The New Chronology is a fringe theory

Fringe theory

A fringe theory is an idea or a collection of ideas that departs significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study. Examples include ideas that purport to be scientific theories but have little or no scientific support, conspiracy theories, unproven esoteric...

 in history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

, which argues that the conventional chronology

Chronology

Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...

 is fundamentally flawed, that events attributed to antiquity such as the histories of Rome

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

, Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 and Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

 actually occurred during the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, more than a thousand years after the time to which they have conventionally been assigned. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Nikolai Morozov

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov was a known Russian revolutionary who spent about 25 years in prison before turning his attention to various fields of science.- Revolutionary activities :...

, although Jean Hardouin

Jean Hardouin

Jean Hardouin , French classical scholar, was born at Quimper in Brittany.Having acquired a taste for literature in his father's book-shop, he sought and obtained admission into the order of the Jesuits in around 1662...

 can be viewed as an earlier predecessor. The New Chronology is commonly associated with Anatoly Fomenko, although it is a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

s.

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the history of humankind goes only as far back as AD

Anno Domini

and Before Christ are designations used to label or number years used with the Julian and Gregorian calendars....

 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

History: Fiction or Science? which contains this New Chronology was written in the Russian language

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 but has been translated into English.

While some researchers have developed revised chronologies of Classical

Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...

 and Biblical periods that shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages", none of these are as radical as that of the New Chronology. The New Chronology is rejected by mainstream historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

s and is inconsistent with absolute

Absolute dating

Absolute dating is the process of determining an approximate computed age in archaeology and geology. Some scientists prefer the terms chronometric or calendar dating, as use of the word "absolute" implies an unwarranted certainty and precision...

 and relative dating

Relative dating

Relative dating is the science determining the relative order of past events, without necessarily determining their absolute age.In geology rock or superficial deposits, fossils and lithologies can be used to correlate one stratigraphic column with another...

 techniques used in the wider scholarly community

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

. The majority of scientific commentators consider The New Chronology to be pseudoscientific

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

.

History of New Chronology

The idea of chronologies that differ from the conventional chronology can be traced back to at least the early 17th century. Jean Hardouin

Jean Hardouin

Jean Hardouin , French classical scholar, was born at Quimper in Brittany.Having acquired a taste for literature in his father's book-shop, he sought and obtained admission into the order of the Jesuits in around 1662...

 then suggested that many ancient historical documents were much younger than commonly believed to be. In 1685 he published a version of Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder

Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...

's Natural History in which he claimed that most Greek and Roman texts had been forged by Benedictine

Benedictine

Benedictine refers to the spirituality and consecrated life in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century for the cenobitic communities he founded in central Italy. The most notable of these is Monte Cassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict...

 monks. When later questioned on these results, Hardouin stated that he would reveal the monks' reasons in a letter to be revealed only after his death. The executors of his estate were unable to find such a document among his posthumous papers. In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

, examining the current chronology of Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

 and the Ancient Near East

Ancient Near East

The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia , ancient Egypt, ancient Iran The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia...

, expressed discontent with prevailing theories and proposed one of his own, which, basing its study on Apollonius of Rhodes

Apollonius of Rhodes

Apollonius Rhodius, also known as Apollonius of Rhodes , early 3rd century BCE – after 246 BCE, was a poet, and a librarian at the Library of Alexandria...

's Argonautica, changed the traditional dating of the Argonautic Expedition, the Trojan War

Trojan War

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...

, and the Founding of Rome

Founding of Rome

The founding of Rome is reported by many legends, which in recent times are beginning to be supplemented by scientific reconstructions.- Development of the city :...

.

In 1887, Edwin Johnson

Edwin Johnson (historian)

Edwin Johnson , English historian, is best known for his radical criticisms of Christian historiography, continuing scholarship in the vein of Bruno Bauer, S.A. Naber, and Allard Pierson...

 expressed the opinion that early Christian history

Early Christianity

Early Christianity is generally considered as Christianity before 325. The New Testament's Book of Acts and Epistle to the Galatians records that the first Christian community was centered in Jerusalem and its leaders included James, Peter and John....

 was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
In 1909 Otto Rank

Otto Rank

Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's...

 made note of duplications in literary history of a variety of cultures:

...almost all important civilized peoples have early woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities—in short, their national heroes. Especially the history of their birth and of their early years is furnished with phantastic [sic] traits; the amazing similarity, nay literal identity, of those tales, even if they refer to different, completely independent peoples, sometimes geographically far removed from one another, is well known and has struck many an investigator.

The articles stirred a lot of controversy, but ultimately Fomenko failed to win any respected historians to his side. By the early 1990s, Fomenko shifted his focus from trying to convince the scientific community via peer-reviewed publications to publishing books. Beam writes that Fomenko and his colleagues were discovered by the Soviet scientific press in the early 1980s, leading to "a brief period of renown"; a contemporary review from the journal Questions of History complained, "Their constructions have nothing in common with Marxist historical science."

By 1996 his theory had grown to cover Russia, Turkey, China, Europe, and Egypt.

Brief summary

In volumes 1, 2 , 3 and 4 of History: Fiction or Science?, Fomenko and his colleagues make numerous claims:

• Different accounts of the same historical events are often 'assigned' different dates and locations by historians and translators, creating multiple "phantom copies" of these events. These "phantom copies" are often misdated by centuries or even millennia and end up incorporated into conventional chronology.
• This chronology was largely manufactured by Joseph Justus Scaliger
  Joseph Justus Scaliger
  Joseph Justus Scaliger was a French religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and Ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Ancient Egyptian history.-Early life:He was born at Agen, the tenth child and third son of Italian...
  
   in Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360. This chronology was completed by Jesuit Dionysius Petavius
  Denis Pétau
  Denis Pétau , also known as Dionysius Petavius, was a French Jesuit theologian.-Life:Pétau was born at Orléans where he had his initial education; he then attended the University of Paris, where he successfully defended his theses for the degree of Master of Arts, not in Latin, but in Greek...
  
   in De Doctrina Temporum, 1627 (v.1) and 1632 (v.2).
• Archaeological
  Archaeology
  Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
  
   dating, dendrochronological
  Dendrochronology
  Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...
  
   dating, paleographical dating, numismatic dating, carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependent on traditional chronology.
• There is not a single document in existence that can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century. Most 'ancient' artifacts may find other than consensual explanation.
• Histories of Ancient Rome
  Ancient Rome
  Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
  
  , Greece
  Ancient Greece
  Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
  
   and Egypt
  Ancient Egypt
  Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
  
   were crafted during the Renaissance
  Renaissance
  The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
  
   by humanists
  Renaissance humanism
  Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...
  
   and clergy
  Clergy
  Clergy is the generic term used to describe the formal religious leadership within a given religion. A clergyman, churchman or cleric is a member of the clergy, especially one who is a priest, preacher, pastor, or other religious professional....
  
   mostly on the basis of documents of their own making.
• The Old Testament
  Old Testament
  The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
  
   is a rendition of events of the 14th to 16th centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, containing 'prophecies' about 'future' events related in the New Testament
  New Testament
  The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
  
  , which is a rendition of events of AD 1152 to 1185.
• The history of religions runs as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the 11th century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (11th-12th century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (12th-16th century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.
• The most probable prototype of historical Jesus
  Jesus
  Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
  
   was a Byzantine emperor, Andronikos I Komnenos
  Andronikos I Komnenos
  Andronikos I Komnenos was Byzantine Emperor from 1183 to 1185). He was the son of Isaac Komnenos and grandson of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.-Early years:...
  
   (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons.
• The Almagest
  Almagest
  The Almagest is a 2nd-century mathematical and astronomical treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and planetary paths. Written in Greek by Claudius Ptolemy, a Roman era scholar of Egypt,...
  
   of Claudius Ptolemy, traditionally dated to around AD 150 and considered to be the cornerstone of classical history, was compiled in 16th and 17th centuries from astronomical data of the 9th to 16th centuries.
• 37 complete Egyptian horoscope
  Horoscope
  In astrology, a horoscope is a chart or diagram representing the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, the astrological aspects, and sensitive angles at the time of an event, such as the moment of a person's birth. The word horoscope is derived from Greek words meaning "a look at the hours" In...
  
  s found in Denderah, Esna, and other temples have unique valid astronomical solutions with dates ranging from AD 1000 and up to as late as AD 1700.
• The Book of Revelation
  Book of Revelation
  The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...
  
  , as we know it, contains a horoscope that is dated to 25 September - 10 October 1486 compiled by cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin.
• The horoscopes found in Sumerian/Babylonian tablets do not contain sufficient astronomical data; consequently, they have solutions every 30-50 years on the time axis and are therefore useless for purposes of dating;
• The Chinese tables of eclipses are useless for dating, as they contain too many eclipses that did not take place astronomically. Chinese tables of comets, even if true, cannot be used for dating.
• All major inventions like powder and guns, paper and print were made in Europe in the period between the 10th and the 16th centuries.
• Ancient Roman
  Ancient Rome
  Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
  
   and Greek
  Ancient Greece
  Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
  
   statues, showing perfect command of the human anatomy, are fakes crafted in the Renaissance, when such command was for the first time attained.
• There was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by over two centuries of yoke and slavery, because the so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Turkic
  Turkic languages
  The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
  
   spoken as freely as Russian. So, Russia and Turkey were once parts of the same empire. This ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities and the hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). The Mongol "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions of the empire that attempted tax evasion. Tamerlane was probably a Russian warlord.
• Official Russian history is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scholars brought to Russia to legitimize the usurping Romanov dynasty.
• Moscow was founded as late as the mid 14th century. The battle of Kulikovo
  Battle of Kulikovo
  The Battle of Kulikovo was a battle between Tatar Mamai and Muscovy Dmitriy and portrayed by Russian historiography as a stand-off between Russians and the Golden Horde. However, the political situation at the time was much more complicated and concerned the politics of the Northeastern Rus'...
  
   took place in Moscow.
• The tsar Ivan the Terrible is a collation of no fewer than four rulers, representing two rival dynasties: the legitimate Godunov rulers and the ambitious Romanov
  Romanov
  The House of Romanov was the second and last imperial dynasty to rule over Russia, reigning from 1613 until the February Revolution abolished the crown in 1917...
  
   upstarts.
• English history of AD 640–1040 and Byzantine history of AD 378–830 are reflections of the same late medieval original.

Detailed description

According to New Chronology, the traditional chronology consists of four overlapping copies of the "true" chronology, which lasted 350 years, shifted back in time by significant intervals (integer multiples of 350 years), with some further revisions. All events and characters conventionally dated earlier than 11th century are fictional, and represent "phantom reflections" of actual Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 events and characters, brought about by intentional or accidental mis-datings of historical documents. Before the invention of printing

Printing

Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....

, accounts of the same events by different eyewitnesses were sometimes retold several times before being written down, then often went through multiple rounds of translating and copyediting. Names were translated, mispronounced and misspelled to the point where they bore little resemblance to originals. According to Fomenko, this led early chronologists to believe or choose to believe that those accounts described different events and even different countries and time periods. Fomenko justifies this approach by the fact that, in many cases, the original documents are simply not available: Fomenko claims that all the history of the ancient world is known to us from manuscripts that date from the 15th century to the 18th century, but describe events that allegedly happened thousands of years before, the originals regrettably and conveniently lost. For example, the oldest extant manuscripts of monumental treatises on Ancient Roman and Greek history, such as Annals

Annals (Tacitus)

The Annals by Tacitus is a history of the reigns of the four Roman Emperors succeeding Caesar Augustus. The surviving parts of the Annals extensively cover most of the reigns of Tiberius and Nero. The title Annals was probably not given by Tacitus, but derives from the fact that he treated this...

 and Histories

Histories (Herodotus)

The Histories of Herodotus is considered one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. Written from the 450s to the 420s BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, The Histories serves as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that...

, are conventionally dated ca. AD 1100, more than a full millennium after the events they describe, and they did not come to scholars' attention until the 15th century. According to Fomenko, the 15th century is probably when these documents were first written.

Central to Fomenko's New Chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, which he called the "Russian Horde", that played the dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns

Huns

The Huns were a group of nomadic people who, appearing from east of the Volga River, migrated into Europe c. AD 370 and established the vast Hunnic Empire there. Since de Guignes linked them with the Xiongnu, who had been northern neighbours of China 300 years prior to the emergence of the Huns,...

, Goths

Goths

The Goths were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin whose two branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe....

 and Bulgars

Bulgars

The Bulgars were a semi-nomadic who flourished in the Pontic Steppe and the Volga basin in the 7th century.The Bulgars emerge after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire in the 5th century....

, through the Polyane

Polans (eastern)

The Polans ; also Polianians; were a Slavic tribe between the 6th and the 9th century, which inhabited both sides of the Dnieper river from Liubech to Rodnia and also down the lower streams of the rivers Ros', Sula, Stuhna, Teteriv, Irpin', Desna and Pripyat...

, Duleby

Dulebes

The Dulebs or Dulebi were one of the tribal unions of Early East Slavs between the 6th and the 10th centuries. Dulebi were among the twelve East Slavic tribes mentioned in the Primary Chronicle...

, Drevliane

Drevlyans

The Drevlians were a tribe of Early East Slavs between the 6th and the 10th century, which inhabited the territories of Polesia, Right-bank Ukraine west of Polans, down the stream of the rivers Teteriv, Uzh, Ubort, and Stviga...

, Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians

Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...

, and Belarussians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 Horde. For the New Chronologists, peoples such as the Ukrainians

Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...

, Belarussians, Mongols, and others who assert their national independence from Russia, are suffering from a historical delusion.

Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos

Andronikos I Komnenos

Andronikos I Komnenos was Byzantine Emperor from 1183 to 1185). He was the son of Isaac Komnenos and grandson of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.-Early years:...

 (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms; his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons. The historical Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha

Elisha

Elisha is a prophet mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an. His name is commonly transliterated into English as Elisha via Hebrew, Eliseus via Greek and Latin, or Alyasa via Arabic.-Biblical biography:...

 (850-800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII

Pope Gregory VII

Pope St. Gregory VII , born Hildebrand of Sovana , was Pope from April 22, 1073, until his death. One of the great reforming popes, he is perhaps best known for the part he played in the Investiture Controversy, his dispute with Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor affirming the primacy of the papal...

 (1020?-1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea

Basil of Caesarea

Basil of Caesarea, also called Saint Basil the Great, was the bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia, Asia Minor . He was an influential 4th century Christian theologian...

 (330-379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven" - emperor of Western Xia

Western Xia

The Western Xia Dynasty or the Tangut Empire, was known to the Tanguts and the Tibetans as Minyak.The state existed from 1038 to 1227 AD in what are now the northwestern Chinese provinces of Ningxia, Gansu, eastern Qinghai, northern Shaanxi, northeastern Xinjiang, southwest Inner Mongolia, and...

, who reigned in 1032-1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the 'alleged' biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies.

Fomenko also merges Jerusalem, Rome and Troy, contrary to the conventional history that places them in different locations of the Ancient World separated by hundreds of years, and identifies them as: "New Rome" = Gospel Jerusalem (in the period 12-13th centuries) = Troy

Troy

Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...

 = Yoros Castle

Yoros Castle

Yoros Castle is a ruined castle at the confluence of the Bosporus and the Black Sea, to the north of Joshua's Hill, in Istanbul, Turkey. It is also commonly referred to as the Genoese Castle, due to Genoa’s possession of it in the mid-15th century....

. To the south of Yoros Castle

Yoros Castle

Yoros Castle is a ruined castle at the confluence of the Bosporus and the Black Sea, to the north of Joshua's Hill, in Istanbul, Turkey. It is also commonly referred to as the Genoese Castle, due to Genoa’s possession of it in the mid-15th century....

 is Joshua's Hill

Joshua's Hill

Joshua's Hill , a hill located on the Asian shore of Bosporus in Beykoz district of Istanbul, Turkey is a shrine containing a mosque and a tomb dedicated to Saint Joshua . The sacred place, culminating the height of 180-195 meters above sea level, is also an important landmark for vessels coming...

; (allegedly Gospel Calvary

Calvary

Calvary or Golgotha was the site, outside of ancient Jerusalem’s early first century walls, at which the crucifixion of Jesus is said to have occurred. Calvary and Golgotha are the English names for the site used in Western Christianity...

).

The Biblical Temple of Solomon was not destroyed, says Fomenko - it is still known to us as the Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia is a former Orthodox patriarchal basilica, later a mosque, and now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey...

 in Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...

 = Old Testament Jerusalem (in the period 14-16th centuries). The biblical Solomon himself is identified as sultan Suleiman the Magnificent

Suleiman the Magnificent

Suleiman I was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1520 to his death in 1566. He is known in the West as Suleiman the Magnificent and in the East, as "The Lawgiver" , for his complete reconstruction of the Ottoman legal system...

 (1494–1566). The historical Jesus may have been born in 1152 and was crucified around AD 1185 on the hill

Joshua's Hill

Joshua's Hill , a hill located on the Asian shore of Bosporus in Beykoz district of Istanbul, Turkey is a shrine containing a mosque and a tomb dedicated to Saint Joshua . The sacred place, culminating the height of 180-195 meters above sea level, is also an important landmark for vessels coming...

 overlooking the Bosphorus. The city that we now know as Jerusalem was known prior to the 17th century as the nondescript Ottoman

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 village of Al-Quds, where biblical "Palestine" is actually the Palatina, along the Rhine, between Basel, where Erasmus Rotterdamus wrote the "New Testament" and between his hometown Rotterdam. It is also likely it wasn't named "Al-Quds" i.e. "the holy", before Scaliger decided it would have been the "Holy city" of "Jerusalem".

On the other hand, according to Fomenko the word "Rome" is a placeholder and 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

Nile

The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...

 with its capital in Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

. The second and most famous "New Rome" is Constantinople. The third "Rome" is constituted by three different cities: Constantinople (again), Rome in Italy, and Moscow (which Orthodox scholars have long named the third Rome

Third Rome

The term Third Rome describes the idea that some European city, state, or country is the successor to the legacy of the Roman Empire and its successor state, the Byzantine Empire ....

). Rome in Italy was allegedly founded around AD 1380 by Aeneas

Aeneas

Aeneas , in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King Priam of Troy, making Aeneas Priam's second cousin, once removed. The journey of Aeneas from Troy , which led to the founding a hamlet south of...

. Moscow as the third Rome was the capital of the great "Russian Horde". Similarly, the word "Jerusalem" is actually a placeholder rather than a physical location and can refer to different cities at different times and the word "Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

" did not define a state, even not a territory but people fighting for God, for example French St Louis and English Elizabeth called themselves the King/Queen of Israel.

Parallelism between John the Baptist

John the Baptist

John the Baptist was an itinerant preacher and a major religious figure mentioned in the Canonical gospels. He is described in the Gospel of Luke as a relative of Jesus, who led a movement of baptism at the Jordan River...

, Jesus, and Old-Testament prophets implies that the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 was written before the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

. Fomenko claims that the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 was being written until the Council of Trent

Council of Trent

The Council of Trent was the 16th-century Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. It is considered to be one of the Church's most important councils. It convened in Trent between December 13, 1545, and December 4, 1563 in twenty-five sessions for three periods...

 (1545–1563), when the list of canonical books was established, and all apocryphal books were ordered to be destroyed.

As another example of history duplicates, according to Fomenko, Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, Plotinus

Plotinus

Plotinus was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition...

 and Gemistus Pletho

Gemistus Pletho

Georgius Gemistus — later called Plethon or Pletho — was a Greek scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy. He was one of the chief pioneers of the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe...

 are one and the same person - according to him, some texts by or about Pletho were mis-dated and today believed to be texts by or about Plotinus or Plato. Similar duplicates include Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite was a judge of the Areopagus who, as related in the Acts of the Apostles, , was converted to Christianity by the preaching of the Apostle Paul during the Areopagus sermon...

, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, also known as Pseudo-Denys, was a Christian theologian and philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century, the author of the Corpus Areopagiticum . The author is identified as "Dionysos" in the corpus, which later incorrectly came to be attributed to Dionysius...

 and Dionysius Petavius. Florence and the House of Medici bankrolled and played an important role in creation of the magnificent 'Roman' and 'Greek' past.

Fomenko's theory is both Eurocentric and Eurasian, describing an Empire that was spreading worldwide and falling apart simultaneously.

Statistical correlation of texts

One of Fomenko's simplest methods is statistical correlation

Correlation

In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....

 of texts. His basic assumption is that a text which describes a sequence of events will devote more space to more important events (for example, a period of war

War

War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

 or an unrest

Unrest

Unrest is a sociological phenomenon, for instance:* Industrial unrest* Labor unrest* Rebellion* Riot-Notable historical unrests:* 19th century Luddites* 1978–79 Winter of Discontent...

 will have much more space devoted to than a period of peace

Peace

Peace is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict. Commonly understood as the absence of hostility, peace also suggests the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, the...

ful, non-eventful years), and that this irregularity will remain visible in other descriptions of the period. For each analysed text, a function

Function (mathematics)

In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...

 is devised which maps each year mentioned in the text with the number of pages (lines, letters) devoted in the text to its description (which could be zero). The function of the two texts are then compared.

For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary history of Rome written by Titus Livius with a modern history of Rome written by Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 V. S. Sergeev, calculating that the two have high correlation

Correlation

In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....

, and thus that they describe the same period of history, which is undisputed. He also compares modern texts which describe different periods, and calculates low correlation, as expected. However, when he compares, for example, the ancient history of Rome and the medieval history of Rome, he calculates a high correlation, and concludes that ancient history of Rome is a copy of medieval history of Rome, thus clashing with mainstream accounts.

Statistical correlation of dynasties

In a somewhat similar manner, Fomenko compares two dynasties

Dynasty

A dynasty is a sequence of rulers considered members of the same family. Historians traditionally consider many sovereign states' history within a framework of successive dynasties, e.g., China, Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire...

 of rulers using statistical methods. First, he creates a database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 of rulers, containing relevant information on each of them. Then, he creates "survey codes" for each pair of the rulers, which contain a number which describes degree of the match of each considered property of two rulers. For example, one of the properties is the way of death: if two rulers were both poisoned, they get value of +1 in their property of the way of death; if one ruler was poisoned and another killed in combat, they get -1; and if one was poisoned, and another died of illness, they get 0 (there is possibility that chroniclers were not impartial and that different descriptions nonetheless describe the same person). An important property is the length of the rule.

Fomenko lists a number of pairs of seemingly unrelated dynasties – for example, dynasties of kings of Israel and emperors of late Western Roman Empire

Western Roman Empire

The Western Roman Empire was the western half of the Roman Empire after its division by Diocletian in 285; the other half of the Roman Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire, commonly referred to today as the Byzantine Empire....

 (AD 300-476) – and claims that this method demonstrates correlations between their reigns. (Graphs which show just the length of the rule in the two dynasties are the most widely known, however Fomenko's conclusions are also based on other parameters, as described above.) He also claims that the regnal history of the 17th-20th centuries never shows correlation of "dynastic flows" with each other, therefore Fomenko insists history was multiplied and outstretched into imaginary antiquity to justify this or other "royal" pretensions.

Fomenko uses for the demonstration of correlation between the reigns exclusively the data from the Chronological Tables of J. Blair (Moscow 1808-1809). Fomenko says that Blair’s tables are all the more valuable to us since they were compiled in an epoch adjacent to the time when Scaligerian chronology. According to Fomenko these tables contain clearer signs of “Scaligerite activity” which were subsequently buried under layers of paint and plaster by historians of the 19-20th centuries.

Astronomical evidence

Fomenko examines astronomical events described in ancient texts and suggests that the chronology is actually medieval. For example:

• He explains the mysterious drop in the value of the lunar acceleration parameter D" between the years AD 700-1300, which the American astrophycist Robert Newton
  Robert Russell Newton
  Robert Russell Newton, also R. R. Newton was an American physicist, astronomer, and historian of science.Newton was Supervisor of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Newton was known for his book The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy . In Newton's view, Ptolemy was "the most...
  
   had explained in terms of non-gravitational forces. By eliminating those anomalous early eclipses the New Chronology produces a constant value of D" beginning around AD 1000.

• He associates initially the Star of Bethlehem
  Star of Bethlehem
  In Christian tradition, the Star of Bethlehem, also called the Christmas Star, revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi, or "wise men", and later led them to Bethlehem. The star appears in the nativity story of the Gospel of Matthew, where magi "from the east" are inspired by the star to travel to...
  
   with the AD 1140 (±20) supernova
  Supernova
  A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...
  
   (now Crab Nebula
  Crab Nebula
  The Crab Nebula  is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus...
  
  ) and the Crucifixion Eclipse
  Chronology of Jesus
  The chronology of Jesus aims to establish a historical order for some of the events of the life of Jesus in the four canonical gospels. The Christian gospels were primarily written as theological documents rather than historical chronicles and their authors showed little interest in an absolute...
  
   with the total solar eclipse
  Solar eclipse
  As seen from the Earth, a solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, and the Moon fully or partially blocks the Sun as viewed from a location on Earth. This can happen only during a new moon, when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction as seen from Earth. At least...
  
   of AD 1170 (±20). In the course of further research he came to the conclusion that Crab Nebula
  Crab Nebula
  The Crab Nebula  is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus...
  
   supernova
  Supernova
  A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...
  
   could not have exploded in AD 1054, but probably in AD 1153. He connects it with total eclipse of AD 1186. Moreover he holds in strong doubt the veracity of 'ancient' Chinese astronomical data.

• He argues that the star catalog in the Almagest, ascribed to the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, was compiled in 15th to 16th centuries AD, with this objective in sight develops new methods of dating old stellar catalogues and proves that Almagest is based on the data collected between AD 600 and 1300, whereby the telluric obliquity is well taken into account.

• He refines and completes Morozov's
  Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov
  Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov was a known Russian revolutionary who spent about 25 years in prison before turning his attention to various fields of science.- Revolutionary activities :...
  
   analysis of some ancient horoscopes, most notably, the so-called Dendera Zodiacs
  Dendera Temple complex
  Dendera Temple complex, . located about 2.5 km south-east of Dendera, Egypt. It is one of the best-preserved temple complexes in Egypt...
  
  —two horoscopes drawn on the ceiling of the temple of Hathor—and comes to the conclusion that they correspond to either the 11th and 13th centuries AD. Moreover he makes in his vol.3 of 'History:Fiction or Science' series final computer aided dating of all 37 Egyptian horoscopes that contain sufficient astronomical data, and shows they all fit into xi-xix timeframe. Traditional history usually either interprets these horoscopes as belonging to the 1st century BC or suggests that they weren't meant to match any date at all.

• In his final analysis of an eclipse triad described by the ancient Greek Thucydides
  Thucydides
  Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
  
   in History of the Peloponnesian War
  History of the Peloponnesian War
  The History of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, fought between the Peloponnesian League and the Delian League . It was written by Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the war. It is widely considered a classic and regarded as one of the...
  
  , Fomenko dates the eclipses to AD 1039, 1046 and 1057. Because of the layered structure of the manuscript, he concludes that Thucydides actually lived in medieval times and in describing the Peloponnesian War
  Peloponnesian War
  The Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BC, was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its empire against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases...
  
   between the Sparta
  Sparta
  Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
  
  ns and Athenians
  Athens
  Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
  
   he was actually describing the conflict between the medieval Navarrans
  Kingdom of Navarre
  The Kingdom of Navarre , originally the Kingdom of Pamplona, was a European kingdom which occupied lands on either side of the Pyrenees alongside the Atlantic Ocean....
  
   and Catalans
  History of Catalonia
  The territory that now constitutes the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain, and the adjoining Catalan region of France, was first settled during the Middle Palaeolithic...
  
   in Spain from AD 1374 to 1387.

• Fomenko claims that the abundance of dated astronomical records in cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia is of little use for dating of events as the astronomical information they contain has solutions on the time axis X approx. every 30–40 years.

Rejection of common dating methods

On archaeological dating methods, Fomenko concludes that:
Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...

 is rejected with a claim that it, for dating of objects much older than the oldest still living trees, isn't an absolute, but a relative dating

Relative dating

Relative dating is the science determining the relative order of past events, without necessarily determining their absolute age.In geology rock or superficial deposits, fossils and lithologies can be used to correlate one stratigraphic column with another...

 method, and thus dependent on traditional chronology. Fomenko specifically points to a break of dendrochronological scales around AD 1000.

Fomenko also cites a number of cases where carbon dating of a series of objects of known age gave significantly different dates. He also alleges undue cooperation between physicists and archaeologists in obtaining the dates, since most radiocarbon dating labs only accept samples with an age estimate suggested by historians or archaeologists. Fomenko also claims that carbon dating over the range of AD 1 to 2000 is inaccurate because it has too many sources of error that are either guessed at or completely ignored, and that calibration is done with a statistically meaningless number of samples.
Consequently, Fomenko concludes that carbon dating is not accurate enough to be used on historical scale.

Fomenko rejects numismatic dating as circular, being based on the traditional chronology, and points to cases of similar coins being minted in distant periods, unexplained long periods with no coins minted and cases of mismatch of numismatic dating with historical accounts.

He fully agrees with absolute dating methods for clay tablets or coins like thermoluminescence dating, optically stimulated luminescence dating, archaeomagnetic, metallographic dating, but points out that their precision does not allow for comprehensive pinpointing on the time axis either.

Fomenko also condemns the common archaeological practice of submitting samples for dating accompanied with an estimate of the expected age. He points out that convergence of uncertainty in archaeological dating methods proves strictly nothing per se. Even if the sum S of probabilities of the veracity of event produced by N dating methods exceeds 1.00 it does not mean that the event has taken place with 100% probability.

Popularity

Despite criticism, Fomenko has published and sold over one million copies of his books in his native Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

. Many Internet forum

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

s have appeared which aim to supplement his work with additional amateur research. His critics have suggested that Fomenko's version of history appealed to the Russian reading public by keeping alive an imperial consciousness to replace their disillusionment with the failures of Communism and post-Communist corporate oligarchies

Oligarchy

Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with an elite class distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, commercial, and/or military legitimacy...

.

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, a former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist, and one of the greatest chess players of all time....

 is a supporter of Fomenko; Billington writes that the theory "might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia" if not for Kasparov's writing in support of it in the magazine Ogoniok. Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko's conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own. Specifically, regarding the alleged Dark Ages, Kasparov was incredulous of the usual view that art and culture died and were not revived until the Renaissance. Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of Byzantium

Byzantium

Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion...

 could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. However, Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the New Chronology.

Aleksandr Zinovyev

Aleksandr Zinovyev

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinovyev was a prominent Russian logician and dissident writer of social critique....

 calls The New Chronology one of the major scientific breakthroughs of the XX century.

Reception

Although Fomenko is a well-respected mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, his historical theories have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

. Russian critics tended to see Fomenko's New Chronology as "an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk ... since the fall of Communism." Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia."

In 2004 Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "New Chronology" the anti-prize of the Moscow International Book Fair called "Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a euphemism for a vulgar Russian word meaning disaster or fiasco) in the category "Honorary illiterate" ("Pochotnaya bezgramota") awarded for the worst book published in Russia.

Critics have accused Fomenko of altering the data to improve the fit with his ideas and have noted that he violates a key rule of statistics

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.David Perkins, a geneticist, coined the term "myside bias" referring to a preference for "my" side of an issue...

 by selecting matches from the historical record which support his chronology, while ignoring those which do not, creating artificial, better-than-chance correlations, and that these practices undermine Fomenko's statistical arguments. The new chronology was given a comprehensive critical analysis in a round table on "The 'Myths' of New Chronology" chaired by the dean of the department of history of Moscow State University

Moscow State University

Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

 in December 1999. One of the participants in that round table, the distinguished Russian archaeologist, Valentin Yanin

Valentin Yanin

Valentin Lavrentievich Yanin is a leading Russian historian who has authored 700 books and articles. He has also edited a number of important journals and primary sources, including works on medieval Russian law, sphragistics and epigraphy, archaeology and history...

, compared Fomenko's work to "the sleight of hand trickery of a David Copperfield

David Copperfield (illusionist)

David Copperfield is an Emmy Award-winning American illusionist, and was described by Forbes as the most commercially successful magician in history. Copperfield's network specials have been nominated for 38 Emmy Awards and won a total of 21 Emmys...

."

James Billington

James H. Billington

Lord LeBron James Hadley Billington is an American academic. He is the thirteenth Librarian of the United States Congress.-Early years:...

, formerly professor of Russian history at Harvard and Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 and currently the Librarian of Congress placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington describes Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire." A French reviewer of Billington's book noted approvingly his concern with the phantasmagorical conceptions of Fomenko about the global "new chronology."

H. G. van Bueren, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Utrecht, concluded his scathing review of Fomenko's work on the application of mathematics and astronomy to historical data as follows:

It is surprising, to say the least, that a well-known (Dutch) publisher could produce an expensive book of such doubtful intellectual value, of which the only good word that can be said is that it contains an enormous amount of factual historical material, untidily ordered, true; badly written, yes; mixed-up with conjectural nonsense, sure; but still, much useful stuff. For the rest of the book is absolutely worthless. It reminds one of the early Soviet attempts to produce tendentious science

Pathological science

Pathological science is the process in science in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions". The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory...

 (Lysenko

Lysenkoism

Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...

!), of polywater

Polywater

Polywater was a hypothetical polymerized form of water that was the subject of much scientific controversy during the late 1960s. By 1969 the popular press had taken notice, and by 1970 doubts about its authenticity were being circulated. By 1973 it was found to be illusory...

, of cold fusion

Cold fusion

Cold fusion, also called low-energy nuclear reaction , refers to the hypothesis that nuclear fusion might explain the results of a group of experiments conducted at ordinary temperatures . Both the experimental results and the hypothesis are disputed...

, and of modern creationism

Creationism

Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

. In brief: a useless and misleading book.

Convergence of methods in archaeological dating

While Fomenko rejects commonly accepted dating methods, archaeologists, conservators and other scientists make extensive use of such techniques which have been rigorously examined and refined during decades of use. While it is known that radiometric dating

Radiometric dating

Radiometric dating is a technique used to date materials such as rocks, usually based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates...

 methods can only provide approximate dates (see also this discussion of radiocarbon dating), the uncertainty associated with each method is known and limited. When several dating methods are used in conjunction, they usually converge to produce similar ages for objects from the same layer of a given archaeological site. Independent scientific absolute dating methods include thermoluminescence dating

Thermoluminescence dating

Thermoluminescence dating is the determination, by means of measuring the accumulated radiation dose, of the time elapsed since material containing crystalline minerals was either heated or exposed to sunlight...

, optically stimulated luminescence

Optically stimulated luminescence

In physics, optically stimulated luminescence is a method for measuring doses from ionizing radiation.The method makes use of electrons trapped between the valence and conduction bands in the crystalline structure of certain types of matter . The trapping sites are imperfections of the lattice -...

 dating, archaeomagnetic dating

Archaeomagnetic dating

Archaeomagnetic dating is the study and interpretation of the signatures of the Earth's magnetic field at past times recorded in archaeological materials. These paleomagnetic signatures are fixed when ferromagnetic materials such as magnetite cool below the Curie point, freezing the magnetic moment...

, and in some cases palaeoentomology

Invertebrate paleontology

Invertebrate paleontology is sometimes described as Invertebrate paleozoology or Invertebrate paleobiology....

, as well as relative dating techniques, relying on stratigraphy

Stratigraphy

Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....

 or the seriation

Seriation (archaeology)

In archaeology, seriation is a relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order. Where absolute dating methods, such as carbon dating, cannot be applied, archaeologists have to use relative dating methods to date...

 of different artifact types.

In the specific case of dendrochronology

Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...

, Fomenko claims that this fails as an absolute dating method because of gaps in the record. However, independent dendrochronological sequences beginning with living trees from various parts of North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 and Europe extend back 12,400 years into the past. Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. These and other data have provided a calibration curve for radiocarbon dating whose internal error does not exceed ±163 years over the entire 26,000 years of the curve.

In fact, archaeologists have developed a fully anchored dendrochronology series going back past 10,000 BCE. "The absolutely dated tree-ring chronology now extends back to 12,410 cal BP (10,461 BC)."

Misuse of historical sources and forced pattern matching

Critics of Fomenko's theory claim that his use of historical sources is highly selective and ignores the basic principles of sound historical scholarship.

Fomenko ... provides no fair-minded review of the historical literature about a topic with which he deals, quotes only those sources that serve his purposes, uses evidence in ways that seem strange to professionally-trained historians and asserts the wildest speculation as if it has the same status as the information common to the conventional historical literature.

They also note that his method of statistically correlating of texts is very rough, because it does not take into account the many possible sources of variation in length outside of "importance". They maintain that differences in language, style, and scope, as well as the frequently differing views and focuses of historians, which are manifested in a different notion of "important events," make quantifying historical writings a dubious proposition at best. What's more, Fomenko's critics allege that the parallelisms he reports are often derived by alleged forcing by Fomenko of the data – rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern.

For example, on the one hand Fomenko asserts that the vast majority of ancient sources are either irreparably distorted duplicate accounts of the same events or later forgeries. In his elision of Jesus and Pope Gregory VII (Book 2, Chapter 2, pg 51) he ignores the otherwise vast dissimilarities between their reported lives and focuses on the similarity of their appointment to religious office by baptism. (The evangelical Jesus is traditionally believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his encounter with John the Baptist. In contrast, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years and was born 8 years after the death of John Crescentius, according to the available primary sources.)

Critics allege that many of the supposed correlations of regnal durations are the product of the selective parsing and blending of the dates, events, and individuals mentioned in the original text. Another point raised by critics is that Fomenko does not explain his altering the data (changing the order of rulers, dropping rulers, combining rulers, treating interregna as rulers, switching between theologians and emperors, etc.) preventing a duplication of the effort and therefore hinting that his results may have a pathological science

Pathological science

Pathological science is the process in science in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions". The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory...

 aspect to them akin to N-rays over a century ago and effectively making this whole theory an Ad hoc hypothesis.

Selectivity in reference to astronomical phenomena

Critics point out that Fomenko's discussion of astronomical phenomena tends to be selective, choosing isolated examples that support the New Chronology and ignoring the large bodies of data that provide statistically supported evidence for the conventional dating. For his dating of the Almagest star catalog, Fomenko arbitrarily selected eight stars from the more than 1000 stars in the catalog, one of which (Arcturus) has a large systematic error. This star has a dominant effect on Fomenko's dating. Statistical analysis using the same method for all "fast" stars points to the antiquity of the Almagest star catalog. Rawlins points out further that Fomenko's statistical analysis got the wrong date for the Almagest because he took as constant Earth's obliquity

Axial tilt

In astronomy, axial tilt is the angle between an object's rotational axis, and a line perpendicular to its orbital plane...

 when it is a variable that changes at a very slow, but known, rate.

Fomenko's studies ignore the abundance of dated astronomical records in cuneiform

Cuneiform

Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot*Cuneiform Records, a music record label...

 texts from Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...

. Among these texts is a series of astronomical diaries, which records precise astronomical observations of the Moon and planets, often dated in terms of the reigns of known historical figures extending back to the 6th century BCE. Astronomical retrocalculations for all these moving objects allow us to date these observations, and consequently the rulers' reigns, to within a single day. The observations are sufficiently redundant that only a small portion of them are sufficient to date a text to a unique year in the period 750 BCE to 100 CE. The dates obtained agree with the accepted chronology. In addition, F. R. Stephenson has demonstrated through a systematic study of a large number of Babylonia

Babylonia

Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia , with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as a major power when Hammurabi Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as...

n, Ancient and Medieval European, and Chinese

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 records of eclipse observations that they can be dated consistently with conventional chronology at least as far back as 600 BCE. In contrast to Fomenko's missing centuries, Stephenson's studies of eclipse observations find an accumulated uncertainty in the timing of the rotation of the earth of 420 seconds at 400 BCE, and only 80 seconds at 1000 CE.

Magnitude and consistency of conspiracy theory

Fomenko claims that world history prior to 1600 was deliberately falsified for political reasons. The consequences of this conspiracy theory are twofold. Documents that conflict with New Chronology are said to have been edited or fabricated by conspirators (mostly Western European historians and humanists of late 16th to 17th centuries). The lack of documents directly supporting New Chronology and conflicting traditional history is said to be thanks to the majority of such documents being destroyed by the same conspirators.

Consequently, there are many thousands of documents that are considered authentic in traditional history, but not in New Chronology. Fomenko often uses "falsified" documents, which he dismisses in other contexts, to prove a point. For example, he analyzes the Tartar Relation and arrives at the conclusion that Mongolia

Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...

n capital of Karakorum

Karakorum

Karakorum was the capital of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, and of the Northern Yuan in the 14-15th century. Its ruins lie in the northwestern corner of the Övörkhangai Province of Mongolia, near today's town of Kharkhorin, and adjacent to the Erdene Zuu monastery...

 was located in Central Russia (equated with present-day Yaroslavl

Yaroslavl

Yaroslavl is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historical part of the city, a World Heritage Site, is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers. It is one of the Golden Ring cities, a group of historic cities...

.) However, the Tartar Relation makes several statements that are at odds with New Chronology (such as that Batu Khan

Batu Khan

Batu Khan was a Mongol ruler and founder of the Ulus of Jochi , the sub-khanate of the Mongol Empire. Batu was a son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan. His ulus was the chief state of the Golden Horde , which ruled Rus and the Caucasus for around 250 years, after also destroying the armies...

 and Russian duke Yaroslav are two distinct people). Those are said by Fomenko to have been introduced into the original text by later editors.

Many of the rulers that Fomenko claim are medieval doppelganger

Doppelgänger

In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...

s moved in the imaginary past have left behind vast numbers of coins. Numismatists have made innumerable identifications of coins to rulers known from ancient sources. For instance, several Roman emperors issued coinage featuring at least three of their names, consistent with those found in written sources, and there are frequent examples of joint coinage between known royal family members, as well as overstrikes

Overstrike (numismatics)

In Numismatics overstrike refers to the image on a coin which has been coined more than once. Overstriking is done deliberately when the first strike is unsatisfactory, or accidentally if the blank slips out of place or if the dies judder, resulting in a slight doubling of the design.Sometimes old...

by kings who were known enemies.

Ancient coins in Greek and Latin are unearthed to this day in vast quantities from Britain to India. For Fomenko's theories to be correct, this could only be explained by counterfeit on a very grand and consistent scale, as well as a complete dismissal of all numismatic analyses of hoard findings, coin styles etc.

External links

Новая Хронология "Chronotron" project

• Series "History: Fiction or Science?" Ep. 3: Methods (with English Subtitles)
• Article "New Hypothetical Chronology and Concept of the English History. British Empire as a Direct Successor of Byzantine-Roman Empire. (Short Scheme)" by A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskij
• New Chronology of the World History at www.univer.omsk.su
• History & Chronology
• http://lib.ru/FOMENKOAT/engltr.txt
• The Theft of the Millenium
• A debunking of Fomenko's theories: Who Lost the Middle Ages? Fomenkology. Critical evaluation of New Chronology of Anatoly Fomenko