New Chronology (Fomenko)
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The New Chronology of Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is an attempt to rewrite world chronology, based on his conclusion that world chronology as we know it today is fundamentally flawed. The ideas of the New Chronology are a direct continuation of earlier theories of Nikolai Morozov. The theory is commonly associated with the name of Fomenko, although it is, in fact, a collaboration of Fomenko with several other Russian mathematicians, most important being Gleb Vladimirovich Nosovsky.
"New Chronology" is considerably more compact than conventional history, because all of the ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages, and the Dark Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, the history of humankind goes only as far as AD 800, we have almost no information about events between AD 800-1000, and most historical events we know took place in AD 1000-1500.
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Fomenko's claims
Fomenko's theory claims that the traditional chronology consists of four overlapping copies of the "true" chronology, shifted back in time by significant intervals (from 300 to 2000 years), with some further revisions. For example, Fomenko claims that Jesus is the same person as the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850-800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?-1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330-379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven" - emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032-1048). Further, John the Baptist baptized Jesus, someone named Maxim baptized St. Basil, the prophet Elijah was the predecessor of Elisha, and John Crescentius (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04484c.htm) was in some way a predecessor of Pope Gregory VII; consequently, according to Fomenko, all of them are also 'reflections' of the same person. There are clearly some corners being cut - the evangelical Jesus is believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his baptism. On the other hand, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years, and he was born 8 years after the death of John Crescentius. Fomenko writes this off as a mistake of official history. Merging together the biographies of the aforementioned people requires also to merge cities, because conventional history places them throughout the entire ancient world, from Jerusalem to Rome. Fomenko identifies all their cities with each other: "New Rome" = Constantinople = Jerusalem = Troy. The Biblical Temple of Solomon was not completely destroyed, says Fomenko - it is still known to us as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Jesus was born in 1053 and crucified around 1085 on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The city that we now know as Jerusalem was known prior to the 15th century as a nondescript Palestinian village of Al-Quds.
On the other hand, according to Fomenko the word "Rome" can signify any one of several different cities and kingdoms. The "First Rome" or "Ancient Rome" or "Mizraim" is an ancient Egyptian kingdom in the delta of the Nile with its capital in Alexandria. The second and most famous "New Rome" is Constantinople. The Italian Rome is at least third in the list of cities known as "Rome"; it was allegedly founded around 1380 by Aeneas.
Parallelism between John the Baptist, Jesus, and Old-Testament prophets implies that the New Testament was being written simultaneously with the Old Testament. Fomenko claims that the Bible was being written until the Council of Trent (1545-1563), when the list of canonical books was established, and all apocryphal books were ordered destroyed.
As another unrelated example, according to Fomenko, Plato, Plotinus and Gemistus Pletho are one and the same person - according to him, some texts by or about Pletho were misdated and today believed to be texts by or about Plotinus or Plato.
Supporting evidence
The facts most frequently cited as proof of Fomenko's claims by his supporters fall into two general categories. The first category is astronomical evidence. In his books Fomenko names several solar and lunar eclipses described by ancient authors and claims that these eclipses fit their descriptions more accurately if they are dated according to his theory. He associates the Star of Bethlehem with one of the most famous historical supernovae - the one observed in 1054 AD ( thus justifying the 1053 year shift ). His analysis of the star catalogue Almagest claim that the catalogue, ascribed to the ancient astonomer Claudius Ptolemy, was created between 600 and 1300 AD. The second category is the existence of "dynastical parallelisms". Fomenko's books list a number of pairs of seemingly unrelated dynasties - for example, dynasties of kings of Old Israel and emperors of late Western Roman Empire ( 300-476 AD ) - and claims to demonstrate correlations between their reign durations. However, these parallelisms are often derived by forcing the data - rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern.
History of New Chronology
The underlying ideas of existence of duplicates in conventional chronology can be traced back to Isaac Newton in early 18th century and Nikolai Morozov in 1900's. Newton restricted his attention to chronology of ancient Egypt and Israel. Several historians in 18th and 19th century ( such as Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), Edwin Johnson (1842-1901) ) suggested that many ancient historical documents were much younger than commonly believed to be. Morozov was the first to claim the existence of correlations between the dynasties of Old-Testament kings and Roman emperors and to suggest that the entire chronology prior to the 1st century BC is wrong.
Fomenko became interested in Morozov's theories sometime in 1973-74. In 1980, together with a few colleagues from the mathematics department of Moscow State University, he published several articles on "new mathematical methods in history" in peer-reviewed journals. The articles stirred a lot of controversy, but ultimately Fomenko failed to win any respected historians to his side. By 1990 Fomenko gave up trying to convince the scientific community and focused on publishing popular books.
By 2005 his theory had grown to cover all of the Old World, from England and Ireland to China.
Conclusion
Fomenko is a well-respected mathematician, but does not have any formal education in history. He expresses unfavorable opinions of radiocarbon and other modern methods of dating in his books and tends to use math, particularly statistics, in his historical research. Besides, he has habits of using references to his own former books or to books that are practically impossible for a casual reader to find and to choose only the facts that he finds convenient for his theory and ignore the rest. Unsurprisingly, his views on history are not shared by any respected historians, and his theory is commonly regarded as pseudoscience.
While Fomenko's theories are not very well known in the West, he has published and sold millions of copies of his books in Russia. The list of his supporters even includes such famous figures as Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
External links
- http://www.revisedhistory.org/Investigation-eng-history.htm
- http://www.univer.omsk.su/foreign/fom/fom.htm
- http://www.jesus1053.com/en/index.html
- http://lib.ru/FOMENKOAT/engltr.txt
- a debunking of Fomenko's theories (http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id13.html)de:Neue Chronologie (Fomenko)