Post by Tamrin on Jan 12, 2014 8:25:52 GMT 10
New Chronology (Fomenko) (excerpts):
The New Chronology is a fringe theory regarded by the majority of the academic community as pseudohistory, which argues that the conventional chronology of Middle Eastern and European history is fundamentally flawed, and that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854-1946), although work by French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) can be viewed as an earlier predecessor. However, the New Chronology is most commonly associated with Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945), although published works on the subject are actually a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians. The concept is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science? which was written in Russian but has been translated into English.
The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.
While some researchers have developed revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical periods that shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages", none of these is as radical as that of the New Chronology. The New Chronology is rejected by mainstream historians and is inconsistent with absolute and relative dating techniques used in the wider scholarly community. The majority of scientific commentators consider The New Chronology to be pseudoscientific.
The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.
While some researchers have developed revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical periods that shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages", none of these is as radical as that of the New Chronology. The New Chronology is rejected by mainstream historians and is inconsistent with absolute and relative dating techniques used in the wider scholarly community. The majority of scientific commentators consider The New Chronology to be pseudoscientific.
Brief summary
In volumes 1, 2 , 3 and 4 of History: Fiction or Science?, Fomenko and his colleagues make numerous claims:
In volumes 1, 2 , 3 and 4 of History: Fiction or Science?, Fomenko and his colleagues make numerous claims:
- 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.
- 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. This chronology was completed by Jesuit Dionysius Petavius in De Doctrina Temporum, 1627 (v.1) and 1632 (v.2).
- 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.
- There is not a single document in existence that can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century. Most 'ancient' artifacts may find other than consensual explanation.
- 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.
- The Old Testament is a rendition of events of the 14th to 16th centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, containing 'prophecies' about 'future' events related in the New Testament, which is a rendition of events of AD 1152 to 1185.
- The history of religions runs as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the 11th century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (11th-12th century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (12th-16th century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.
- The most probable prototype of historical Jesus was a Byzantine emperor, Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons.
- The Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy, traditionally dated to around AD 150 and considered to be the cornerstone of classical history, was compiled in 16th and 17th centuries from astronomical data of the 9th to 16th centuries.
- 37 complete Egyptian horoscopes found in Denderah, Esna, and other temples have unique valid astronomical solutions with dates ranging from AD 1000 and up to as late as AD 1700.
- The Book of Revelation, as we know it, contains a horoscope that is dated to 25 September - 10 October 1486 compiled by cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin.
- The horoscopes found in Sumerian/Babylonian tablets do not contain sufficient astronomical data; consequently, they have solutions every 30–50 years on the time axis and are therefore useless for purposes of dating;
- The Chinese tables of eclipses are useless for dating, as they contain too many eclipses that did not take place astronomically. Chinese tables of comets, even if true, cannot be used for dating.
- All major inventions like powder and guns, paper and print were made in Europe in the period between the 10th and the 16th centuries.
- Ancient Roman and Greek statues, showing perfect command of the human anatomy, are fakes crafted in the Renaissance, when such command was for the first time attained.
- There was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by over two centuries of yoke and slavery, because the so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Turkic spoken as freely as Russian. So, Russia and Turkey were once parts of the same empire. This ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities and the hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). The Mongol "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions of the empire that attempted tax evasion. Tamerlane was probably a Russian warlord.
- Official Russian history is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scholars brought to Russia to legitimize the usurping Romanov dynasty.
- Moscow was founded as late as the mid 14th century. The battle of Kulikovo took place in Moscow.
- The tsar Ivan the Terrible is a collation of no fewer than four rulers, representing two rival dynasties: the legitimate Godunov rulers and the ambitious Romanov upstarts.
- English history of AD 640–1040 and Byzantine history of AD 378–830 are reflections of the same late medieval original.
Reception
Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as pseudoscience. Russian critics tended to see Fomenko's New Chronology as "an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk ... since the fall of Communism". Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia".
In 2004 Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "New Chronology" the anti-prize of the Moscow International Book Fair called "Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a euphemism for a vulgar Russian word meaning disaster or fiasco) in the category "Esteemed nonsense" ("Pochotnaya bezgramota") awarded for the worst book published in Russia.
Critics have accused Fomenko of altering the data to improve the fit with his ideas and have noted that he violates a key rule of statistics by selecting matches from the historical record which support his chronology, while ignoring those which do not, creating artificial, better-than-chance correlations, and that these practices undermine Fomenko's statistical arguments. The new chronology was given a comprehensive critical analysis in a round table on "The 'Myths' of New Chronology" chaired by the dean of the department of history of Moscow State University in December 1999. One of the participants in that round table, the distinguished Russian archaeologist, Valentin Yanin, compared Fomenko's work to "the sleight of hand trickery of a David Copperfield".
James Billington, formerly professor of Russian history at Harvard and Princeton and currently the Librarian of Congress placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington describes Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire." A French reviewer of Billington's book noted approvingly his concern with the phantasmagorical conceptions of Fomenko about the global "new chronology".
H.G. van Bueren, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Utrecht, concluded his scathing review of Fomenko's work on the application of mathematics and astronomy to historical data as follows:
Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as pseudoscience. Russian critics tended to see Fomenko's New Chronology as "an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk ... since the fall of Communism". Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia".
In 2004 Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "New Chronology" the anti-prize of the Moscow International Book Fair called "Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a euphemism for a vulgar Russian word meaning disaster or fiasco) in the category "Esteemed nonsense" ("Pochotnaya bezgramota") awarded for the worst book published in Russia.
Critics have accused Fomenko of altering the data to improve the fit with his ideas and have noted that he violates a key rule of statistics by selecting matches from the historical record which support his chronology, while ignoring those which do not, creating artificial, better-than-chance correlations, and that these practices undermine Fomenko's statistical arguments. The new chronology was given a comprehensive critical analysis in a round table on "The 'Myths' of New Chronology" chaired by the dean of the department of history of Moscow State University in December 1999. One of the participants in that round table, the distinguished Russian archaeologist, Valentin Yanin, compared Fomenko's work to "the sleight of hand trickery of a David Copperfield".
James Billington, formerly professor of Russian history at Harvard and Princeton and currently the Librarian of Congress placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington describes Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire." A French reviewer of Billington's book noted approvingly his concern with the phantasmagorical conceptions of Fomenko about the global "new chronology".
H.G. van Bueren, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Utrecht, concluded his scathing review of Fomenko's work on the application of mathematics and astronomy to historical data as follows:
It is surprising, to say the least, that a well-known (Dutch) publisher could produce an expensive book of such doubtful intellectual value, of which the only good word that can be said is that it contains an enormous amount of factual historical material, untidily ordered, true; badly written, yes; mixed-up with conjectural nonsense, sure; but still, much useful stuff. For the rest of the book is absolutely worthless. It reminds one of the early Soviet attempts to produce tendentious science (Lysenko!), of polywater, of cold fusion, and of modern creationism. In brief: a useless and misleading book.—H.G. van Bueren, "Mathematics and Logic"
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 New Chronology 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 New Chronology 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 New Chronology. Fomenko often uses "falsified" documents, which he dismisses in other contexts, 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 New Chronology (such as that Batu Khan and Russian duke Yaroslav 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 claims 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.
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 New Chronology 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 New Chronology 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 New Chronology. Fomenko often uses "falsified" documents, which he dismisses in other contexts, 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 New Chronology (such as that Batu Khan and Russian duke Yaroslav 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 claims 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.
