who controls the past controls the future. who controls ...chronologia.org/en/1n00-en-001-038.pdfiv...
TRANSCRIPT
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
ii | history: fiction or science?
This seven volume edition is based on a numberof our books that came out over the last couple ofyears and were concerned with the subject in ques-tion. All this gigantic body of material was revisedand categorized; finally, its current form does notcontain any of the repetitions that are inevitable inthe publication of separate books. All of this re-sulted in the inclusion of a great number of addi-tional material in the current edition – includingpreviously unpublished data. The reader shall finda systematic rendition of detailed criticisms of theconsensual (Scaligerian) chronology, the descrip-tions of the methods offered by mathematical sta-tistics and natural sciences that the authors have
discovered and researched, as well as the newhypothetical reconstruction of global history upuntil the XVIII century. Our previous books on thesubject of chronology were created in the period ofnaissance and rather turbulent infancy of the newparadigm, full of complications and involved is-sues, which often resulted in the formulation ofmulti-optional hypotheses. The present edition pi-oneers in formulating a consecutive unified con-cept of the reconstruction of ancient history – onethat apparently is supported by a truly immensebody of evidence. Nevertheless, it is understandablethat its elements may occasionally be in need of re-vision or elaboration.
A. T. Fomenko
Chronology 1 Introducing the problem. A criticism of the Scaligerian chronology.
Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs.
A. T. Fomenko
Chronology 2 The dynastic parallelism method. Rome. Troy. Greece. The Bible. Chronological shifts.
A. T. Fomenko, V. V. Kalashnikov, G. V. Nosovskiy
Chronology 3 Astronomical methods as applied to chronology. Ptolemy’s Almagest.
Tycho Brahe. Copernicus. The Egyptian zodiacs.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy
Chronology 4 Russia. Britain. Byzantium. Rome.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy
Chronology 5 Russia = Horde. Ottomans = Atamans. Europe. China. Japan. The Etruscans. Egypt. Scandinavia.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy
Chronology 6 The Horde-Ataman Empire. The Bible. The Reformation. America. Passover and the calendar.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy
Chronology 7 A reconstruction of global history. The Khans of Novgorod = The Habsburgs. Miscellaneous information.
The legacy of the Great Empire in the history and culture of Eurasia and America.
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History: Fiction or Science?
Fomenko, Anatoly Timofeevich. Born in 1945. FullMember (Academician) of the Russian Academy ofSciences, Full Member of the Russian Academy ofNatural Sciences, Full Member of the InternationalHigher Education Academy of Sciences, Doctor ofPhysics and Mathematics, Professor, Head of theMoscow State University Section of Mathematics ofthe Department of Mathematics and Mechanics.Solved Plateau’s Problem from the theory of minimalspectral surfaces. Author of the theory of invariantsand topological classification of integrable Hamil-tonian dynamic systems. Laureate of the 1996 Na-tional Premium of the Russian Federation (in Mathe-matics) for a cycle of works on the Hamiltoniandynamical systems and manifolds' invariants theory.Author of 180 scientific publications, 26 monographsand textbooks on mathematics, a specialist in geom-etry and topology, calculus of variations, symplectictopology, Hamiltonian geometry and mechanics,computer geometry.
Author of a number of books on the development ofnew empirico-statistical methods and their applica-tion to the analysis of historical chronicles as well asthe chronology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
iv | history: fiction or science?
Also by Anatoly T. Fomenko (List is non-exhaustive)
Integrability and Nonintegrability in Geometry and MechanicsD Reidel Pub Co, 1988
Present State of the TheoryTaylor & Francis, 1989
Historical Survey (Studies in the Development of Modern Mathematics)Taylor & Francis, 1989
Minimal Surfaces, Stratified Multivarifolds, and the Plateau ProblemTogether with Dao Trong ThiAmerican Mathematical Society, 1991
Elements of the Geometry and Topology of Minimal Surfaces in Three-Dimensional SpaceTogether with A. A. TuzhilinAmerican Mathematical Society, 1991
Topological Classification of Integrable SystemsAmerican Mathematical Society, 1991
Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations Dating Ptolemy's AlmagestTogether with V. V. Kalashnikov, G. V. NosovskiyCRC Press, 1993
Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and Its Applications to Historical Dating: The Analysis of Ancient and Medieval RecordsKluwer Academic Publishers, 1994
Antiquity in the Middle Ages: Greek and Bible HistoryEdwin Mellen Press, December 1994
Algorithmic and Computer Methods for Three-ManifoldsTogether with S. V. MatveevKluwer Academic Publishers, 1997
Variational Principles of Topology: Multidimensional Minimal Surface TheoryKluwer Academic Publishers, 1997
Topological Modeling for VisualizationSpringer Verlag, 1998
Tensor and Vector Analysis: Geometry, Mechanics and PhysicsTaylor & Francis, 1998
New Methods of Statistical Analysis of Historical Texts: Applications to ChronologyEdwin Mellen Press, 1999
Integrable Hamiltonian Systems: Geometry, Topology, ClassificationTogether with A. V. BolsinovRoutledge, 2003
Anatoly T. Fomenko
H i s t o r y :Fiction or Science?
Delamere Publishing
p a r i s . l o n d o n . n e w y o r k
c h r o n o l o g y
1
Published by Delamere Resources Ltd 2003
19 Peel Road
Douglas
Isle of Man IM1 4LS
United Kingdom
http://history.mithec.com
Copyright © Delamere Resources Ltd 2003
ISBN 2-913621-01-5
Anatoly T. Fomenko asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work
Translated from Russian by Michael Jagger
Cover by Diane Deolen
Project management by Franck Tamdhu
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Critics are welcome, of course, to quote brief
passages by way of criticism and review.
Overview of the seven volumes ....................................................................................................................................................................... iiAbout the Author ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... iiiAlso by Analoly T. Fomenko.............................................................................................................................................................................. ivA Global Falsification of History. Foreword by Alexander Zinoviev ....................................................................... xvForeword by A. Shiryaev....................................................................................................................................................................................... xviiiPublisher’s Note ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. xxPreface by A. T. Fomenko..................................................................................................................................................................................... xxiHistory of the New Chronology. By A. T. Fomenko and G. V. Nosovskiy .......................................................... xxixPublisher’s Advice .................................................................................................................................................................................................... xxxviii
Chapter 1 The problems of historical chronology1. Roman chronology as the foundation of European chronology ...................................................................... 12. Scaliger, Petavius, and other clerical chronologers. The creation of contemporary
chronology of the ancient times in the XVI-XVII century a.d. ........................................................................ 13. The veracity of the Scaliger-Petavius chronology was questioned as early as the XVI century ... 10
3.1. Who criticized Scaliger’s chronology and where ................................................................................................ 103.1.1. De Arcilla, Robert Baldauf, Jean Hardouin, Edwin Johnson,
Wilhelm Kammeyer ....................................................................................................................................................... 103.1.2. Sir Isaac Newton ............................................................................................................................................................... 113.1.3. Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov....................................................................................................................... 133.1.4. Recent publications of German scientists containing criticisms
of Scaliger’s chronology............................................................................................................................................. 183.2. The questionnable veracity of the Roman chronology and history.
The hypercritical school of the XIX century.......................................................................................................... 194. The problems in establishing a correct chronology of “ancient” Egypt...................................................... 235. The problem in dating the “ancient” sources.Tacitus and Poggio.
Cicero and Barzizza. Vitruvius and Alberti .............................................................................................................................. 256. Timekeeping in the Middle Ages. Historians discuss the “chaos reigning
in the mediaeval datings.” Peculiar mediaeval anachronisms ............................................................................... 317. The chronology and the dating of Biblical texts ................................................................................................................. 32
Contents
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8. Difficulties and contradictions arising from the reading of old texts........................................................... 348.1. How does one read a text written in consonants exclusively?
The vocalization problem .......................................................................................................................................................... 348.2. The sounds “R” and “L” were often confused in the Middle Ages.................................................... 35
9. Problems in the Scaligerian geography of Biblical events ......................................................................................... 379.1. Archaeology and the Old Testament .............................................................................................................................. 379.2. Archaeology and the New Testament............................................................................................................................ 40
10. Ancient historical events: geographic localization issues........................................................................................ 4210.1. The locations of Troy and Babylon................................................................................................................................ 4210.2. The geography of Herodotus is at odds with the Scaligerian version........................................ 4410.3. The inverted maps of the Middle Ages...................................................................................................................... 49
11. A modern analysis of Biblical geography ................................................................................................................................ 4912. The mysterious Renaissance epoch as a product of the Scaligerian chronology............................ 5313. The foundations of archaeological methods have been based on the Scaligerian
chronology from the very beginning........................................................................................................................................... 5913.1. The ambiguity of archaeological datings and their dependence on
the existing chronology.............................................................................................................................................................. 5913.2. The excavations of Pompeii. The dating of this town’s destruction............................................. 6113.3. The alleged acceleration of the destruction of the “ancient” monuments ............................. 6513.4. When did the construction of the Cologne Cathedral really begin? ........................................... 6513.5. Archaeological methods are most often based on Scaliger’s datings............................................ 6813.6. One of the numerous problems of the Scaligerian history – the problem
of bronze manufacture before the discovery of tin....................................................................................... 7014. The problems and deficiencies of dendrochronology and several other dating methods ......... 71
14.1. The consequent scale of dendrochronological datings does not extend further back in time than the X century a.d. ..................................................................................................... 71
14.2. Sedimentary layer datings. The methods of radium-uranium and radium-actinium analysis ....................................................................................................................................................... 73
15. Are radiocarbon datings to be trusted? ..................................................................................................................................... 7415.1. The radiocarbon datings of ancient, mediaeval, and modern specimens
are scattered chaotically ............................................................................................................................................................. 7415.1.1. Libby’s initial idea. The first failures............................................................................................................ 7415.1.2. A criticism of the application of the radiocarbon method
to historical specimens ............................................................................................................................................. 7515.2. The dating of the Shroud of Turin ................................................................................................................................ 7715.3 Modern radiocarbon analysis of Egyptian artefacts demonstrates serious
contradictions ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 8016. Critical analysis of the hypotheses on which the radiocarbon method
is based. By A. S. Mishchenko ............................................................................................................................................................... 8016.1. W. F. Libby’s initial idea ............................................................................................................................................................. 8016.2. Physical basics of the radiocarbon method .......................................................................................................... 8116.3. The hypotheses that the radiocarbon method is based upon ............................................................ 8316.4. The moment of the object’s departure from the exchange reservoir.......................................... 8316.5. Radiocarbon content variations in the exchange reservoir................................................................... 8416.6. Variations in radiocarbon content of living bodies...................................................................................... 87
17. Summary................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8718. Numismatic dating......................................................................................................................................................................................... 90
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Chapter 2 Astronomical datings1. The strange leap of parameter D" in the Theory of Lunar Motion................................................................ 932. Are the “ancient” and mediaeval eclipses dated correctly? ....................................................................................... 95
2.1. Some astronomical data .............................................................................................................................................................. 952.2. The discovery of an interesting effect: an unprejudiced astronomical dating
shifts the dates of the “ancient” eclipses to the Middle Ages.................................................................. 962.3. Three eclipses described by the “ancient” Thucydides ................................................................................ 972.4. The eclipses described by the “ancient” Titus Livy ......................................................................................... 105
3. Transferring the dates of the “ancient” eclipses forward in time into the Middle Ages eliminates the enigmatic behaviour of the parameter D"............................................ 105
4. Astronomy moves the “ancient” horoscopes into the Middle Ages ............................................................... 1064.1. The mediaeval astronomy ....................................................................................................................................................... 1064.2. The method of unprejudiced astronomical dating ......................................................................................... 1094.3. Many “ancient astronomical observations” may have been theoretically
calculated by late mediaeval astronomers and then included into the “ancient”chronicles as “real observations”........................................................................................................................................ 110
4.4. Which astronomical “observations of the ancients” could have been a result of late mediaeval theoretic calculations? .................................................................................................................. 111
5. A brief account of several examples of Egyptian Zodiacs......................................................................................... 1125.1. Some general observations........................................................................................................................................................ 1125.2. The Dendera Zodiacs..................................................................................................................................................................... 1135.3. The horoscopes of Brugsch and Flinders Petrie.................................................................................................. 1245.4. Finite datings of the Egyptian Zodiacs based on their complete deciphering,
as obtained by A. T. Fomenko and G. V. Nosovskiy in 2001 .................................................................. 1275.5. On the errors of E. S. Goloubtsova and Y. A. Zavenyagin ......................................................................... 128
6. Astronomy in the New Testament...................................................................................................................................................... 133
Chapter 3 The new dating of the astronomical horoscope as described in the ApocalypseBy A. T. Fomenko and G. V. Nosovskiy
1. The proposed research method ............................................................................................................................................................ 1342. General information about the Apocalypse and the time of its creation.................................................. 1353. Ursa Major and the throne........................................................................................................................................................................ 1394. The events took place on the Isle of Patmos........................................................................................................................... 1415. The constellations of Cassiopeia and the throne were drawn
as Christ sitting on his throne in the Middle Ages ........................................................................................................... 1416. The Milky Way....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 1427. Twenty-four sidereal hours and the constellation
of the Northern Crown................................................................................................................................................................................. 1468. Leo, Taurus, Sagittarius, Pegasus ......................................................................................................................................................... 1469. The daily rotation of the Northern Crown............................................................................................................................... 14810. Equine planetary images in mediaeval astronomy........................................................................................................ 14811. Jupiter is in Sagittarius ............................................................................................................................................................................... 15012. Mars is beneath Perseus in either Gemini or Taurus .................................................................................................. 15213. Mercury is in Libra......................................................................................................................................................................................... 15514. Saturn is in Scorpio ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 15715. The Sun is in Virgo with the Moon underneath the feet
of the latter.............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 157
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16. Venus is in Leo .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15717. The astronomical dating of the Apocalypse by
the horoscope it contains......................................................................................................................................................................... 15718. Our reconstruction of the initial content of the Apocalypse.............................................................................. 161
Chapter 4 Astronomy in the Old Testament1. Mediaeval astronomy in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel................................................................................ 167
1.1. The title of the book ........................................................................................................................................................................ 1671.2. The description of the Milky Way and the Ophiuchus constellation............................................ 1681.3. The Biblical description of the astronomical sectors, or “wings,”
on the celestial sphere .................................................................................................................................................................... 1691.4. The constellations of Leo, Taurus and Aquila ....................................................................................................... 1691.5. The Biblical description of the mediaeval “wheels,”
or planetary orbits ............................................................................................................................................................................. 1701.6. Parallels with the astronomical symbolism of the Apocalypse ............................................................ 1741.7. Biblical cherubim, chariots, and mediaeval planetary orbital wheels ............................................ 1751.8. The Biblical description of mediaeval cosmology as a celestial temple....................................... 176
2. The Biblical prophecy of Zechariah and the date of its creation....................................................................... 1773. The Biblical prophecy of Jeremiah and the date of its creation.......................................................................... 1814. The Biblical prophecy of Isaiah and the date of its creation .................................................................................. 1835. The Biblical prophecy of Daniel and the date of its creation ................................................................................ 183
Chapter 5 The methods of dating the ancient events offered by mathematical statistics1. The local maxima method......................................................................................................................................................................... 187
1.1. The historical text volume function................................................................................................................................. 1871.2. The maxima correlation principle .................................................................................................................................... 1881.3. Statistical model................................................................................................................................................................................... 1901.4. Experimental test of the maxima correlation principle.
Examples of dependent and independent historical texts ........................................................................ 1941.5. Method of dating the historical events ......................................................................................................................... 198
2. Volume functions of historical texts and the amplitude correlation principleBy A. T. Fomenko and S. T. Rachev ..................................................................................................................................................... 201
2.1. Dependent and independent chronicles.Volume function maxima correlation........................................................................................................................... 201
2.2. Rich and poor chronicles and chronicle zones .................................................................................................... 2022.3. Significant and insignificant zeroes of volume functions ......................................................................... 2032.4. The information respect principle................................................................................................................................... 2032.5. The amplitude correlation principle of volume graphs
in the poor zones of chronicles............................................................................................................................................ 2042.6. Description of statistical model and formalization ........................................................................................ 2042.7. The hypothesis about the increase of the “form” parameter
of a chronicle in the course of time................................................................................................................................. 2052.8. The list and characteristics of the Russian chronicles we investigated ........................................ 2052.9. The final table of the numeric experiment.............................................................................................................. 2062.10. Interesting consequences of the numeric experiment.
The confirmation of the statistical model.............................................................................................................. 2072.11. Comparison of a priori dependent Russian chronicles ............................................................................. 207
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2.12. Comparison of a priori independent Russian chronicles ....................................................................... 2082.13. Growth of form parameter in the course of time for the Russian
chronicles after the XIII century....................................................................................................................................... 2092.14. Growth of the average form parameter over the course of time
for groups of Russian chronicles of the XIII-XVI century.................................................................... 2092.15. Growth of the average parameter of form over the course of time
for the groups of Russian chronicles of the alleged IX-XIII century........................................... 2102.16. Chronological shift by 300 or 400 years in Russian history................................................................. 2102.17. Conclusions............................................................................................................................................................................................ 211
3. The maxima correlation principle on the material of the sources pertinent to the epoch of Strife in the History of Russia (1584-1619) By A. T. Fomenko, N. S. Kellin and L. E. Morozova .............................................................................................................. 211
4. The method for the recognition and dating of the dynasties of rulers.The small dynastic distortions principle ..................................................................................................................................... 215
4.1. The formulation of the small dynastic distortions principle................................................................. 2154.2. The statistical model ...................................................................................................................................................................... 2174.3. Refinement of the model and the computation experiment................................................................. 2214.4. Result of the experiment: coefficient c(a, b) positively distinguishes
between the dependent and independent dynasties of kings................................................................ 2224.5. The method of dating the royal dynasties and the method
detecting the phantom dynastic duplicates ............................................................................................................. 2225. The frequency damping principle.
The method of ordering of historical texts in time ......................................................................................................... 2236. Application of the method to some concrete historical texts ................................................................................ 2257. Method of dating of the events............................................................................................................................................................. 2268. The frequencies duplication principle.
The duplicate detection method.......................................................................................................................................................... 2279. Statistical analysis of the Bible............................................................................................................................................................... 228
9.1. Partition of the Bible into 218 “generation chapters” ................................................................................... 2289.2. Detection of the previously known duplicates in the Bible
with the aid of the frequency dumping principle............................................................................................. 2299.3. New, previously unknown duplicates we discovered in the Bible.
General scheme of their distribution within the Bible ................................................................................ 2329.4. A representative example: the new statistical dating of the Apocalypse,
which moves from the New Testament into the Old Testament ....................................................... 23310. The method of form-codes.
The comparison of two long currents of regal biographies................................................................................. 23411. Correct chronological ordering method and dating
of ancient geographical maps.............................................................................................................................................................. 238
Chapter 6 The construction of a global chronological map and the results of applying mathematical procedures of dating to the Scaligerian version of the ancient history1. Textbook of ancient and mediaeval history in the consensual
Scaliger-Petavius datings.............................................................................................................................................................................. 2562. Mysterious duplicate chronicles inside the “Scaliger-Petavius textbook” ................................................. 2563. Mysterious duplicate regal dynasties inside the “textbook by Scaliger-Petavius” ............................. 2634. Brief tables of some astonishing dynastic parallelisms................................................................................................. 294
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5. Conformity of results obtained by different methods .................................................................................................. 3185.1. General assertion................................................................................................................................................................................. 3185.2. The agreement of the different methods on the example of the identification
of the Biblical Judaic reign with the Holy Roman Empire of allegedly X-XIII century a.d. .......................................................................................................................................................................... 318
6. The general layout of duplicates in “the textbook by Scaliger-Petavius”.The discovery of the three basic chronological shifts .................................................................................................... 320
7. The Scaligerian textbook of the ancient history glued together four duplicates of the short original chronicle ..................................................................................................................... 321
8. The list of phantom “ancient” events which are phantom duplicates,orreflections of the mediaeval originals....................................................................................................................................... 323
9. Identification of the “ancient” Biblical history with the mediaeval European history.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 328
10. Our hypothesis: history as described in surviving chronicles only begins in ca. the X century a.d. We know nothing of the events that took place before the X century a.d. ......................................................................................................................................................................... 333
11. Authentic history only begins in XVII century a.d.The history of the XI-XVI century is largely distorted.Many dates of the XI-XVI century require correction .............................................................................................. 334
12. The radical distinction of our chronological concept from the version of N. A. Morozov............................................................................................................................................................................................... 334
13. The hypothesis about the cause of the fallacious chronological shifts in the creation of the history of antiquity .............................................................................................................. 336
13.1. Chronological shift of a thousand years as the consequence of the fallacious dating of Jesus Christ’s life .......................................................................................................... 336
13.2. The letter “X” formerly denoted the name of Christ,but was later proclaimed to stand for the figure of ten.The letter “I” formerly denoted the name of Jesus, but was later proclaimed to be the indication of one thousand.................................................................. 336
13.3. Until the XVIII century, the Latin letters “I” or “J” – i.e. the first letters of the name of Jesus – were still used in several European regions to denote “one” in recording of dates.......................................................................... 343
13.4. How the chronological shift by 330 or 360 years could have occured....................................... 35113.5. What latin letters “M”, “D”, “C” in Roman dates meant originally,
in the Middle Ages .......................................................................................................................................................................... 35113.5.1. General idea......................................................................................................................................................................... 35113.5.2. Example: the date on the tomb of Empress Gisela ...................................................................... 35213.5.3. Another example: the date on the headstone of Emperor
Rudolf Habsburg............................................................................................................................................................ 35213.5.4. Recording of mediaeval dates was not unified everywhere
even in the XVIII century ..................................................................................................................................... 35413.5.5. Some datings of printed books and manuscripts dating
from the XV-XVII century will apparently have to be moved forwards in time by at least fifty more years....................................................................................... 355
13.6. The foundation date of Rome of Italy ....................................................................................................................... 35613.7. A later confusion of foundation dates of the two Romes,
on the Bosporus and in Italy................................................................................................................................................. 356
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13.8. Scaliger and the Council of Trent. Creation of the Scaligerian chronology of antiquity in the XVI-XVII century......................................................................................... 358
13.9. Two phantom “ancient” reflections of Dionysius Petavius,a mediaeval chronologist of the XVII century................................................................................................... 359
14. A stratified structure of the Scaligerian textbook of ancient history.......................................................... 36015. The coordination of a new astronomical dating with a dynastic parallel ............................................. 36516. A strange lapse in the Scaligerian chronology near “the beginning
of the new era”.................................................................................................................................................................................................... 367
Chapter 7 “Dark Ages” in mediaeval history1. The mysterious Renaissance of the “Classical Age” in mediaeval Rome .................................................... 373
1.1. The lugubrious “Dark Ages” in Europe that presumably succeeded the beauteous “Classical Age” ................................................................................................................................................. 373
1.2. Parallels between “antiquity” and the Middle Ages that are known to historians, but misinterpreted by them ............................................................................................................... 375
1.3. Mediaeval Roman legislators convene in the presumably destroyed “ancient” Capitol................................................................................................................................................................................. 377
1.4. The real date when the famous “ancient” statue of Marcus Aurelius was manufactured ............................................................................................................................................................................. 379
1.5. Could the “ancient” Emperor Vitellius have posed for the mediaeval artist Tintoretto?.................................................................................................................................................................................. 381
1.6. The amount of time required for the manufacture of one sheet of parchment.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 383
1.7. The “ancient” Roman Emperor Augustus had been Christian, since he wore a mediaeval crown with a Christian cross........................................................................................... 383
2. The “ancient” historian Tacitus and the well-known Renaissance writer Poggio Bracciolini................................................................................................................................................................................................ 386
3. The mediaeval Western European Christian cult and the “ancient” pagan Bacchic celebrations.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 394
4. Petrarch (= Plutarch?) and the “Renaissance of antiquity”..................................................................................... 4104.1. How Petrarch created the legend of the glory of Italian Rome out of nothing .................. 4104.2. Petrarch’s private correspondence with people considered
“ancient characters” nowadays............................................................................................................................................. 4135. “Ancient” Greece and mediaeval Greece of the XIII-XVI century.................................................................... 415
5.1. The history of the mediaeval Athens is supposed to be obscured by darkness up until the XVI century............................................................................................................................................................. 415
5.2. Greece and the Crusades ............................................................................................................................................................ 4225.3. The history of Greek and Athenian archaeology is relatively short................................................. 4255.4. The tendentious distortion of the image of mediaeval Athens in
the “restoration works” of the XIX-XX century ................................................................................................. 4276. Strange parallels in the Scaligerian history of religions............................................................................................... 436
6.1. Mediaeval Christianity and its reflection in the Scaligerian “pagan antiquity”............................................................................................................................................................................... 436
6.2. Mediaeval Christianity and “ancient” Mithraism ............................................................................................. 4416.3. References to Jesus Christ contained in “ancient” Egyptian artefacts........................................... 4446.4. Researchers of the ancient religions commenting on the strange similarities
between the cults of “antiquity” and those of the Middle Ages.......................................................... 453
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6.5. Moses, Aaron and their sister Virgin Mary on the pages of the Koran ....................................... 4586.6. The XI century as the apparent epoch of St. Mark’s lifetime.
The history of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice ..................................................................................................... 4597. The “ancient” Egypt and the Middle Ages................................................................................................................................. 462
7.1. The odd graph of demotic text datings ....................................................................................................................... 4627.2. The enigmatic “revival periods” in the history of “ancient” Egypt................................................... 4637.3. The ancient Hittites and the mediaeval Goths...................................................................................................... 465
8. Problems inherent in the Scaligerian chronology of India ...................................................................................... 4659. Was the artificial elongation of ancient history deliberate?..................................................................................... 467
Annexes2.1. (to chapter 2) Grammatical analysis of an eclipse description
in History by Thucydides. By Y. V. Alexeyeva ....................................................................................................................... 4715.1. (to chapter 5) Per annum volume distribution in some Russian chronicles................................. 4745.2. (to chapter 5) Frequency matrix of names and parallels in the Bible
By V. P. Fomenko and T. G. Fomenko ............................................................................................................................................ 4806.1. (to chapter 6) Per annum volume distribution in The History of the City
of Rome in the Middle Ages by F. Gregorovius .................................................................................................................... 4926.2. (to chapter 6) Per annum volume distribution in The Roman History from
the Foundation of the City by Titus Livy .................................................................................................................................. 4976.3. (to chapter 6) Per annum volume distribution in the book by Baronius
describing mediaeval Rome.................................................................................................................................................................. 5046.4. (to chapter 6) The “double entry” of the Biblical royal reigns of Israel and Judah .............. 5116.5. (to chapter 6) Armenian history. Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire
of the alleged X-XIII century a.d., a.k.a. the Kings of Judah, a.k.a. the mediaeval Armenian Catholicoses................................................................................................................................................. 517
1. Three phantom reflections of the same mediaeval dynasty......................................................................... 5172. The parallelism between the mediaeval Armenian history
and the phantom Roman Empire according to Scaliger................................................................................. 5226.6. (to chapter 6) The identification of the “ancient” Kingdom of Judah
with the Holy Roman Empire of the alleged X-XIII century a.d.The correlation between reign durations and biographical volumes ....................................................... 532
The complete bibliography to the seven volumes ................................................................................................................................................... 536
I familiarized myself with the works of A. T. Fo-menko comparatively recently, and they impressedme greatly. What part of them struck me as the moststunning? First and foremost, it was the intellectual ca-pacity observable behind them. The authors reveal away of cogitating that manages to fuse austere logicwith dialectic flexibility; this is truly a rare occurrencein the field of social studies. Reading the œuvres ofA. T. Fomenko and his co-author G.V Nosovskiy – oc-casionally several times over – was a veritable intel-lectual delight for yours truly. They flabbergasted mewith their sheer disquisitive might as well as the re-search results which, in my opinion, can by rights becalled the greatest discovery in contemporary histor-ical science – what A. T. Fomenko and his colleagueshad learnt over the course of their research was the factthat the entire history of humanity up until the XVIIcentury is a forgery of global proportions (“old history”in their terminology) – a falsification as deliberate asit is universal. I shall be referring to this falsificationas the first one. My sociological research of the greatevolutionary breakpoint demonstrated that a new,blatant, global and premeditated falsification was al-ready in full swing. Prior to becoming familiar withthe writings of Fomenko, I had already known that thefalsification of the past was a rather common phe-nomenon inherent in human existence. However, Iwas neither aware of the scale of this fraud as de-scribed by Fomenko and his fellow scholars, nor of itssocial type. My assumption had been that the blatant
falsification of history on a planetary scale that I dis-covered was the first one in what concerned the pro-portions and the ulterior motivation, as well as its his-torical role. Let us call it the second falsification of thesame variety. It differs from the first in terms of per-taining to a different epoch. Its main subject is mod-ern history and whatever historical period can beclaimed as relevant to, and seen as fitting for, the pur-poses of this falsification. The second falsification alsodiffers from the first one in its primary means andmethods, which shall be described below.
One has to differentiate between the two kinds offalsification, the first one being the involuntary rou-tine falsification of minor details that results fromthe mechanisms of gnosis and those of the actual de-scription of historical events, or the entropy inherentin the framework of humanity’s historical memory.The second is the extraordinary, premeditated andcomplex falsification that has distinct social causes.
Let us consider the former kind first. We shall dis-regard the period preceding the epoch of literacy andsymbolic systems. The mnemonic means availableback then were less than meagre, which automati-cally diminished the arsenal of the hypothetical fal-sifiers. We shall turn to the era of literacy instead. Itis common knowledge that historical events becomeimmanetized in human language – and a statementuttered is a lie, as the old saying goes. We cannotfathom the unfathomable. What we end up doing israking the vastness of history for tiny morsels of in-
A Global Falsification of HistoryForeword by Alexander Zinoviev
formation and adding some of our own narrative inorder to produce wholesome and coherent textualmaterial.
The modern information technology does not af-fect the principles that the status quo relies upon. Letus introduce the concept of historical “atoms”, or par-ticles that aren’t subject to further division. One maywell calculate that the verbal description of a singleyear of real history the way it really happened, in-cluding all manner of events, no matter how minute,would require the processing power of all the com-puters on the planet, with all people made computeroperators. De facto, this technology serves as a pow-erful instrument of historical falsification. It allows forthe possibility of drowning a scientific approach to his-torical events in an ocean of meaningless facts.
Furthermore, the description of actual historicalevents is done by humans, and not perfect divine en-tities. People are brought up and educated in a cer-tain way and have a certain social standing, as well asegotistical goals and aims of their very own. All of thisaffects the way the information is processed. Over thecourse of time, the overwhelming majority of eventsare wiped away into oblivion without leaving the mer-est trace. They are frequently not even realized asevents. The people’s attitude to the past begins to alteras past events gradually drift into an altogether dif-ferent observational and interpretational context.
Evolutionary process discerns between two kindsof events – preliminal and superliminal. The formerkind does not affect the general character of evolu-tion; the latter one does. However, humans, includ-ing specialists, fail to recognize the difference be-tween the two. Everyone knows perfectly well howmuch attention is poured over rather insignificantindividuals, such as kings and presidents, whereasthe really important events often don’t even get so muchas a passing reference. This affects the relations be-tween historical events so much that all sense ofmeasure is often lost. Even if we are to suppose thatall those who partake in the creation of historicalrecords see veracity as their mission, the result oftheir collective efforts is often the rendition of theirown subjective views on history as opposed to whathappened in reality. As centuries pass by, the streamof disinformation is fed by various sources and trib-utaries, which, in their multitude, produce the effect
of impartial falsification of historical events. Thisstream also feeds on murky rivulets of countless liarsand swindlers.
The false model of history serves its function fora certain while. However, humanity eventually entersa period when this distorted representation loses ef-ficacy and stops serving its ends. This is where peo-ple are supposed to start searching for explanationsand set out on their quest for a “truth”. However, thereis the abstract scientific kind of truth, and the actualhistorical variety – that is to say, something that peo-ple regard, or will at some point start regarding astruth. The very word “truth” is confusing here. Weshall be on safer ground if we are to consider the ad-equacy of having certain concepts of the past for thenew needs that have manifested as a result of the his-torical process. These concepts stop being valid forsatisfying these needs. One becomes aware of the ne-cessity to update our view of the past in accordancewith whatever the present stipulates. This awarenessis the kind of craving that can only be satisfied by a“bona fide rectification” of history, which has to occuras a grandiose paradigm shift – moreover, it has to bea large-scale organized operation; one that shall resultin an epochal falsification of the entire history of hu-mankind. The issue at hand is by no means the falsi-fication of individual observations of historical events,but rather the revision of the entirety of historicalrecords describing the events which cannot be ob-served as a principle since they belong to the past.What we are talking about is not a mere change in theperception and interpretation of the same old exis-tential phenomena – it is the adaptation of the char-actery, which naturally used to refer to certain com-monplace realities at some point, to the exigencies ofpeople who have to live in an altogether different en-vironment. Trained specialists are a sine qua non forthis – people whose activity shall have to be organ-ized in such a manner that their collective output willresult in the creation of a coordinated historicalGestalt. What they really have to do is create exactlythe kind of past that is needed for the present, mak-ing use of whatever available material presents itself.
The first global falsification of history as discov-ered and brilliantly related by Fomenko was basedon an erroneous temporal and spatial coordinate sys-tem of chronological events (the chronological sys-
xvi | history: fiction or science?
tem and the localizations of events wedded thereto).The more recent and ongoing second global falsifi-cation of history is based on a system of erroneouspseudoscientific sociological concepts stemming fromideology and aided greatly by the modern informa-tion manipulation technology. This is why I call thesecond falsification conceptual and informational, ormerely “conceptual” for brevity’s sake. Fomenko’sworks describe the technology of building a falsemodel of human history which uses the art of ma-nipulating the temporal and spatial coordinates ofevents. Many thousands of specialists in false histor-ical models are already working on this second falsi-fication – their forte is the ability to misrepresent his-torical events while giving correct temporal and spa-tial coordinates and representing individual factsveraciously and in full detail. The actual falsificationis achieved via the selection of facts, their combina-tion and interpretation, as well as the context of ide-ological conceptions, propagandist texts that they areimmersed into, etc. In order to describe the technol-ogy behind the second falsification with any degreeof clarity at all, exhaustively and convincingly, oneneeds a well-developed scientific system of logisticsand methodology, as well as sociological theory. I callsuch a system logical sociology; however, it is a thingof the future, which means that the second falsifica-tion of history shall continue in its present manner,with as much ease and impunity as the first. Tens andhundreds of years hence, a number of solitary re-searchers shall “excavate” the so-called “modern his-tory” in very much the same manner as Fomenko(and his predecessors, including N. A. Morozov) havetreated “old history”.
I would like to conclude with an observation con-cerning the exceptional scientific scrupulousness ofthe works of A. Fomenko and G. Nosovskiy. I have ex-amined them from exactly this position many a time,and I have neither found a single ipse dixit statement,
nor any categorical pontificating of any kind. Thegeneral narrative scheme they employ is as follows:the authors relate the consensual (school textbook)historical concepts and then cite historical facts whicheither fail to concur to said concepts, or contradictthem explicitly. Other authors who have noticed theseinconsistencies are quoted. Then Fomenko and No-sovskiy put forth hypotheses which allow to find log-ically correct solutions for the problems under study.They keep on emphasizing and reiterating that theissue at hand is all about hypotheses and not cate-gorical statements presented as the truth absolute.The readers are invited to take part in the solution ofproblems that arise as a consequence of the consen-sual chronological concept of history. I am amazedby the horrendous injustice of the numerous criticsof Fomenko and Nosovskiy, who obviously distorttheir ideas, either failing to understand them com-pletely or being altogether unfamiliar with their con-tent. It is also quite astounding that whenever a pub-lication occurs that voices ideas that bear semblanceto those of Fomenko and Nosovskiy, but are a lotmore tame and local, providing a lot less factual in-formation, this publication is usually accepted witha great deal more benevolence. I understand the psy-chological groundwork beneath this – Fomenko andNosovskiy have performed a great scientific feat ofepochal significance, one that affects the sentimentsand interests of too many people. Acknowledging thisfeat as such, or at the very least the mere fact of itscreative relevance, obligates one to actions that are ap-parently beyond these people due to their incapabil-ity and immaturity. The trouble with Fomenko andNosovskiy is that they have reached out too far anddealt the dominating historical discourse too heavya blow.
Alexander Zinoviev.10 October 1999,
19 April 2001.
a global falsification of history | xvii
Alexander Zinoviev, Professor of the Moscow State University, logician, sociologist, writer, member of the Finnish, Bavarian and ItalianAcademy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Polite Letters and several others. Laureate of the 1982 Alexis Tocqueville prize for soci-ology and the “Best Sociology Essay of 1979” prize, as well as a large number of European and international prizes for literature.Honorary citizen of several French and Italian towns and cities. The works of A. A. Zinoviev are published in more than 20 languagesand considered international bestsellers. He reads lectures on sociology in many European and American universities.
The methods of applied statistics affect a widerange of scientific paradigms today, including the re-search of a great variety of texts. We use the word“text” to refer to sequences of diverse signals here,such as the lengthy codes one finds in genetics, graph-ical representations of this kind or the other that canbe encoded and represented in a textual form, as wellas actual narrative texts, such as historical chronicles,original sources, documents etc.
One of the key objectives we encounter here islearning to identify dependent texts, by which wemean texts possessing some degree of affinity be-tween them – similarities in their nature or history,for instance. We may regard the recognition problemas an example, where one is confronted with the taskof finding the visual representation that bears thegreatest resemblance to the given prototype. The sub-ject of long signal sequence research emphasizes theability to find uniform subsequences and their join-ing points. All of the above bears equal relevance tosolving the classical change-point problem, for in-stance, which is of vital importance to mathematicalstatistics and the statistics of stochastic processes.
In application to narrative text studies and theirneeds, the problem of differentiating between de-pendent and independent texts (such as chronicles)can be formulated as that of tracing out the texts thathail back to a common original source (the ones thatcan logically be referred to as “dependent”), or those
of non-correlating origins (the ones we can logicallyrefer to as “independent”). It is well understood thatproblems of this kind are exceptionally complex, andthus new empirico-statistical identification methodsdeserve full recognition for their ability to comple-ment classical approaches to actual research (in sourcestudies, for instance).
The present book by A. T. Fomenko, Professor ofPure Mathematics, is primarily oriented at the devel-opment of said methods as applied to identifying anddating dependent and independent texts (in relationto the texts that possess veritable datings a priori).
The author of the book suggests a new approachto the recognition of dependent and independentnarrative (historical) texts based on a number ofmodels he had constructed and trends discoveredwith the aid of empirico-statistical methods and as aresult of extensive statistical experimentation withvarying quantitative characteristics of actual textssuch as chronicles, original sources etc. The verifica-tion of these models (statistical hypotheses) by sub-sistent chronicle material confirmed their efficacy andallowed us to suggest new methods of dating texts, or,rather, the events they describe.
The approach suggested by A. T. Fomenko is ratherunorthodox and requires the reader to possess a cer-tain degree of attentiveness and diligence in order tobecome accustomed with his innovative logical con-structions which may be perceived as uncanny; how-
Foreword by A. Shiryaev (1990)to the first edition of A. T. Fomenko’s Methods of statistical analysis
of narrative texts and their applications to chronology, 1990. Based on research materials of 1973-1988
ever, one has to note that the author’s principal ideasare perfectly rational from the point of view of con-temporary mathematical statistics and fit into thecognitive paradigm of experts in applied statisticswith the utmost ease.
The scientific results obtained by the author aremost remarkable indeed, and what we witness todaycan already be referred to as the rather sudden evolve-ment of a whole new scientific division in applied sta-tistics that is definitely of interest to us. All of the re-sults in question were educed from a tremendous bodyof work performed by the author with the assistanceof his fellow academicians, most of them specializingin mathematical statistics and its applications.
Seeing as how the book relates to problems thatconcern several scientific disciplines, one is con-fronted with the necessity of finding points of con-tact between experts working in different areas. Awide number of terms and definitions common forscholars of one discipline may need to be explicitlytranslated for scientists of a different specializationand orientation. This is to be borne in mind by therepresentatives of both natural sciences and human-ities among the readers of this book. However, saidmiscommunications are common and are easily over-come by any mixed collective of scientists collabo-rating on solving a particular problem. One may hopethat the potential readers may prove this very collec-tive that will carry on with the research commencedby an eminent professional mathematician.
In addition to the development of new empirico-statistical methods as applied to dating events, thepresent book contains a number of applications to theproblem of validating the chronology of historical
events. One has to differ clearly here between the pri-mary statistical result achieved by the book, namely,defining the layer structure of the global chronolog-ical map and its representation as a “sum” of fourlayers, and the plethora of available interpretations.Interpreting the results and building hypotheses iswell beyond the scope of precise mathematical knowl-edge, so the author urges us to be extremely carefulwith the conclusions relating to a potential revisionof the “static chronology of ancient history”. The au-thor repeatedly insists on the necessity of criticalanalysis and separating verified facts from their in-terpretations and various hypotheses.
The concept offered by A. T. Fomenko is noveland somewhat startling, and by all means deserves ameticulous study.
The book is written in conformance to the mostdemanding scientific standards and is an unprece-dented phenomenon in the area of international sci-entific literature on applied mathematical statistics,so no reader shall be left indifferent. It also offers usa glimpse of the rather charming personality of its au-thor, a mathematician and a history scholar.
One hopes that the reader studies the book in itsentirety with undiminished attention after the pe-rusal of the first couple of pages and, at the very least,becomes familiar with a fascinating scientific prob-lem, or maybe even joins the research in this new andpromising field of science.
A. N. Shiryaev,President of the International BernoulliSociety for Mathematical Statistics andProbability Theory in 1989-1991.
| xix
A. N. Shiryaev, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Head of the ProbabilityTheory Studies Department of the Moscow State University Department of Physics and Mathematics, Head of the Probability Theoryand Mathematical Statistics Department of the V. A. Steklov Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
xx | history: fiction or science?
Publisher’s Note History: Fiction or Science? is the most explosive trac-tate on history ever written – however, every theoryit contains, no matter how unorthodox, is backed bysolid scientific data.
The book is well-illustrated, contains over 500 graphs,copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts at-testing to the falsity of the chronology used nowa-days, which never cease to amaze the reader.
Eminent mathematician proves that:
Does this sound uncanny? This version of events issubstantiated by hard facts and logic – validated bynew astronomical research and statistical analysis ofancient sources – to a greater extent than everythingyou may have read and heard about history before.
The dominating historical discourse in its currentstate was essentially crafted in the XVI century froma rather contradictory jumble of sources such as in-numerable copies of ancient Latin and Greek manu-scripts whose originals had vanished in the Dark Agesand the allegedly irrefutable proof offered by late me-diaeval astronomers, resting upon the power of ec-clesial authorities. Nearly all of its components areblatantly untrue!
For some of us, it shall possibly be quite disturbingto see the magnificent edifice of classical history toturn into an ominous simulacrum brooding over thesnake pit of mediaeval politics. Twice so, in fact: thefirst seeing the legendary millenarian dust on the an-cient marble turn into a mere layer of dirt – one thatmeticulous unprejudiced research can eventually re-move. The second, and greater, attack of unease comeswith the awareness of just how many areas of humanknowledge still trust the three elephants of the con-sensual chronology to support them. Nothing canremedy that except for an individual chronologicalrevolution happening in the minds of a large enoughnumber of people.
Jesus Christ was born in 1053 a.d. and crucified in 1086 a.d.
The Old Testament refers to mediaeval events.
Apocalypse was written after 1486.
The materials contained in this book correspondto the research that was started in 1973.
One might wonder why we should want to revisethe chronology of ancient history today and base ourrevision on new empirico-statistical methods. Itwould be worthwhile to remind the reader that in theXVI-XVII century chronology was considered to be asubdivision of mathematics, prior to having graduallytransformed into a field of historical studies consid-ered complete in general, and only requiring minoreventual clarifications leaving the actual edifice ofchronology intact. And yet we discover that the con-temporary official version of the chronology of an-cient history is full of prodigious contradictions andinconsistencies which deserve an attempt of partialclarification and rectification based on the methodsof modern statistics at the very least.
One often hears the question about what couldpossibly motivate a mathematician into wanting tostudy a seemingly historical problem. The answer isas follows. My primary interests are those of a pro-fessional mathematician; they are thus rather distantfrom historical and chronological issues. However, inthe early 70’s, namely, in 1972-1973, I had to dealwith the dates of ancient eclipses during my studiesof one of the key problems in celestial mechanics (seeChron1, Chapter 2 for more details). It had to dowith computing the so-called coefficient D" in theTheory of Lunar Motion. The parameter character-izes acceleration and is computed as a time function
on a large historical interval. The computations wereperformed by Robert Newton, a contemporaryAmerican astronomer and astrophysicist. Upon theircompletion, he had made the unexpected discoveryof parameter D" behaving in the most peculiar man-ner, namely, performing an inexplicable leap on theinterval of VIII-X century a.d. This leap cannot beexplained by conventional gravitational theory, andis improbable to the extent of making Robert Newtoninvent mysterious “extra-gravitational forces” in theEarth-Moon system that suspiciously refuse to mani-fest in any other way.
This inexplicable effect attracted the professionalinterest of the mathematician in me. The verificationof R. Newton’s work showed that his computationsconformed to the highest scientific standards andcontained no errors. This made the gap in the dia-gram even more enigmatic. A prolonged ponderingof this topic led me to the idea of checking the exac-titude of datings of the ancient eclipses that the D"parameter computations were based upon since theyimplicitly affected the result. This idea turned out tohave been unprecedented for the scientists that haddealt with the problem previously. Robert Newtonhimself, an eminent expert in the field of astronavi-gation and theoretical dynamics of natural and arti-ficial celestial bodies, trusted the ancient historicaldates completely and attempted to explain the leap inthe behaviour of parameter D" from within his pro-fessional paradigm. That is to say, without the mer-
Preface by Anatoly T. Fomenko
est hint of the very idea of questioning ancient chron-ology. I was more fortunate in that respect: I foundout that N. A. Morozov, a renowned Russian scien-tist and encyclopedist, had analyzed the datings ofancient eclipses and claimed most of them to be inneed of revision. This happened as early as the be-ginning of the XX century. He offered new datings fora large number of eclipses that were considerablymore recent. Having obtained his tables, I have re-peated Newton’s calculations using Morozov’s datesin lieu of the consensual ones as input data. I wasamazed to discover that the D" graph altered instantlyand drastically, having transformed into a rather evenhorizontal line that concurred with the conventionalgravitational theory perfectly. The enigmatic leap dis-appeared along with the necessity to invent fictitious“extra-gravitational forces”.
The satisfaction from having finished a body of sci-entific work successfully was accompanied by a sud-den awareness of a very knotty point arising in thisrespect, one of great peculiarity and paramount im-portance. Namely, that of whether the consensualchronology of ancient history was to be trusted at all.
It was true that the new datings of many ancienteclipses offered by N. A. Morozov led to the equal-ization of the D" function diagram, the eliminationof a strange contradiction from celestial mechanics,and to the discovery of the conformance of an im-portant parameter in the theory of lunar motion toperfectly normal patterns of behaviour.
It was equally true, however, that fitting somethinglike the idea that the three ancient eclipses describedin the History of the prominent ancient author Thu-cydides took place in the XI or even the XII centurya.d. and not in the V b.c. as it is believed today intoone’s perception proved quite impossible. The issuehere is that the dating of the “triad of Thucydides” canonly correspond to these two astronomically precisesolutions (see Chron1, Chapter 2). The inevitablequestion that arose in this respect was that of whichdiscipline had been correct in this case, astronomy orcontemporary chronology.
I had to address several distinguished historianswith this quandary, including the ones from our veryown Moscow State University. Their initial reactionwas that of polite restraint. According to them, therewas no point whatsoever in questioning the consen-
sual chronology of ancient history since all the datesin question can easily be verified by any textbook onthe subject and have been proved veracious a longtime ago. The fact that the diagram of some parame-ter D" started to look natural after revised calcula-tions based on some flimsy new chronology was hardlyof any relevance. Moreover, it would perhaps be bet-ter for the mathematicians to occupy themselves withmathematics and leave history to historians. The samesentiment was expressed to me by L. N. Gumilyov.I refrained from arguing with him.
The reply offered by the historians failed to satisfyme. Firstly due to the fact that chronology, being aproblem of calculating dates, bears immediate rele-vance to applied mathematics. This includes astro-nomical calculations, the verification of their precision,calendarian problems, the interpretation of old writ-ings based on their frequency characteristics etc, andmay present an extensive number of complex issues.Secondly, becoming familiar with the contemporarychronological tables soon proved that the ancient dateswere quoted rather arbitrarily, with hardly any refer-ences at all given. At best, the first chronological ta-bles get a quote – however, those were compiled rel-atively recently, in the XVI-XVII century. Delvingdeeper into the problem showed me that the versionof chronology that we agree upon today wasn’t theonly one available historically. I found out that emi-nent scientists in various countries expressed the ideathat ancient datings required a radical revision. I re-alized that the answer was the furthest thing fromsimple, and that shedding some light on the issuewould require plenty of time and effort. This is how1973 saw me commencing work in this direction,aided by colleagues – most of them professional math-ematicians and physicists.
The research progressed rapidly. Over the yearsthat passed since 1973 many points have been clari-fied and a great volume of interesting information ob-tained. A lot of it was published by myself and my col-leagues in a number of books and scientific articlesquoted in the literature list. The first related publica-tion saw light in 1980. It has to be noted that over thecourse of time our opinions on certain chronologi-cal problems have changed. Said alterations neverconcerned the general picture, but occasionally led tosignificant shifts in our perception of details. Today
xxii | history: fiction or science?
we feel that the empirico-statistical methods that ourchronological research was based upon need to beformulated and coordinated again. This is how thebooks Chron1 and Chron2 came to existence.
Chron1 is based on the first book I wrote on thesubject – Methods of Statistical Analysis of NarrativeTexts and their Application to Chronology (Identifyingand Dating Dependent Texts, The Statistical Chron-ology of Ancient History, The Statistics of Ancient Re-ports of Astronomical Events). It was published bythe Moscow State University in 1990; a further re-vised and extended edition appeared in 1996 underthe title Methods of Mathematical Analysis of Histor-ical Texts and their Applications to Chronology(Moscow, Nauka Publishing, 1996). The present bookcontains the entire material in a revised, extended, andcoordinated form. Chron2 contains an extended ver-sion of two of my books: Global Chronology (Mos-cow, MSU, 1993) and The New Chronology of Greece:The Mediaeval Age of Classics (Moscow, MSU, 1996).
Certain important results that get briefly men-tioned in Chron1 and Chron2 were achieved withthe aid of outstanding scientists – Professor V. V. Ka-lashnikov, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sci-ences (Moscow State University and the National Re-search Institute for System Studies, Moscow, Russia),and the Senior Scientific Associate G. V. Nosovskiy,Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (theDepartment of Mathematics and Mechanics, MoscowState University) – experts in fields of probability the-ory studies and mathematical statistics. The forma-tion of the author’s concept of chronology is largelya result of having collaborated with V. V. Kalashnikovand G. V. Nosovskiy for many years, and I would liketo express my heartfelt gratitude to both of them.
I would like to state explicitly that over the periodof time from 1981 and until presently our collabo-ration with G. V. Nosovskiy has been constant andvery fruitful, as the two of us have published a num-ber of what we consider to be milestones of the newchronology. The formulation of the main principlesof reconstructing modern chronology and mediae-val history is a direct result of the work we have donetogether over these years, which adds particular im-portance to this period.
Let us briefly describe the structure of Chron1and Chron2. The consensual versions of chronol-
ogy, as well as those of ancient and mediaeval history,had evolved completely by XVII century AD and ap-pear to contain major flaws. Many prominent scien-tists have been aware of this and have discussed it forquite a while (see Chron1, Chapter 1). However, thecreation of a new concept of history that would be freefrom inconsistencies proved a truly formidable task.
A group of mathematicians, most of them from theMoscow State University, commenced research on theproblem in 1974. The results were most captivating,and got covered in a number of monographs (see bib-liography) and several dozens of publications in sci-entific periodicals. Let us emphasize that the new con-cept of chronology is based primarily on applyingmethods of modern statistics to the analysis of histori-cal sources and extensive cybernetic computations.
The main subject of the books Chron1 andChron2 is the research of new empirico-statisticalmethods of finding dependencies in historical textsand derived procedures of dating historical events.
The task of recognizing the difference between de-pendent and independent texts is really that of identi-fying images. One encounters it in various scientificparadigms including applied statistics, linguistics,physics, genetics, historical source studies etc. Findingdependent texts is of great utility as applied to study-ing historical sources where they may be traced to acommon original that had been lost before our time.It is also very useful to be able to tell which texts areindependent, or derived from non-correlating sources.
The very concept of text can be interpreted in awide variety of ways. Any sequence of symbols, sig-nals, and codes can be referred to as “text” – the se-quences of genetic code in DNA chains, for instance.The common problem of finding dependent texts isformulated as follows: one has to find “similar frag-ments” in long signal sequences – that is, fragmentsof text that duplicate one another.
There is a multitude of methods for recognition ofdependencies and identifying “similar images”availabletoday.We offer some new empirico-statistical methods.They might be of use in analyzing historical chroni-cles, manuscripts, and archive materials as well as infinding the so-called homologous fragments in textsof a significantly different, more general nature.
This book is divided into several parts or topics forthe reader’s convenience. This should help us to se-
| xxiiipreface by a. t. fomenko | xxiii
curely differentiate between proven statistical factsand hypotheses. At the same time, one has to state thatsuch topical division is rather artificial since the top-ics really have lots and lots of points in common.
The first topicSolving the problem of statistical recognition of
dependent and independent historical texts. Formu-lating new statistical models and hypotheses, as wellas verifying them with extensive experimental mate-rial of actual historical chronicles. It turns out we’reable to acquire general verifications of the models of-fered. In other words, we have managed to discoverinteresting statistical tendencies that define the evo-lution of textual information over a period of time,such as what really happens to the data contained inthe manuscripts during their duplication etc.
Having discovered these tendencies is our first result.The discovered trends are used as basis for the for-
mulation of new methods of dating the events de-scribed in the chronicles. This is achieved by statisti-cal comparison of the chronicles and documents per-tinent to the research with the ones possessingconfirmed datings. The methods are verified by alarge body of correctly dated materials. Their appli-cation to the chronicles and documents describing theevents of the XVII-XX century appears to confirm theefficacy of these methods. Namely, the statistical dat-ings that we got as a result of our research concur withthe ones confirmed by traditional methods. The apriori dependent chronicle pairs turn out to be de-pendent statistically with the use of our methods. Theones that are independent a priori turn out to be in-dependent statistically as well.
Experimental examination of veraciously datedchronicles describing the events of XVII-XX centurya.d. led to the discovery of natural numeral coefficientsthat allow us to differentiate between a priori depend-ent chronicles and a priori independent ones in 1974-1979. Basically, these numbers are rather small for a pri-ori dependent pairs and rather large for a priori in-dependent ones. This means that nowadays we cancompare arbitrary chronicles X and Y and find outwhether their proximity coefficients are within the zonethat refers to dependent chronicles or the one that refersto independent ones. It is needless to say that theboundaries of these zones were found experimentally.
The discovery of the hidden dependencies that de-fine the evolution of information in rather large his-torical chronicles as well as the development and ex-perimental verification of the new dating methods(currently comprising a total of eight) – is the secondprincipal result of our work. The datings achieved byour methods cannot be regarded as finite, so we shallrefer to them as “statistical datings”and nothing more.We shall occasionally drop the word “statistical” for thesake of brevity. The above is to say that we regard theempirico-statistical dates that we computed to be a re-sult of applying statistical methods to historical ma-terials. Nevertheless, the concurrence of these statisticaldatings with the ones verified a priori that we have dis-covered in the interval of XVII-XX century a.d. im-plies that our results are of an objective nature.
The second topicIt can also be referred to as critical. We analyze the
traditional datings of events that occurred in ancientand mediaeval Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean coun-tries, Egypt, and America. Bearing the reader’s con-venience in mind, we have collected various materi-als here that can be found scattered across all kindsof scientific literature and are known to specialists ofvarious profiles, but often remain beyond the aware-ness of the general public. These materials illustrateserious difficulties that are presently inherent to theproblem of scientific dating of historical events pre-ceding the XIV century a.d.
We shall inform the reader of the fundamental re-search conducted by a prominent Russian scientistand encyclopedist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov(1854-1946), honorary member of the USSR Academyof Sciences, who was the first to have formulated theproblem of confirming the ancient and mediaevalchronology with the means offered by natural sci-ences in its entirety in addition to having collected agreat volume of critical materials and suggested anumber of innovative hypotheses.
We shall also tell of the chronological researchconducted by Sir Isaac Newton, who questioned manydatings of historical events, and several other repre-sentatives of the critical current in history and chron-ology. We quote from eminent authorities in the fieldsof archeology, source studies, and numismatics, anda variety of other well-known scientists, and exten-
xxiv | history: fiction or science?
sively compare different points of view so that thereaders could develop their own opinions of the prob-lems in question.
The primary application of novel empirico-sta-tistical methods is the analysis of dates of historicaloccurrences. This is why we were forced to analyze asmany dating versions of events in question as we couldfind in this day and age. The issue here is that vari-ous ancient and mediaeval chronicles frequentlydemonstrate significant discrepancies in dating cer-tain important events. Attempting to navigate in thischaos of mediaeval versions, we devote special atten-tion to those reflected in the chronicles of XV-XVIcentury a.d. due to the fact that the chronologists ofthat epoch were temporally closer to the events de-scribed than we are. Subsequent chronological ver-sions of XVII-XX century are often revisions of de-rivative material, obscuring and heavily distorting theoriginal mediaeval meaning.
Starting with XVI-XVII century a.d., the versionof the chronology of ancient history that was createdin the works of prominent mediaeval chronologistsJ. Scaliger and D. Petavius «rigidifies». The mainpoints of the official version of contemporary chron-ology coincide with those of Scaliger and Petavius.Hence we are to use the term “Scaligerian chronol-ogy” and refer to the consensual datings of ancientevents as “Scaligerian datings”.
We presume the reader to be more or less famil-iar with the traditional – Scaligerian de facto – chron-ology concepts familiar from school and university.We shall thus refrain from quoting the Scaligerianconcept in detail, considering this knowledge to be inpublic domain. On the contrary, we shall be makinga special emphasis on its inconsistencies. Further on,we shall give a brief analysis of traditional datingmethods: datings based on historical sources, ar-chaeological datings, radiocarbon datings, dendro-chronology etc. It is expedient for allowing the readerevaluate the veracity and the precision of these meth-ods as well as their application areas.
The third topicIn 1975-1979 the author compiled a table that re-
ceived the name of a “Global Chronological Map”,which may be referred to as GCM for the sake ofbrevity. It may be regarded as a rather complete
“Scaligerian textbook” of ancient and mediaeval his-tory. All the principal events of ancient history withtheir dates according to Scaliger (the ones used today),lists of main historical characters etc were placed alongthe horizontal axis of time. All the key original sourcesthat survived and contained descriptions of contem-porary life were quoted for each epoch. The resultingchronological map contains tens of thousands ofnames and dates. The physical space it covers amountsto several dozens of square metres. This map proveda priceless encyclopedia and guide for the edifice ofcontemporary – Scaligerian de facto – ancient and me-diaeval chronology. Due to the large volume of the ma-terial, it made its way into Chron1 and Chron2 withmany expurgations, as small tables and diagrams.
The fourth topicIn 1974-1979, the entire arsenal of the new em-
pirico-statistical dating methods was applied to thefactual material collected on the map of the Scaliger-ian chronology. This was done by inspecting all man-ner of pairs of historical epochs and the key originalsources pertinent to them. These chronicles wereprocessed statistically and then compared in pairs,and eventually the dependence coefficients of com-pared historical texts were computed.
If such coefficients for the two compared chroni-cles X and Y proved to belong to the same numericorder as those of the a priori dependent chroniclesfrom the “certainty interval” of XVII-XX century a.d.,we called them statistically dependent. In this case,both correlating epochs (temporal periods) weremarked on the map with the same arbitrarily chosensymbol such as the letter R.
If the proximity coefficient (or measure) of the twocompared chronicles X and Y proved to belong to thesame numeric order as those of the a priori independ-ent chronicles from the “certainty interval”of XVII-XXcentury a.d., we called them statistically independent.In this case, both correlating epochs (temporal peri-ods) were marked on the map with different arbitrar-ily chosen symbols such as the letters N and S.
As a result of statistical research, pairs of statisti-cally dependent chronicles and epochs pertinent tothem were found and marked in the “Scaligerian his-tory textbook”. We called such chronicles and arraysof events they described statistical duplicates.
| xxvpreface by a. t. fomenko | xxv
We discovered that the results of using differentempirico-statistical methods correlate very well.Namely, the chronicle pairs “statistically similar” ac-cording to one method turned out to be “statisticallysimilar” according to all the others (if such methodsare at all applicable to the chronicles in question).This result correlation is perceived as important.
It is vital that our empirico-statistical methodshave found no unforeseen duplicates, or chronicleswhose dependent nature we weren’t aware of a pri-ori, on the interval of XVII-XX century a.d.
At the same time, the same methods found a largenumber of new statistically similar chronicles (dupli-cates) that were previously considered underived, in-dependent in all senses of the word and ascribed bycontemporary historians to various epochs before theXVII century a.d., preceding the XI century in partic-ular. The compilation of the Scaligerian chronologicalmap and the discovery of statistical duplicates thereinamount to the third principal result of this book.
The fourth principal result is the division of theScaligerian chronological map into the sum of fourchronicle layers discovered by the author. These chron-icle layers are nearly identical, but they are shifted intime in relation to each other. These shifts amount tosignificant amounts of time and their correspondentchronicle layers may be regarded as “short chronicles”of sorts. A very rough description of “The ContemporaryScaligerian Textbook of Ancient and Mediaeval His-tory” would be calling it a sum, or a collage, of fourcopies of the same short chronicle, statistically speaking.
A criticism of the Scaligerian chronology and thedescription of the four statistical results mentionedabove comprise the main part of the present book.Its other parts are of a hypothetical and interpreta-tional nature. They aid the formulation of a possibleanswer to the naturally occurring question about themeaning of all the discovered empirico-statisticalfacts, and what the history was “really like”.
The fifth topicThis topic can be called interpretational. This is
where we offer the hypotheses that may explain thetrends we have discovered and the reasons why the“Scaligerian textbook of history” might contain du-plicates. Neither this material, nor the “textbook oftruncated history” that we offer are to be considered
finite in any way. They may only be regarded as of-fering a possible version that requires a great body ofwork to be conducted by experts of various profiles,and maybe even special research facilities.
The author’s position on a significant number ofpoints raised in Chron1 and Chron2 has formed asa result of interaction, collective research, and exten-sive discussions with specialists from a wide varietyof fields, most notably, the field of mathematics andfellow mathematicians. Specifically, the new statisti-cal models and the results we have achieved have allbeen presented and discussed over the span of thepast twenty-plus years:
the Fourth and the Fifth International ProbabilityTheory and Mathematical Statistics Conferences inVilnius, Lithuania, 1981 and 1985;
the First International Bernoulli Society for Math-ematical Statistics and Probability Theory Congressin Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1986;
the Multi-dimensional Statistical Analysis andProbabilistic Modelling of Real-Time Processes sem-inar by Prof. S.A. Aivazyan at the Central Institute ofEconomics and Mathematics of the USSR Academyof Sciences;
several national seminars on Stochastic ModelContinuity and Stability by Prof. V. M. Zolotaryov(The V. A. Steklov Mathematics Institute of the Rus-sian Academy of Sciences) and Prof.V.V. Kalashnikov(The National Research Institute for System Studies);
Controllable Processes and Martingales seminarsby Prof. A. N. Shiryaev (V. A. Steklov MathematicsInstitute of the Russian Academy of Sciences) andProf. N. V. Krylov (Department of Mathematics andMechanics, Moscow State University);
Academician V. S.Vladimirov’s seminar at the V. A.Steklov Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academyof Sciences;
Academician O. A. Oleinik’s seminar at the De-partment of Mathematics and Mechanics, MoscowState University;
Academician A. A. Samarsky’s seminar at the USSRNational Mathematical Modelling Centre;
The author would like to give thanks to all of theparticipants of the discussion, and the members of theaudience.
xxvi | history: fiction or science?
The author also expresses his gratitude to the fol-lowing members of the Russian Academy of Sciencesfor their kind support and collaboration: AcademicianE. P. Velikhov, Academician Y. V. Prokhorov, Acade-mician I. M. Makarov, Academician I. D. Kovalch-enko, Academician A. A. Samarsky, and AcademicianV. V. Kozlov, as well as Corresponding Member S. V.Yablonsky.
Thanks to fellow mathematicians, as well as mech-anicians, physicists, chemists, and historians, most ofthem members of the Moscow State University fac-ulty: Prof. V. V. Alexandrov, Prof. V. V. Belokourov,Prof. N. V. Brandt, Prof. Y. V. Chepurin, Prof. V. G.Dyomin, Cand. Sci. M. I. Grinchouk, Prof. N. N. Kol-esnikov, Prof. V. V. Kozlov, member of the RussianAcademy of Sciences, Prof. N. V. Krylov, Prof. A. S.Mishchenko, Prof. V. V. Moshchalkov, Prof. Y. M. Nik-ishin, Prof. V. A. Ouspensky, Prof. V. I. Piterbarg, Prof.M. M. Postnikov, Prof. Y. P. Solovyov, Prof. Y. V. Tatar-inov, and Prof. V. I. Trukhin, as well as Prof. V. M. Zol-otaryov and Prof. A. N. Shiryaev, CorrespondingMember of the Russian Academy of Sciences, bothmembers of the V. A. Steklov Mathematics Instituteof the Russian Academy of Sciences; faculty mem-bers of the National Research Institute for SystemStudies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Prof.V. V. Kalashnikov and Prof. V. V. Fyodorov; facultymember of the Central Institute Of Economics andMathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences,Prof. Y. M. Kabanov; faculty member of the NationalInstitute of Scientific Research in Information Trans-fer Problems, Prof. A. V. Chernavsky; faculty mem-ber of the Moscow Oil and Gas Institute, Prof. I. A.Volodin; Prof. S. V. Matveyev, Chelyabinsk UniversityCorresponding Member of the Russian Academy ofSciences; faculty member of the Kiev University, M. V.Mikhalevich, and Prof. V. V. Sharko, staff member ofthe Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of Math-ematics.
The author would like to express his heartfelt grat-itude to all of them, along with S. N. Gonshorek forhis collaboration and support.
Over various stages the participants of the NewChronology project included the representatives of avariety of scientific paradigms. In their midst: V. V.Bandourkin and Prof. D. Blagoevic (Belgrade Uni-versity, Belgrade, Yugoslavia), Cand. Phys. Math. Sci.
B. E. Brodsky, T. G. Cherniyenko, Y. S. Chernyshov,Prof. B. S. Darkhovski, Prof. I. V. Davidenko, D. V.Denisenko, Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. T. N. Fomenko,V. P. Fomenko, Cand. Tech. Sci. T. G. Fomenko, I. A.Golubev, N. Gostyev, Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. M. I.Grinchouk, Prof. V. D. Gruba, I. Y. Kalinichenko,Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. N. S. Kellin, G. A. Khroustaliov,Prof. A. Lipkovsky (Belgrade University, Belgrade,Yugoslavia), Prof. A. S. Mishchenko, N. A. Milyakh,A. V. Nerlinsky, Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. I. N. Nikitin,Prof. E. M. Nikishin, M. G. Nikonova, A. A. Onish-chenko, Dr. Guillermo Peña Feria (Cuba, Spain), M. E.Polyakov, S. N. Popov, Prof. M. M. Postnikov, N. Z.Rakhimov, A. Y. Ryabtsev, D. K. Salakhutdinov, Prof.Y. N. Sergiyenko, Prof. Jordan Tabov (The BulgarianAcademy of Sciences Institute of Mathematics, Sofia,Bulgaria), Y. N. Torkhov, and Y. A. Yeliseyev.
The author would also like to thank Prof.V. K.Abal-akin,V.V. Bandourkin,A.V. Bogdanov, M.A. Bocharov,Prof. R. L. Dobroushin, Prof. E. Y. Gabovitsch, Prof.M. I. Grossman, Prof. A. O. Ivanov, Cand. Phys. Math.Sci. V. Kossenko, Prof. Y. M. Lotman, Dr. ChristophMarx (Switzerland), Prof. A. A. Polikarpov, Prof. V. D.Polikarpov, Cand. Hist. Sci. S.A. Poustovoyt, Prof. M. L.Remnyova, Prof. S. N. Sokolov, and Prof. A. A. Tou-zhilin, for valuable discussions and insights.
Many thanks for the kind assistance of ProfessorPeter Gruber (The Technical University, Vienna, Aus-tria) who proved to be most valuable indeed.
The author is indebted to all those who helpedwith statistical work on original sources, namely N. S.Kellin, P. A. Pouchkov, M. Zamaletdinov, A. A. Maka-rov, N. G. Chebotaryev, E. T. Kouzmenko, V. V. Bashe,B. A. Silberhof, M.Y. Stein,V. P. Fomenko, Cand. Tech.Sci. T. G. Fomenko, and Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. T. N.Fomenko.
Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. N. S. Kellin, Cand. Phys.Math. Sci. N. Y. Rives, Cand. Phys. Math. Sci. I. S. Shi-ganov, P. A. Pouchkov, M. Zamaletdinov, Cand. Phys.Math. Sci. S. Y. Zholkov, and A. V. Kolbasov have allprovided much appreciated help with the creation ofalgorithms and programs, as well as statistical workon the material.
The author would further like to thank T. G. Zakha-rova, Director of the N.A. Morozov Museum at the In-stitute for Biology of Inland Water, RAS, the entire staffof the museum, as well as V. B. Biryukov for the ex-
| xxviipreface by a. t. fomenko | xxvii
xxviii | history: fiction or science?
ceptionally valuable help in archive studies related toN.A. Morozov and his scientific output they provided.
Starting in 1998, the development of the newchronology was aided by a number of specialists froma variety of unrelated fields and adhering to differentcognitive paradigms. The author is grateful to theworld chess champion G. K. Kasparov for the mate-rials and the valuable discussion that he provided, tothe prominent writer, prominent logician and sociol-ogist, A. A. Zinoviev, for our fruitful and importantdebates. My thanks also go to the IAELPS AcademicianM. K. Moussin, a merited employee of the oil and gasindustry, and all the members of his family who ac-tively took part in the “New Chronology” project.Special thanks to I. R. Moussina for her help in com-pilation of the Dictionary of Interlingual Parallelisms.The project development was greatly helped by A. V.Podoinitsyn, the economist, and Prof. I.V. Davidenko,the geologist.
Disputes with various historians, philologists, andlinguists provided for a significant influence on thedevelopment of the new chronology.
The author is greatly beholden to the head of thePhilological Department of the Moscow State Uni-versity, Prof. M. L. Remnyova, for her kind assistancein allowing a reading of a special course in chrono-logical problems and new mathematical methods inhistory and linguistics, which was read by G. V. No-sovskiy and the author, at the Philological Depart-ment of MSU in 1998. We would like to thank theProfessor of the Philological Department, A. A. Poli-karpov, who supervises the Laboratory of ComputerMethods in Linguistics for his help in organizing thiscourse and valuable discussions.
Thanks to the Freeborn Russia radio station (Mos-cow) for the informational support of the New Chron-ology project in 1998-1999, namely, a large series ofspecial weeklies dedicated to our research. Y. S. Cher-nyshov brilliantly presented these programs. The sec-ond cycle of these programs appeared in 2001.
The author expresses gratitude to the dozens anddozens of people in complex chronological research,for their help and support.
A fond, special thanks to the author’s parents, V. P.Fomenko and T. G. Fomenko, and his wife, T. N. Fo-menko, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sci-ences, for the great and invaluable help in processingstatistical materials and for their steady, unswervingsupport during all the years of robust and complexdevelopment of the new chronology.
The book is dedicated to the memory of NikolaiAleksandrovich Morozov, brilliant scientist, encyclo-pedist, and author of the most profound œuvres onchemistry, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and his-tory. He was the first to have fully formulated theproblem of finding scientific basis for ancient andmediaeval chronology using natural sciences, and ob-taining fundamental results in this direction.
The author would like to express the wish for thisseven-volume edition to provide an impetus for thedevelopment of new empirico-statistical methods ofstudying historical texts so that the problems of an-cient chronology can be solved in their entirety.
A. T. Fomenko,March 2002
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The history of the new chronology and its devel-opment can be divided into three periods, albeit ar-bitrarily.
The first stage – the XVI-XX century, when var-ious researchers periodically discovered major incon-sistencies in the edifice of the Scaligerian chronology.We shall quote the names of some familiar scientiststhat dissented with the chronology of Scaliger-Petaviusand reckoned that the real ancient and mediaevalchronology differed significantly.
De Arcilla – the XVI century, Professor of the Sala-manca University, see Chron1, Chapter 1. The in-formation on his chronological research is of a rathervolatile nature, and it was only by accident that N. A.Morozov managed to learn of it. It is known merelythat De Arcilla claimed “ancient” history to have beenforged in the Middle Ages. However, we regrettablyfailed to have found any of his works. The SalamancaUniversity could not give us any information aboutthem, either.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – the great Englishscientist, physicist, and mathematician devoted a largepart of his life to chronology and published a largevolume entitled The Chronology of Ancient KingdomsAmended. To which is Prefix’d, A Short Chronicle fromthe First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquestof Persia by Alexander the Great. See [1298]; more de-tails in Chron1, Chapter 1.
Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) – eminent French sci-
entist and author of a large number of works on phil-ology, theology, history, archaeology, and numismat-ics. He was also Director of the French Royal Library,and wrote a few chronological works with sharp crit-icisms of the entire edifice of the Scaligerian chronol-ogy. He was of the opinion that most of the so-called“ancient artefacts”were either counterfeit, or belongedto a much more recent age. See details in Chron7,Appendix 3.
Peter Nikiforovich Krekshin (1684-1763) – the per-sonal secretary of Peter the Great wrote a book criti-cizing the contemporary version of Roman history. Itwas “still fresh” in his day and age, and wasn’t takenfor granted the way it is today. See details in Chron4,Chapter 14:30.
Robert Baldauf – the German philologist of thelate XIX – early XX century. Assistant professor atthe Basel University and author of the four volumesentitled History and Criticisms ([1025:1]). He cameto the conclusion that the “ancient” literary workswere a lot more recent than one was accustomed tothink, guided by philological considerations. Baldaufproved that those works were all mediaeval in theirorigins. See details in Chron7, Appendix 3.
Edwin Johnson (1842-1901) – English historian ofthe XIX century, criticized the Scaligerian chronologyseverely in his works ([1214] and [1215]), claimingthat they needed to be truncated drastically. See de-tails in Chron1, Chapter 1.
History of the New Chronology
By A. T. Fomenko and G. V. Nosovskiy
Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (1854-1946) – aprominent Russian scientist and encyclopedist, madea breakthrough in chronological studies. He criticizedthe Scaligerian version of chronology and history ex-tensively. He offered the concepts of several new nat-ural scientific methods of analyzing chronology andintroduced scientific approaches to chronology mak-ing the latter a science de facto. See details in Chron1,Chapter 1.
Wilhelm Kammeyer (late XIX century – 1959) – aGerman scientist and lawyer, developed a method ofverifying the authenticity of ancient documents. Hediscovered nearly all of the ancient and early mediae-val Western European documents to have been eithercopied or forged in a more recent age. He came to theconclusion that both ancient and mediaeval historywere falsified, and wrote several books on the topic.
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) – a prominentpsychoanalyst of Russian origin lived and worked inRussia, the UK, Palestine, Germany, and the USA. Hewrote a number of books on ancient history that con-cerned several contradictions and peculiarities of an-cient history. He also made an attempt of explainingthem in relation to the Catastrophism Theory. He isconsidered to be the founder of the “critical school”in chronology, but what he really did was try to pro-tect the Scaligerian chronology from drastic changes,so his inclusion in the list of the founding fathers ofthe new chronology is rather arbitrary. We reckonthat the fact of Velikovsky’s works are much betterknown than the earlier and more detailed ones byN. A. Morozov, inhibited the development of the newchronology in the Western Europe of the XX centuryconsiderably. See details in Chron7, Appendix 3.
All in all, one has to state that the precariousnessof the Scaligerian chronology was mentioned ratherexplicitly in the scientific works of the XVII-XIX cen-tury. The Scaligerian version of history was subject toextended criticisms, and the thesis of the global fab-rication of ancient texts and artifacts was formulated.Nevertheless it came to pass that no one with the ex-ception of N. A. Morozov managed to find a way ofconstructing a proven version of the correct chronol-ogy; even his version was hardly based on any sub-stantial evidence, being incomplete and having in-herited a number of substantial flaws from the chron-ology of Scaliger and Petavius.
The second stage – during the first half of theXX century. This stage should doubtlessly be linkedto the name of N. A. Morozov. He was the first tohave understood and formulated the fundamentalidea that the Scaligerian chronology needed a com-plete revision, not just the “ante-mundane” part, butalso its entire edifice up to the VI century a.d. N. A.Morozov had used a number of innovative naturalscientific methods for chronological analysis andquoted a number of indisputable arguments forproving his brilliant idea. The publication of his mainworks on the revision of ancient history occurred in1907-1932 ([542]-[544]). However, he held the er-roneous opinion that post-VI century chronologywas basically correct. See details in Chron1, Chap-ter 1:3.
The third stage – being the period of 1945-1973, can be characterized as one of “deliberate mut-ing”. The historical science tries to cast the chrono-logical research of N. A. Morozov and his predeces-sors into oblivion. The chronological discussions inRussia cease altogether, and an “alienation zone” ofsorts is created around N. A. Morozov’s works onchronology, whereas in the West, the debate becomescircular and doesn’t venture outside I. Velikovsky’shypothesis of “Catastrophism”.
The fourth stage – which was the period of1973-1980, commenced in 1973, when A. T. Fomenko,faculty member of the Department of Mathematicsand Mechanics of the Moscow State University, wasresearching several problems related to celestial me-chanics. He had noticed the 1972 article of the Amer-ican astrophysicist Robert Newton ([1303]), wherethe latter described a strange leap in lunar accelera-tion, and the so-called parameter D". The leap oc-curred around the X century a.d. Using the Scaliger-ian datings of the writings that make reference tolunar and solar eclipses, R. Newton computed lunaracceleration as a time function on the interval of theI-XX century a.d. The leap in question comprises anentire mathematical order (!), and cannot be ex-plained by the gravitational theory in any way. It wasthe issue of the discussion organized by the Royal So-ciety of London and the British Academy of Sciencesin 1972, and one that had spawned major contro-versy ([1453]). The discussion failed to elucidate thesituation in any way, and so R. Newton suggested at-
xxx | history: fiction or science?
tributing the leap to certain mysterious extra-gravi-tational forces in the Earth-Moon system.
A. T. Fomenko noted that all the attempts of ex-plaining the gap in the behaviour of D" failed to raisethe issue of the veracity of the eclipse datings thatwere the actual basis for R. Newton’s calculations.However, despite the fact that A. T. Fomenko was welloutside the paradigm of historical research back in theday, he had heard that N. A. Morozov offered somenew datings of the “ancient” eclipses in his work en-titled Christ, published in 1924-1932. It has to be saidthat A. T. Fomenko’s initial attitude towards N. A.Morozov’s works was rather sceptical and based onwhatever random information he had received onthe subjects during informal discussions with fellowfaculty members. Nevertheless, having overcome hisscepticism, A. T. Fomenko unearthed an astronomi-cal table by N. A. Morozov that contained the newdatings and performed a new calculation of the pa-rameter D" using the same algorithm offered byR. Newton. He was amazed to have discovered thedisappearance of the mysterious leap and the trans-formation of the D" diagram into an even, practi-cally horizontal line. A. T. Fomenko’s work on thetopic was published in 1980 ([883]).
However, the elimination of the enigma from ce-lestial mechanics led to another question of para-mount importance: what was one supposed to dowith the chronology of the ancient times in this case?The eclipse dates were supposed to be evidentiallylinked to a vast array of historical materials. SinceN. A. Morozov’s works helped to solve a complex ce-lestial mechanics problem, A. T. Fomenko decided tostudy them in more detail. The only professor fromthe MSU Department of Mathematics and Mechanicsto have had Morozov’s Christ, already a bibliograph-ical curiosity by that time, in his possession, was M. M.Postnikov. He was interested in N. A. Morozov’s re-search and occasionally told his colleagues about it. In1974, A. T. Fomenko approached M. M. Postnikovwith the suggestion of reading a series of introductorylectures on N. A. Morozov’s works. M. M. Postnikovhad acquiesced after a brief hesitation, and read fivelectures for a group of mathematicians that worked inthe MSU Department of Mathematics and Mechanicslater the same year.
As a result, a group of mathematicians developed
an interest in chronological problems, regarding themfrom the point of view of applied mathematics. It be-came obvious that the complexity of this issue de-manded the development of new independent meth-ods of dating. Hence the main focus in 1973-1980was on developing methods of analyzing historicaltexts that were based on mathematical statistics, anumber of which was proposed and formulated byA. T. Fomenko in 1975-1979. They allowed for theelucidation of the global picture of chronological mis-datings in Scaliger’s version and elimination. Morespecifically, A. T. Fomenko had discovered three im-portant chronological shifts, of roughly 333 years,1053, and 1800 years respectively. These shifts areonly inherent to the erroneous chronology of Scaliger-Petavius, and have nothing to do with the correctone. It turned out that “the Scaligerian textbook” wascompiled from four copies of one and the same briefchronicle.
The first scientific publications on this topic werecomposed and prepared for publishing in 1973-1980.
The fifth stage – 1980-1990 can be character-ized by the publication of articles on the new meth-ods of dating and achieved chronological results inspecialized periodicals dedicated to pure and appliedmathematics. The first publications on the topic werethe two articles by A. T. Fomenko ([883] and [884])published in 1980, as well as the preprint by A. T. Fo-menko and M. M. Postnikov ([681]), published thesame year. In 1981 a young mathematician by thename of G. V. Nosovskiy, specializing in probabilitytheory and mathematical statistics, actively joined thenew chronology research. This period saw the pub-lication of several dozens of scientific articles on in-dependent empirico-statistical and astronomicalmethods in chronology. They were written by A. T.Fomenko, either alone or in collaboration with themathematicians G. V. Nosovskiy, V. V. Kalashnikov,S. T. Rachev, V. V. Fyodorov, and N. S. Kellin (see bib-liography).
It has to be mentioned that the research was sup-ported by Academician E. P. Velikhov, the physicistthat proposed two of A. T. Fomenko’s articles with thedescription of methods and a global picture ofchronological misdatings to be submitted to theDoklady AN SSSR (a periodical of the USSR Academyof Sciences), and Academician Y. V. Prokhorov, the
| xxxihistory of the new chronology | xxxi
mathematician that had done the same for two arti-cles by A. T. Fomenko, V. V. Kalashnikov, and G. V.Nosovskiy on the issue of dating Ptolemy’s Almagest.
A. T. Fomenko made reports concerning the newdating methods at scientific seminars on mathematicsconducted by Academician V. S.Vladimirov,Academic-ian A. A. Samarsky, Academician O. A. Oleynik, andCorresponding Member S.V.Yablonsky, as well as a sci-entific seminar on history conducted by AcademicianI. D. Kovalchenko, a specialist on applying mathemat-ical methods to history, who was genuinely interestedin those methods and claimed that historians neededto delve deeper into chronology issues.
Over the period of 1980-1990, A. T. Fomenko, G. V.Nosovskiy, and V. V. Kalashnikov presented their re-ports on the new methods of independent dating ata number of scientific conferences on mathematics.
The position of Academician A. N. Kolmogorov inthis respect is most interesting. When A. T. Fomenkowas presenting a scientific report on the new methodsof dating at the Third International Conference onProbability Theory and Mathematical Statistics in Vil-nius, 1981,A. N. Kolmogorov came to the presentationand spent the entire forty-plus minutes that it tookstanding in the back of the hall, having strategicallychosen a spot where he wouldn’t be seen from the hall,retaining the ability to see and hear everything thatwas going on at the blackboard. A. N. Kolmogorov de-parted immediately after the presentation and did notapproach the person at the blackboard. It has to besaid that A. N. Kolmogorov’s health was already quitefrail by that time, and having to stand for forty min-utes must have taken a considerable effort on his part.
Later on, in Moscow, A. N. Kolmogorov invitedA. T. Fomenko over to his residence and inquiredwhether he could borrow any of his publications onchronology. He was given a brief 100-page essay writ-ten by A. T. Fomenko in 1979 that had circulatedaround as a manuscript prior to its publication as apreprint in 1981 ([888]). Apart from that, A. T. Fo-menko had given A. N. Kolmogorov a more exhaus-tive 500-page typewritten text on the topic. In twoweeks’ time, A. N. Kolmogorov invited A. T. Fomenkoto converse with him once again. During the two-hour discussion it became clear that A. N. Kolmogo-rov had made a thorough study of the materials. Hehad asked a large number of questions, and his pri-
mary concern had been about the dynastical paral-lelisms between the ancient dynasties, including thebiblical ones, and those of the Middle Ages. He saidhe was frightened by the possibility of a radical re-construction of a number of modern concepts basedon ancient history. He had no objections to the le-gitimacy of the methods. Finally, A. N. Kolmogorovgave the 500-page text back to A. T. Fomenko andasked whether he could keep the 100-page essay as apresent. The request was complied with.
One has to add the following report that A. T. Fo-menko received orally from one of the partakers ofthe conversation that is to be described below. A whileago, Professor M. M. Postnikov had submitted an ar-ticle with an overview of N. A. Morozov’s chrono-logical research in a journal titled Uspekhi Matemati-cheskih Nauk (The Successes of Mathematical Sci-ences). The following dispute among members of thejournal’s editing board, among them AcademiciansP. S. Alexandrov and A. N. Kolmogorov, ensued. A. N.Kolmogorov refused so much as to touch the article,saying something along the lines of “This article is tobe rejected. I spent enough time and effort fightingMorozov in the days of yore”. However, he had addedthe following: “And yet we shall all look perfectly id-iotic if it turns out that Morozov had been right”. Thearticle was rejected.
This conversation sheds some light on the eventsof the days when N. A. Morozov’s research was prac-tically vetoed. Today we are being convinced thateverything had happened “automatically” and thatN. A. Morozov’s research was of little enough inter-est to have been forgotten by everyone in a short time.We are now beginning to understand that the forcesopposing N. A. Morozov were all the more formida-ble to have needed the participation of A. N. Kolmo-gorov. It is also noteworthy that A. N. Kolmogorovconsidered it possible for N. A. Morozov to have beencorrect.
Apparently, during the time N. A. Morozov’s re-search was cast into oblivion, historians have beenconstantly bothered by the possibility of someone re-suming it. It is hard to find another explanation forthe peculiar fact that as early as 1977, when the re-search conducted by the Moscow State Universitymathematicians was in its earliest stages and no pub-lications had been issued on the topic, the Communist
xxxii | history: fiction or science?
magazine had published an article by Doctor of His-torical Sciences A. Manfred with a severe criticism of“the new mathematical methods” in history. Thenames of the methods’ authors weren’t mentioned,but the implications were perfectly clear. A. Manfredwrote the following: “If these “young” scientists aregiven any degree of liberty at all, they will drown thebook market in summaries of numeric data. The“new” tendencies need to be overcome as a result ofscrupulous critical analysis, since they are holdingback the progress of global historical science…”(Communist, July 1977, 10th issue, pages 106-114).
In 1981, immediately after our first publicationson chronology appeared, the History Department ofthe USSR Academy of Sciences gathered for a specialsession on June 29, 1981, that had the criticism ofour work as its main objective. The Learned Secretaryof the History Department of the USSR Academy ofSciences, Cand. Hist. Sci.V.V.Volkov and the LearnedSecretary of the Principal Tendencies of HumanSociety Development Council of the History Depart-ment of the Academy N. D. Loutzkov sent A. T. Fo-menko an official note saying, among other things,that: “The Department’s session took place on29 June, 1981, conducted by the Vice AcademicianSecretary of the Department, the Academician Y. V.Bromley… Your conclusions were sharply criticizedby the specialists of six humanities institutes as wellas the staff members of the Sternberg Institute ofAstronomy” (8 May 1984).
The most vehement criticisms of the 1981 sessionbelonged to the Corresponding Member of the USSRAcademy of Sciences Z. V. Udaltsova, and the chair-woman of the commission, Y. S. Goloubtsova, bothof them historians. Y. S. Goloubtsova was in chargeof a special commission of historians that had beenassembled to analyze our works. The materials of thisdiscussion had provided the basis for a series of arti-cles with harsh criticisms of our research in varioushistorical periodicals.
A similar “discussion” recurred in 1998-1999, asshall be mentioned below.
The sixth stage – is the post-1990 period. It canbe characterized as “the stage of publishing books onnew chronology.” This is when the books that coveredour chronological research, as well as those contain-ing derived hypotheses about what pre-XVII century
history really looked like, started to appear. The firstbook on this topic was A. T. Fomenko’s Methods ofStatistical Analysis of Narrative Texts and their Ap-plication to Chronology, MSU Publishing, 1990. Theforeword was written by A. N. Shiryaev, President ofthe International Bernoulli Society for MathematicalStatistics and Probability Theory in 1989-1991, Corre-sponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sci-ences, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Head of theProbability Theory Studies Section of the MoscowState University Department of Mathematics andMechanics, Head of the Probability Theory and Math-ematical Statistics Department of the V. A. SteklovMathematics Institute of the Russian Academy ofSciences.
It has to be mentioned that this book was sup-posed to have been published much earlier. It was al-ready typeset by the Publishing House of the SaratovUniversity in 1983-1984 and edited by Cand. Hist.Sci. S. A. Poustovoyt (Moscow). However, the pub-lishing house received a sudden missive from the his-torians of Leningrad, Head of the Universal HistorySector, the Leningrad division of the USSR HistoryInstitute, Corresponding Member of the USSR Acad-emy of Sciences, V. I. Routenburg, Learned SecretaryT. N. Tatsenko, Cand. Hist. Sci., Head of the Historyof Ancient States Formerly on USSR Territory and theAncient World Group, I. A. Shishova, Cand. Hist. Sci.,Learned Secretary I. V. Kouklina, Cand. Hist. Sci.Among other things, they wrote that our researchwas “obviously contradicting the founding principlesof the Marxist historical science… the UniversalHistory Sector as well as the history of Ancient StatesFormerly on USSR Territory and the Ancient WorldGroup considering the publication of A. T. Fomenko’s“Methods of Statistical Analysis of Narrative Textsand their Applications to Chronology” an absoluteimpossibility”. The historians demanded the publi-cation of the book to be stopped in the most cate-gorical way, and thus the typesetting of the book wasrecycled.
The Nauka Publishing House planned to publishour book titled The Geometrical and StatisticalAnalysis of Star Configurations. The Dating of theStar Catalogue of Almagest authored by A. T. Fo-menko,V.V. Kalashnikov and G.V. Nosovskiy in 1991.It was reviewed and submitted for publishing. How-
| xxxiiihistory of the new chronology | xxxiii
ever, when a significant part of work had already beendone, the Nauka publishing house all but ceased itspublishing activity due to the change of the politicaland economical climate in the country. The book waspublished later, in 1995, by the Faktorial PublishingHouse that had received the prepared materials fromNauka, which had subsequently resumed work andpublished two more of our books on chronology in1996 and 1997.
As we can see, the release of A. T. Fomenko’s Meth-ods in 1990 was followed by a break of sorts. Afterthat, starting in 1993, a number of books covering thecurrent stages of our research eventually got pub-lished. This was when the term New Chronology hadbeen coined in reference to the chronology that wasbeginning to emerge due to the application of ournew dating methods. It was new in the sense of dif-fering from the one still deemed official today, thatof Scaliger-Petavius, and should have really beencalled the Correct Chronology due to its freedom fromthe errors of the Scaligerian school.
The publication of books on the new chronologywas undertaken by a number of Muscovite publish-ing houses: MSU Publishing, the MSU EducationalCentre of Pre-University Education Publishing, aswell the publishing houses Nauka, Faktorial, Kraft,Olimp, Anvik, and Delovoi Express. Outside Russiaour books on chronology were published in bothEnglish and Russian by Kluwer Academic Press (theNetherlands), CRC Press (USA), and Edwin MellenPress (USA). In 2000-2003 the entire material wascollected, processed and arranged as the seven vol-umes of Chronology. What you are now holding inyour hands now is the first volume of seven.
Starting in 1995-1996, a large number of articlesdiscussing our books on the new chronology beganto appear in various newspapers and magazines. Mostof them expressed two polar points of view. One campenjoyed our books a great deal, whilst the other waspositively infuriated by them. About a hundred ofsuch articles appeared every year; their numberssurged dramatically in 1999-2000.
In 1998, the Free Russia radio station had beenbroadcasting a series of radio programmes for oversix months, where Y. S. Chernyshov brilliantly relatedthe contents of our books. Namely, he had read thenearly complete text of the two of our books on the
radio – The Empire and The New Chronology of Rus-sia, England, and Rome. In addition to that, the firstcouple of chapters of The Biblical Russia also receiveda reading. The programmes were resumed in 2001,but ceased shortly after that, despite Y. S. Chernyshovbeing ready to continue with them.
In 1998, seven series of the Night Flight pro-gramme on TVC (produced by ATV Studios akaAuthor Television, hosted by A. M. Maksimov) fea-tured A. V. Podoinitsyn, a Muscovite economist anda member of the informal “New Chronology” or-ganization as their special guest. A. V. Podoinitsynhad related the main points of our research and an-swered a great many of the viewers’ questions live. Theprogrammes had caused a great resonance.
In 1998, we were telephoned by World ChessChampion G. K. Kasparov. It turned out that he hadread quite a few of our books, and, having comparedthe points we were making with his own concept ofhistory, decided most of them were valid. He sharedsome of his ideas and observations with us, and wedeemed some of them to be worthy of inclusion intoour subsequent works (with references to G. K. Kas-parov). Apart from that, G. K. Kasparov had made afew brilliant public addresses advocating the newchronology, one of them as a guest of Night Flight fol-lowing in the footsteps of A. V. Podoinitsyn’s conver-sations with A. M. Maksimov. We are grateful to G. K.Kasparov for his having found and given us theunique 1771 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,where we found a large number of valuable and in-teresting materials confirming and extending the con-clusions that we had reached. G. K. Kasparov relatessome of his points in the preface to our Introductionto the New Chronology, 1999, Kraft Publishing.
In 1999, the prominent writer, sociologist, logi-cian, and philosopher A. A. Zinoviev, who had just re-turned to Russia after many years spent in emigration,got in touch with us. Having read some of our pub-lications, he had decided that our concept was gen-erally a correct one, concurring well with his own re-search in the field of history and historical falsifica-tions. He offers some of ideas in the preface to the newedition of our Introduction to the New Chronology,2001, Kraft Publishing.
In 1996, our materials on the new chronologystarted to appear online. The number of related web
xxxiv | history: fiction or science?
sites keeps on growing and at the moment there areabout ten of them in Russia and at least one in Ger-many, which is the brainchild of Professor E. Y. Ga-bovitsch (Karlsruhe, Germany), the founder of thenew German Salon of History – the institution wherethe new chronology has been discussed very activelyover the last couple of years. E. Y. Gabovitsch has alsohelped us immensely with archive research he hadconducted in Germany. A number of valuable ideasand considerations of his has helped reconstruct thetrue history.
The web site that is currently becoming increas-ingly popular in Russia, offering constant discussionopportunities for both proponents and opponents ofthe new chronology can be found at newcrono.ru
The reaction of historians during the period of1990-1998 had been rather lukewarm, and didn’t gobeyond the odd occasional article whose authors didn’teven bother to give scientific counter-arguments butmerely expressed their disapprobation. The radicalchange came about in 1998. One of the Presidiumsessions of the Russian Academy of Sciences gatheredwith the sole purpose of discussing our research.
Later on, the History Department Bureau of theAcademy was called for a special session, and the issuewas also discussed during a subsequent session of theMathematics Department Bureau. The History De-partment Bureau proposed an entire combat plan foropposing the new chronology, which had been im-plemented most visibly in December 1999, when theHistory Department of the MSU organized a largeconference suggestively enough named “The Mythsof the New Chronology”. The main point of the con-ference agenda was that of a categorical deprecationof our research, and the conclusion was made that thenew research is to be pronounced perfectly unac-ceptable, as well as that all research concerning theNew Chronology was to be banned, and its authorsreprimanded severely. (See details in Chron7, Ap-pendix 4). A rather amusing process commencedshortly afterwards. The materials of this conferencewere published several times under different titlesand covers, with minute variations. There are seven(!) such books published currently, all duplicatingeach other, and it seems as though we haven’t seen theend of it yet. We familiarized ourselves with the crit-icisms offered most thoroughly, and learned that the
historians hadn’t managed to have found any origi-nal counter-arguments. The material had been pre-sented in a more “scientific” and “advanced” man-ner, and considerable progress had been made in thefine art of attaching labels. We had written a detailedreply, see Chron7, Appendix 4.
Starting with 1996, a number of books proving thefalsity of Western European mediaeval chronologywere published by German scientists (see Chron7,Appendix 3). However, the authors of works appearto misperceive the entire scale of the problem, think-ing that several minor local corrections of the Scali-gerian chronology should suffice. This is a mistakethat they need to become aware of, prior to succeed-ing in any of their endeavours. At the same time, thecritical part of those works is carried out thoroughlyenough. The first book that has to be mentioned inthis respect is Uve Topper’s The Great Campaign onthe falsification of history, as well as C-14 Crash byBlöss and Nimitz that conveys to us the knowledge ofradiocarbon analysis (see bibliography).
Over the last couple of years, our works on thenew chronology, apart from the mere arousing of in-terest, have teemed a line of research based on the re-sults we had achieved in reconstructing universal his-tory as related in the latest books of the New Chron-ology series. First and foremost, one has to mentionthe efforts of the world chess champion G. K. Kaspa-rov in this respect, such as his public addresses on theissue and the articles he had written for a number ofmagazines in 1999-2001. In particular, he had or-ganized a number of public disputes at the St. Peters-burg University of Humanities. The years 2000-2001have also been marked by the publication of suchbooks as The True History of Russia and Multi-op-tional History by Alexander Goutz, a mathematicianfrom Omsk, and N. I. Khodakovsky’s The TemporalSpiral. A. Boushkov’s The Russia That Never Was isalso visibly influenced by our works. This list can becontinued. Despite the fact that the key chronologi-cal issues are not related in these books, they unravelseveral new and interesting facts that confirm ourgeneral concept.
However, we must firmly disagree with a numberof ideas voiced in these works and ones similar tothem. Being in favour of such activity in general, webeg to differ between these works and our scientific
| xxxvhistory of the new chronology | xxxv
xxxvi | history: fiction or science?
research of chronology. We regard ascribing what weclearly did not say, or speaking on behalf of the NewChronology without our consent as perfectly unac-ceptable. All that we deem worth relating is either al-ready published in our books, or will be formulatedin the upcoming ones. They remain the originalsource for the entire concept of the New Chronology.It is also unacceptable to ascribe our ideas and results,leave alone the basic postulates of our concept to oth-ers. We thoroughly deprecate the use of the term thatwe coined along with the entire concept of NewChronology for the propaganda of views that we donot share.
Let us mention another interesting effect. The re-cent publication of certain authors is clearly deriva-
tive, spawned by the “echoes” of the New Chronology.Such “informational reverberations” are doubtlesslyof use; nevertheless, one has to bear in mind that theyneither constitute the essence of the New Chronology,nor its foundations, namely, natural scientific datingmethods and the new concept of history that evolvedfrom those as our hypothesis. All attempts to replacethe foundations of the New Chronology with derivativeobservations of linguistical or historical nature may cre-ate the illusion of being essential or evidential to the NewChronology. This is untrue. The concept is based onstatistical and astronomical dating methods first andforemost.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy,April 2001
Anatoly T. Fomenko
Chronology 1First volume of History: Fiction or Science series
by A. T. Fomenko and G. V. Nosovskiy
Introducing the Problem
A Criticism of the Scaligerian Chronology
Mathematical and Statistical Dating Methods
Eclipses
Zodiacs
Global Chronology
xxxviii | history: fiction or science?
Publisher’s Advice
History: Fiction or Science? contains data, illustrations, charts and
formulae containing irrefutable evidence of mathematical, statis-
tical and astronomical nature. You may as well skip all of it during
your first reading. They were included in this introductory volume
as ammunition for your eventual discussions with the avid devo-
tees of classical chronology. In fact, before reading this book, you
have most probably been one of such devotees.
After reading History: Fiction or Science? you will develop a more
critical attitude to the dominating historical discourse or even be-
come its antagonist. You will be confronted with natural disbelief
when you share what you’ve learned with others. Now you are very
well armed in face of inevitable scepticism. This book contains
enough solid evidence to silence any historian by the sheer power
of facts and argumentation.