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New Chronology (Anatoly Fomenko): A Revised History Timeline

Xanatico

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NOTE: This thread was created with posts originally appearing in the History Rewritten thread.

So are any of you familiar with something called New Chronology? There is a russian mathematician named Fomenko, who claims that all of human recorded history acutally happened in the last 1000 years. He believes that Jesus lived around 1000 AD, that the settlements of Ancient Greece were in fact settlements done by crusaders in around the 14th century, and that most of egyption and roman history was just made up during the reneissance. It makes the man who claimed year 600-1000 ad never happened seem like an amateur. ;)
 
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Probably in here somewhere but too lazy to search:

http://timothyhorrigan.com/documents/fomenko.review.html

Dr. Fomenko is a Russian mathematician who has branched out into history. He is a founder of the controversial "New Chronology" movement which essentially states that history only goes back till about 1050 AD. From what we now call the 11th through 15th centuries, there was a Eurasian empire (what we now call the "Byzantine empire") which lasted almost 400 years. In the 15th century, the various remnants of the empire developed their own versions of the story, each with their own nation at the center of the story. These stories were eventually recombined into a single narrative which repeats itself cyclically.

But this is really funny:

The online bookstore entries for this volume rather amusingly show easily history gets mixed up. The translator is someone named Michael Jagger who is almost certainly not the singer Mick Jagger (whose full name is Michael Phillip Jagger.) However, some online bookstores do list Mick Jagger as a coauthor. Amazon.com says the translator is someone named Mike Jagupov. This is hard enough to keep straight while the singer is still alive, and a few decades from now, I am sure that many sources will say that the legendary Rolling Stones frontman translated this book into English.
 
Dr. Fomenko is a Russian mathematician who has branched out into history. He is a founder of the controversial "New Chronology" movement

I've always found Fomenko's hypotheses very interesting, but not totally convincing (so saying, I'm not totally convinced by anything).

I'm more open to aspects of Francesco Carotta's resonant 'Christ-Was-Really-Julius-Caesar' proposal, his interpretation of that diegetic transposition being inarguably-supported by the eternal patency of the current Church of Rome (well....how can that aspect be countered? Henry VIII and Martin Luther aside...)

I've mislaid something much-more radical than all of this, which I wanted to share...so extreme that both Fomenko and Carotta would probably run away from it. Dammit....did I begin discussing it on the forum, previously?
 
Dr. Fomenko is a Russian mathematician who has branched out into history. He is a founder of the controversial "New Chronology" movement which essentially states that history only goes back till about 1050 AD. From what we now call the 11th through 15th centuries,
Does Carbon 14 dating conflict with at or support it?
 
NOTE: This excerpt has been copied from another thread:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...towels-civilization-reset.65746/#post-1851451


... I wonder whether the likes of Fomenko actually believe some of the radical claims they make?

The New Chronology is a pseudohistorical theory 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.

One of Fomenko's key claims (which is either just that, ie eminently-disprovable, or somehow a substantive proposition is:

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the standard historical timeline, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to Fomenko's claims, 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

NB I am NOT supporting this theory, I merely quote the summary from Wiki, and am intrigued that such a proposition could be made. Does anyone on the Forum know whether there is the slightest shred possible substance to this extreme revisionism, or is it purely (as @EnolaGaia so deftly puts it)...

Refuting documented history in favor of fanciful fiction sells; filtering the fiction to get at the facts makes the drones' heads hurt.
 
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I don't see how the New Chronology would work.

There is too much "stuff" happening for it to happen in the Middle Ages :) It all takes longer than 1000 years, say, to fit it all in.

Is it somehow related to the Bishop Ussher theory? As Wikipedia says
...his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation as "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004"; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC...

and is it somehow more christianly acceptible (for that brand of christians who believe this.... er... tosh) to have a short chronology?

I have no problem with Bishop Ussher's work at the time he did it. Trying to create a stable absolute chronology is a worthwhile endeavour - see archaeology!

How does the New Chronology deal with other dating methods? C14 behaves in a way that is internally consistent and fits with everthing we understand about half life, decay, chemistry and so on. The application of it to archaeology is a basic "truth" being applied to a different field. As our basic "truth" is refined and changed, the implications for archaeological dating catch up. So if New Chronology says the archaeological dates are wrong, it is the basic underlying "truth" that is being challenged.
 
So if New Chronology says the archaeological dates are wrong, it is the basic underlying "truth" that is being challenged.

Wiki said:
On archaeological dating methods, Fomenko claims:

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​
— Anatoly Fomenko, History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology 1) [Second edition]

I'm intrigued by his statistical text methodology.

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.

We are all victims to the effect whereby an enshrined factual error becomes an observed inarguable fact - yet also, nowadays, we live in an online ocean of semi-unmodifiable insubstantial factoids

Certain of his claims (eg that Solomon was really Suleiman, and the '1185AD Crucifixon' are interesting...note, I say interesting, not overpoweringly-convincing)

Fomenko also claims that carbon dating over the range of AD 1 to 2000 is inaccurate because it has too many sources of error that are either guessed at or completely ignored, and that calibration is done with a statistically meaningless number of samples. Consequently, Fomenko concludes that carbon dating is not accurate enough to be used on a historical scale
 
... How does the New Chronology deal with other dating methods? C14 behaves in a way that is internally consistent and fits with everthing we understand about half life, decay, chemistry and so on. ...

As I understand it, Fomenko dismisses C-14 and other such dating methods as unreliable or erroneous as a result of contamination, excessive ranges of variation, and / or single-point outcomes that don't pass muster on formal statistical grounds. This last factor is consistent with his background as a mathematician and statistical analyst.

Edit to Add:

One might suspect anyone wishing to refute C-14 (etc.) dating methods could ask if the isotopes' decay rate was really as steady or fixed as presumed. To the best of my knowledge, Fomenko never invoked this gambit.
 
It's important to bear in mind that Fomenko's alternative history is intrinsically connected to an agenda - a re-imagining of Russian history that affords a large measure of nationalistic pride combined with the overturning of conventional narratives that leave Russia (as the core of the failed Soviet Union) a substantial state still in search of its own identity.

In effect, Fomenko has created an alternate mythos in which Russia is, and always has been, a major socio-cultural power subsuming the various fragmentary Slavic / Turkic elements conventional history has treated as separate entities. Another facet of this re-imagining is to contextualize Russia as a historical entity associated with the East (Asia) rather than the West (Europe).

This 2004 doctoral thesis:

http://www.library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/uploads/approved/adt-NWU20050120.113353/public/02Whole.pdf

... provides a wide-ranging overview of Fomenko's work from this perspective.
 
One might suspect anyone wishing to refute C-14 (etc.) dating methods could ask if the isotopes' decay rate was really as steady or fixed as presumed.

Yes, I think so. It's a known thing in archaeology, one of the known knows :) The idea that we may need to extend or contract sections of the timeline is a nuisance but it isn't unexpected.

Nice wikipedia article on the different calibrations.
 
I was under the impression that the main point of contention wasn't the decay rate, but rather the assumption that environmental C-14 levels had always been the same as they are now?
 
That sounds quite normal for a Mathematician.

They can be quite...different.
 
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