarship.
Fomenko's claims
Brief summary
Fomenko claims
- That the chronology universally taken for granted is simply wrong;
- That this chronology was essentially invented in the 16th-17th century;
- That archaeological, dendrochronological, paleographical, carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependant on traditional chronology;
- That there is not a single document that could be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century;
- That Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy;
- That Jesus Christ may have been born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD or even later;
- That the Old Testament is probably a rendition of Middle Ages events.
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reflections" of actual Middle Ages events and characters, brought about by intentional or accidental misdatings of historical documents.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 the 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 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.
Critics point out that the evangelical Jesus is believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his baptism. On the other hand, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years, and he was born 8 years after the death of John Crescentius. Fomenko writes this off as a mistake of official history. 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. Historical Jesus may have been born in 1053 and crucified around 1085 AD on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. 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 being written simultaneously with 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.
Fomenko's methods
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 unevenness will remain visible in other description 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.
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. He also compares modern texts which describe different periods, and calculates low correlation, as expected. 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, which is disputed. Opponents note that this kind of analysis is very rough, and that it does not take into account differences between events described in the two texts, while Fomenko maintains that it is this fact precisely which guarantees higher neutrality of the analysis.
Statistical correlation of dynasties
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 reignal 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" pretentions. Fomenko's critics respond that these parallelisms are often derived by forcing the data - rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern.
Astronomical evidence
Fomenko names several solar and lunar eclipses described by ancient authors and suggests that they fit their descriptions more accurately if these eclipses (and thus the documents they appear in) are medieval. 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. 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 500 BC, if not further, contradicting Fomenko's claims [1].
Fomenko associates the Star of Bethlehem with supernovae observed in 1054 AD and the Crucifixion Eclipse with the full solar eclipse of 1086 AD, as such a pair of astronomical events is extremely rare. He argues that the Almagest star catalogue, ascribed to the ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, was actually created between 600 and 1300 AD. He repeats 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 6th or 14-15th centuries AD. Traditional history usually either interprets these horoscopes as belonging to 1st century BC or suggests that they do not have to match any date at all.
History of New Chronology
The underlying idea of the existence of duplicates in conventional chronology can be traced back to Isaac Newton in the early 18th century and Nikolai Morozov in the early 20th century. Newton restricted his attention to chronology of ancient Egypt and Israel. Several historians in 18th and 19th century ( such as Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), Edwin Johnson (1842-1901) ) suggested that many ancient historical documents were much younger than commonly believed to be. 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.
Fomenko became interested in Morozov's 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 1990 Fomenko gave up trying to convince the scientific community and focused on publishing popular books.
By 2005 his theory had grown to cover all of the Old World, from England and Ireland to China.
Consistency
In order to make New Chronology internally consistent and to avoid direct confrontation with historical records and artifacts, several sacrifices have to be made.
- All principal scientific methods of dating of ancient sources (radiocarbon dating, etc.) are either questioned or discarded.
- A major conspiracy theory is introduced. According to Fomenko, world history prior to 1600 was deliberately falsified for political reasons. The consequences of this conspiracy theory are twofold. Any documents that conflict with NC can be proclaimed to have been edited or fabricated by conspirators (mostly Western European historians and humanists of late 16th to 17th centuries). To explain the lack of documents directly supporting NC and conflicting traditional history, it is posited that the majority of such documents was destroyed by the same conspirators.
- Consequently, there are many documents that are considered authentic in traditional history, but not in NC. Fomenko often has to resort to using "falsified" documents to prove a point. For example, he analyzes Tartar Relation and arrives at the conclusion that Mongolian capital of Karakorum was located in Northern Russia. However, 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 claimed to have been introduced into the original text by later editors.
Conclusion
Although Fomenko is a well-respected mathematician, his historical theories have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who view them as pseudoscience. His critics claim he chooses only the facts that he finds convenient for his theory and ignores the rest. Nevertheless, 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 Chess World champion Garry Kasparov. 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(ISBN 2913621058), vol.2 (ISBN 2913621066) in English.