Blog Archive

11.11.2007

Anatoly Fomenko and the New Chronology

Who is Antatoly Fomenko and what is the New Chronology?

To introduce the subject, I have:
1) pasted a few passages from wikipedia which includes a 16-point summary, which is followed by
2) summaries of my 50+ posts from the "History or Science" thread in the Breakfornews.com forum . My posts often have excerpts from Fomenko's first two History: Fiction or Science books (Chronology 1 and Chronology 2) including chapter or page numbers. The first two books, like I mentioned in my first post, can be read in their entirety at Google Books.

For those that may think that shortening the timeline of history is a completely crackpot idea, keep in mind that the venerated analytical mind of Isaac Newton questioned the standard chronology as well, even writing a book on it called The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended . My guess is that most modern Newton biographers avoided mentioning his chronological research, or summarized this aspect of his life as simply a profound obsession with the Christian bible.

I don't necessarily agree with everything that Fomenko writes. Some of his conjectures are really out there (like suggesting, though not that strongly, that Moses' Ark of the Covenant may be equivalent to the sacred black stone in Islam's Kaaba), but I agree with the general premise that little evidence exists today for the "Dark Ages" or for events before 1000 A.D.


FROM WIKIPEDIA:
New Chronology (Fomenko)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 ideas of Nikolai Morozov, and may have had their origin in the theories of the French scholar Jean Hardouin. The chronology is commonly associated with the name of Fomenko, although it is, in fact, a collaboration of Fomenko with several other Russian mathematicians, including Gleb Vladimirovich Nosovsky.

The "New Chronology" is radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all of ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages and Antiquity, and the Early Middle Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, the history of humankind goes only as far back 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.

These views are entirely rejected by mainstream scholarship. While some mainstream researchers have offered revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical history which do shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages," none of these revisionist chronologies are as radical as Fomenko's: the events which are traditionally assumed to have happened in the centuries before AD 1 are still thought to have happened thousands of years ago, not hundreds of years ago as in Fomenko's timeline

.....

History of New Chronology

The idea of chronologies different from the conventional chronology can be traced back to at least the early 17th century. Jean Hardouin 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's Natural History in which he claimed that most Greek and Roman texts had been forged by Benedictine 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.[1] In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton, examining the current chronology of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East, expressed discontent with prevailing theories and proposed one of his own, which, basing its study on Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, changed the traditional dating of the Argonautic Expedition, the Trojan War, and the Founding of Rome.[2][3]

In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed the opinion that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.[4] In 1909 Otto Rank 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.[5]

Nikolai 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.[citation needed]

Fomenko became interested in Morozov's problematic theories in 1973. 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 the early 1990s, Fomenko shifted his focus from trying to convince the scientific community via peer-reviewed publications to publishing books. His books range from popular to rather involved, yet accessible to educated readers.

By 2005 his theory had grown to cover all of the Old World, from England and Ireland to China

.....

Brief summary

In volumes 1, 2 and 3 of History: Fiction or Science?, Fomenko and his colleagues claim:

  1. That 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;
  2. That this chronology was largely manufactured by Joseph Justus Scaliger in Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360;
  3. That this chronology was completed by jesuit Dionysius Petavius in De Doctrina Temporum, 1627 (v.1) and 1632 (v.2);
  4. That archaeological dating, dendrochronological dating, paleographical dating, numismatic dating, carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependent on traditional chronology;that their use in conjunction as 'confiming' one another is a statistical fallacy - probabilities can't be added.
  5. That there is not a single document in existence that can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century; that most 'ancient' artifacts may find other then consensual explanation;
  6. That histories of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy mostly on the basis of documents of their own making;
  7. That the Old Testament is a rendition of events of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, containing 'prophecies' about 'future' events related in the New Testament, which is a rendition of events of 1153 to 1186 AD;
  8. That the history of religions runs as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the XI century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (XI-XII century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (XII-XVI century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, and Islam;
  9. That the most probable prototype of historical Jesus was Andronicus (allegedly AD1153 to 1186), the emperor of Byzantine; known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons;
  10. That the Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy, traditionally dated to around 150 AD and considered to be the corner stone of classical history, was compiled in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from astronomical data of the ninth to sixteenth centuries.
  11. That 37 complete Egyptian horoscopes found in Denderah, Esna, and other temples have unique valid astronomical solutions with dates ranging from 1000 AD and up to as late as 1700 AD;
  12. That the Book of Revelation we know of contains a horoscope that is dated to 25 September - 10 October 1486 compiled by cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin.
  13. That the horoscopes found in Sumerian/Babylonian tablets do not contain sufficient astronomical data consequently they have solutions every 30-50 yrs on the time axis and are therefore useless for purposes of dating;
  14. That the Chinese tables of eclipses are useless for dating as they contain too many eclipses that did not take place astronomically; that Chinese tables of comets even if they were true can't be used for dating;
  15. That all major inventions like powder and guns, paper and print were made in Europe in tenth to sixteenth centuries;
  16. That Ancient Roman and Greek statues, showing perfect command of the human anatomy are fakes crafted in the Renaissance when, according to Fomenko, such command was for the first time attained.



A list of 50+ posts by me discussing Fomenko or New Chronology:


SUMMARY ARTICLES
  • A good summary of Chronology 1 My post talks about the summary article "The paradigm of the New Mathematically Correct Chronology" written by a user (flash_dancer) of the abovetopsecret forum on 10/9/2006, accessible directly here .
    • The main change I spotted in Chronology 2 (and which differs from that summary post) is that Fomenko adds about another 100 years or so to the estimated date of Jesus's crucifixion based on his dating of the 3-hour solar eclipse in the Gospels, "Now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land unto the ninth hour" (Matthew 27:45). Fomenko's discussion of the true dating of the evangelical eclipse is on pages 52-57 here
      http://books.google.com/books?q=fomenko+true+dating+evangelical+eclipse&btnG=Search+Books Some interesting medieval artwork on pages 55 and 56 concerning the crucifixion depiction with the sun and moon overhead.So, Fomenko's date for the crucifixion is now: 1185 May 1.
    • Excerpt from that summary post about Roman numerals and dates: "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.

      The first method: abbreviated form of recording. For instance, "the III century since Christ" could be recorded briefly as "X.III", "X" being the first letter of the Greek word XPICTOC (Christ). The letter X is one of the prevalent mediaeval anagrams for the name of Christ. Thus, the phrase "Christ’s Ist century"’ when abbreviated, could read as "X.I", the phrase "Christ’s II century" could read as "X.II", and so on. These abbreviations may possibly have caused the appearance of the contemporary designation for centuries. However, as of a certain later time the mediaeval chronologists suggested that the letter "X" in the beginning of a date should stand for the figure of "ten". Such interpretation automatically adds a thousand years to the initial date. Thus, an erroneous date appears, a thousand years more ancient than the real one. See p-337"
  • Overview Graphs that help summarize Fomenko's New Chronology
    • STEP 1:Go to Google Books and search for "fomenko history" or just click here
    • STEP 2. Click on Chronology 1 or Chronology 2
    • STEP 3. Change the page number to
      A)CHRONOLOGY 2, PAGE 233 (TWO EXCELLENT OVERVIEW GRAPHS)
      B)CHRONOLOGY 1, PAGE 295
      C)CHRONOLOGY 1, PAGE 326
      D)CHRONOLOGY 1, PAGE 365
    • For best viewing in Google Books, I usually enlarge the page once or twice by pressing "+", press "Full screen" (button in top right corner), and then also put my browser in Full Screen mode as well (by pressing F11 on Windows/P.C. computers). For browsers other than Internet Explorer, the page may at first appear not to load, but if you click and drag anywhere on the screen with your mouse, the pages will immediately appear.

METHODOLOGY: CHARTERS, COINS, CARBON, & CARTOGRAPHY
  • The Magna Carta is dated "the seventeenth year of our reign"; most of the important documents from more than five centuries ago that are still accessible today were dated according to the local ruler's year of reign, and NOT according to years after Christ's expected birth or death ; rethinking Roman numerals
    • Another post that mentions reign-length dating, with an excerpt written by Jan Beaufort, whose essay can be accessed directly here
      • Beaufort writes: "The, possibly, oldest and most widely used method to engrave important events into collective memory has been the attribution to the leader's years of reign. “In the 5th year of Pharaoh Amenophis”, “in the 10th year of great king Xerxes”, “in the 18th year of Jerobeam" (2 Chr. 13, 1), the texts will tell us. In Luke 3,1-2 we read: “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”
  • Numismatic Dating dating "ancient" coins
  • Criticisms of Radiocarbon Dating Major shenanigans with archaeology datings in general, including radiocarbon (carbon-14) dating.
    • Fomenko discusses this in two sections in Chapter 1 of Chronology 1, pages 74-90.
      • 15.ARE RADIOCARBON DATINGS TO BE TRUSTED? (pages 74-80)
      • 16.CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE HYPOTHESES ON WHICH THE RADIOCARBON METHOD IS BASED (pages 80-90)

    • 1) the "scientific" results tend to be useless generally, during the last 2000 years especially...not to mention that the dating method was originally calibrated using textbook samples/examples where the original date was supposedly already known; since radiocarbon dating relies on the Scaligerian chronology to begin with, this method relies on circular reasoning
    • 2) a archaeologist/businessman/academic trying to capitalize typically sends a sample to a lab telling the lab THE DATE they expect to get back so the labs that do these things have a financial incentive to tell the customer what he/she wants
    • 3) samples from the same object sometimes provide results that differ from each other by THOUSANDS OF YEARS ; if it's not what is expected, the vested interest does not make the information public ( perhaps getting another lab to test until the desired answer is received ?) and academics rarely publish unexpected results; some of the businessman involved (like in the Athens: The Tourist Trap post) are much more like P.T. Barnum/circus promoters than searching for historical truth
  • Flowery & Verbose Language = NOT ANCIENT because writing paper was a luxury
  • Analyzing Old Maps Interesting anomalies on old maps. I think Fomenko is saying that alleged 11th & 12th century A.D. maps are primitive, and progress in cartography was roughly linear until the 18th century; therefore, "ancient" maps that look a little "too good" were probably created much later.

PETRARCH
  • Petrarch : The creator of the "Dark Ages" myth can't find any "ancient" buildings when visiting Rome
  • Petrarch gaining politically and financially from the Dark Ages myth he starts using a dubious methodology ; by promoting or denouncing found or forged manuscripts, the political order could pick or choose the validity of land claims

NOT-SO-ANCIENT CULTURES
  • Not-So-Ancient Egypt - the dating methods are simply pathetic
  • Not-So-Ancient India - no records of Alexander the Great supposedly conquering India exist ; if you think some people you know are bad at geography, that's nothing compared to: "Mediaeval authors occasionally placed India in Africa or Italy (!)"
  • Not-So-Ancient Greece "ancient" Greece = medieval Greece; History by Herodotus is the main source
    • The Greek Solon = biblical Solomon Mentioned at the end of this post.
      • Fomenko thinks the "Temple of Solomon" was actually the Temple of Hagia Sophia in Czar-Grad (a.k.a. Istanbul)
  • Athens: The Tourist Trap
    • Photographic evidence of the destruction of all Ottoman buildings in 19th & early 20th centuries to create the "ancient Athens" image for tourism
      • Go to Google Books, change the page numbers to:
        • in Chronology 1: 427-435
        • in Chronology 2: 269-270
          • I recommend reading the entire 8-page section (half of the pages are photographs) from Chronology 1 using Google Books. Pages 430 & 432 has actual 1860s photographs of the Acropolis with Ottoman towers, with the latter page showing the "renovation" aka DEMOLITION work beginning in 1865
    • The Likely Date of the Parthenon's Construction is around the 12th century
    • The Parthenon is a Christian temple a.k.a. "The Temple of St. Mary"
  • Who was Aristotle? A long thread I started on the RevisedHistory forum; very strange that a text search of his works does not return even one instance of his famous pupil Alexander the Great; his "Politics" sounds fairly modern, perhaps a few hundred years old; forum member Ron finds similarities between Aristotle and Arab scholar Averroes
  • The Supposedly Flawless Memories of Homer's Disciples and the horse in the Trojan "Horse" story is probably a bad translation or interpretation of "like a horse." The actual Trojan Horse may have been the dilapidated Aqueduct of Valens in Istanbul which Greeks used to sneak into the city. Fomenko writes, "The nursery tale about a gigantic hollow equine statue is just as preposterous as the Scaligerian tale of Homer's seven hundred pages melodiously sung aloud by the "ancient" Greek shepherds for five hundred years before they could be written down, five hundred years after the fall of Troy."
  • Oh Henries!, The Wrath of Khan(s) & Conrads , and the Many Names of Roman Emperors
    • Explains the possibility that the large number of "Henries" or "Conrads" in an empire may be because "Henry" and "Conrad" were not names, but titles
    • As for "ancient" Rome's rulers and their FULL NAMES, a lot of these first names as last names must have confused the "historians" or have been added by them to make the chronologies longer. At the very least, the similar repeating short names added another dimension of complexity for historians throughout the ages. And the full names of emperors Caligula or Nero don't even contain the words "caligula" or "nero."
      • Tiberius = Tiberius Claudius Nero Julius Caesar Augustusus,
      • Caligula = Gaius Julius Caesar Augustusus Germanicus,
      • Claudius = Tiberius Claudius Nero Drusus Germanicus Caesar Augustusus,
      • Nero = Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus Tiberius Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar
  • Could "years" = "months" in the Old Testament and/or Chinese calendar ? . These two comments posted by MAXHO on 4/28/2004 in this RevisedHistory.org thread are intriguing, at the very least providing a simple explanation of why people supposedly hundreds of years old are in the Old Testament: 900 "YEARS" = 900 months = 900/12 = about 75-years-old
    • "MAXHO:The Chinese lunar calendar answers the question when the development started in China. The calendar consists of 12 periods/signs, however, the time units are interpreted wrong by the adherents of conventional history. The Western calendar has the same 12 signs, but they are believed to represent MONTHS, while the Chinese system counts YEARS. There should be no such difference between the two! Hence, year 4702 according to the Chinese calendar should be interpreted as month 4702, i.e. 4702/12 = 391 years from the establishment of this system. Therefore, we arrive at year 1600, which was the time when the Chinese "civilization" began its independent (from the Empire) development!!!
      ....
      MAXHO: I would like to add that the same concept can be applied to the information in the Old (Jewish) Testament. It explains why the "first" people had lifespans of 900, 500, and 300 "years". Divided by 12, in order to convert those units from lunar to annual, we get the usual ages of 75, 42, and 25 years respectively. These anomalies can be explained by the following: We have some common word stems that exist in many languages: (PIE):-VEX---(Eng): WEEK, (Ger.) WOCHE, (Sla) VEK (century!). (Eng) YEAR --- (Ger) JAHR --- (Sca) JAAR -- (Sla): YAR (spring, sun). These stems were used to denote a certain period of time, but the precise meaning is unknown because the words have received different connotations in different languages. Therefore, some unreasonable ages must have been calculated in units other than years, e.g. months... "

RELIGION

JUDAISM

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
  • Absence of Vatican Records according to 19th century German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius
  • Eyes Wide Shut: Was Early Christianity a Sex Cult ? slutty nuns, nude statues in cathedrals, and the Inquisition eliminating hedonistic factions and evidence
  • The secular importance of the Crusades including noblemen being given inheritable rights to lands they couldn't quite conquer yet, which reminds me of the English aristocracy stealing land during the "enclosure" movement
  • Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559) is the Catholic Church's "Forbidden Books" list; I pick three authors at random from the list (Peter Waldo, Jerome of Prague, & John Wycliffe) and provide excerpts from wikipedia about them; makes the CC look pretty bad
  • Playing Hide & Go Seek with the BODY OF SAINT MARK Did the Catholic Church's treatment of the body inspire the movie Weekend at Bernie's ?
  • Why was Martin Luther not set on fire? If the CC supposedly set 7 kids on fire for saying the Lord's Prayer in English instead of Latin, and during the FOUR INQUISITIONS (Medieval Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, Portuguese Inquisition, Roman Inquisition) probably did much worse, why not set a guy like Martin Luther on fire after he sets the papal bull on fire? ALSO, the post shows the 1841 English Hexapla Parallel New Testament, which has 6 different English translations, and shows how different the translations are from each other using just the first page of the NT
  • I am still clueless about Christianity's origins, plus my take on Apocalyptic cults . I'm still at a loss at understanding why Christianity started, when the Catholic Church formed, who Jesus was if he even existed, and the place of the "Gospels" or any work of "scripture". ..even if the scriptures were copied without error. And if they were copied with errors or changed by Powers That Were or Powers That Be, maybe that's why comedians like Bill Maher say that the Bible reads like a MadLibs word game: "hey look, Eve came from Adam's...rib ."
    • Fomenko seems to believe that the world's other religions began with Jesus and Christianity, and the rest are derivations from it. He also believes that the Apocalypse mentioned in Revelation was for a time period (give or take a few years) around 1492, and that Jesus may be buried in Istanbul at a site currently believed to be the grave of (Saint?) Joshua.
    • Fomenko's historical (not astronomical) reasons for dating the Book of Revelations to year 1486 A.D. starts on page 160 of Chronology 1. So, I think Fomenko is saying that year 1492 A.D. was also the year at the time expected to be Year 7000 from Adam, so that would have had a millenial expectation as well.
    • My take on apocalyptic cults:
      • "Have you ever read about apocalyptic cults?
        They seem to span ALL OF KNOWN HUMAN HISTORY, and I have a good guess why:
        HUMANS ARE MORTAL.

        So, I imagine that those cults are first formed by mostly middle-aged or elderly people who realize that parts of life sucks for some reason or other, so uh, God's gonna off almost everyone and create a New Age of Enlightenment after getting ridding of the sucky parts of his blessed Creation. Even without an Apocalypse, most of these cultists would have about 20 to 30 years of LIFE ON EARTH left regardless on average...which also seems to coincide with when exactly their "estimate" of the Date of the Coming Apocalypse. And when the Apocalypse doesn't come, these idiots extend the timeline by one or more generations, until followers lose complete interest in the bullshit or the date of the Apocalypse is post-poned to some way distant future or its agreed that The End will Come only When God decides. "

THE BIBLE
  • Dating the biblical Apocalypse
  • Vampire Jesus : the Greek text of the bible suggests "execution at the stake" instead of crucifixion ; mentions similarities of Jesus to Egyptian Osiris and Greek Heracles
  • Abraham, Lot, Noah, Tower of Babel, biblical Adam wearing medieval armor in an engraving, plus the Romulus & Remus story Also includes me questioning the influence of the Medici family (first printed Greek copy of Homer was published in 1448 in Florence) and possibly the Habsburgs/Hapsburgs in promoting false history. I also question when the Catholic Church was really founded and when the "Jesus" (Andronicus/Basil the Great/ Hildebrand) story or history was first created
  • Did Joshua = Alexander the Great ? Fomenko believes that Moses successor Joshua was equivalent to Alexander the Great. Joshua is considered the most warlike in the Bible, with military campaign after military campaign; two of the kings Joshua conquered were Makkedah and Madon. Fomenko thinks Alexander of Macedon really lived during 15th or 16th centuries A.D., but says his analysis is mostly in Chron 5. The outline details mostly seem to say "both were very warlike, and conquered many lands and nations." Also, Alexander probably fought "Prussians" or white russians, not Persians.
  • Did Joshua = Charlesmagne as well ? So, Fomenko has the continuously warlike Joshua (sucessor of Moses) equal not only the continuously warlike Alexander the Great, but equal the continuously warlike Charlesmagne as well.
    • 1) both were continuosly warlike throughout their lives
    • 2) Joshua fought the Amorites, Charlesmagne fought the Moors
    • 3) in the Bible, God "stops the sun" for Joshua so his men can finish off his enemies in battle ; same language is used in the medieval Song of Roland for Charlesmagne....this is a unique event in both literary works, meaning there are no other known occurrences of God stopping the sun
  • Sodom & Gomorrah: The Search for a Volcano A hell of a lot of Bible passages hint that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by a volcanic eruption. But, the only volcanoes around are in Italy, not Palestine. And the most famous eruption was in Italy of Mt. Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii, according to mainstream history in 79 A.D. So Fomenko thinks that maybe "Sodom & Gomorrah" were really the Italian cities of Stabia and Herculanum. Discussion of this is in Chronology 1, pages 49-51 .

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls have RED INK and TITANIUM which means the "crown jewel of biblical scholarship" is probably medieval in origin. (Much thanks to BFN member duane for finding the article "Challenging History: The Dead Sea Scrolls" in Philadelphia's "The Bulletin" newspaper 10/3/2007 by Neil Altman) .
    • Altman writes:"One of the best-kept secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been the discovery of metals in the black ink. That finding was buried in unpublished results, and wasn't unearthed until 1996. The presence of metals further points to the scrolls being of medieval origin. "Scientific testing of the scrolls in the early 1950s found silver, manganese, iron and other metals in the black ink used on the scrolls. Scholars tried to downplay the discovery of these metals by saying that some of them, like copper and lead, were byproducts of leaching from a bronze inkwell. Yet silver, manganese and iron are not components in the making of bronze. The 1990s tests also detected the presence of strontium and titanium but could not tell if they were pure. (In its purest form, neither element was isolated until the 1800s.)"
    • Altman writes: "The presence of metals also contradicts the scholarly claim that the authors of the scrolls used Dead Sea water for ink, for the salty water contains no titanium, according to a chart of a scientific study from an Ivy League physicist. Scholars tell us that ink spiked with metals came after the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls."
    • Altman writes:"Another discovery that has cast doubt on the Dead Sea Scrolls is the appearance of red ink. The term "Red Letter Day" comes from the Christian usage of red ink to mark holy days, such as Easter, on the medieval calendars and to illuminate medieval manuscripts by highlighting words or even letters. So why, then, is there red ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls, a supposedly pre-Christian text? And not just red ink - Western numbers in red ink."
    • The Dead Sea Scrolls also shares many similarities to the Moshe Leah Scroll found in China. Altman writes: "Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Silver, curator of the Hebrew section of the British Library's department of Oriental manuscripts, confirmed what others had seen."Anybody slightly acquainted with the Dead Sea Scrolls," he wrote, "will notice at a glance the overall similarity of the hand that wrote the Moshe Leah scrolls to that of certain documents of the Dead Sea caves, and anyone a little familiar with the Dead Sea texts will be struck by the resemblances in orthography."

THE KORAN
  • Koran provides chronology different from Scaligerian chronology
    • Follow-up on scholars' interpretations of the Koran saying "the sister of Moses and Aaron is the mother of Jesus"
  • The Koran, the Ark, and the Qa'aba The printing history of the Koran is pretty revealing: no variations in Koran implies modern printing history; first printing was in Europe, not Arabia; and all the existing biographies of Mohammad just happen to be recent ones. Also mentions Fomenko's nutty idea that Moses' Ark of the Covenant may be equivalent to the Muslim's sacred Black Stone kept in the Qa'aba.
    • "When was the Qa'aba built? Scaligerian history is of the opinion that it has been destroyed and restored ten times!"
    • "It is only in the alleged X-Xl century A.D. that the more or less verifiable period of Hajj observance, or Mecca pilgrimage, begins in Scaligerian history. By the way, a religious war flared up in the XVIII century, which the Scaligerites hastened to use as explanation for the complete absence of any authentic objects remotely resembling the graves of the Prophet and his companions in either Mecca or Medina."
  • The Gold Koran . I guess that's one way to get around the paper & parchment decaying and questionable dating problem - PAGES MADE OF GOLD. This "thousand-year-old" masterpiece is older than I thought...at least 1942 old, perhaps even 18th century.
    • School officials decided to "return" the "9th century Koran" to Turkey because "its origin was unclear. " What the hell was Johns Hopkins U. doing with the original Gold Koran in 1942? Just found it lying around? One would have thought that the Turks would have kept better track of a GOLD KORAN and all.
    • "The first 18 chapters of the Gold Koran disappeared from Turkey sometime after 1756. The section entered the Hopkins collection in 1942 as part of a bequest of rare books."

PTOLEMY'S ALMAGEST
  • Ptolemy's Almagest . Half of Chronology 3 is devoted to re-dating Ptolemy's Almagest. Fomenko et al apparently fleshed out their case in 1993 with a mere 300-page book devoted to ONLY this one topic, called Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations: Dating Ptolemy's Almagest. (VERY Limited Preview at Google Books)
    • WHY IS THE ALMAGEST IMPORTANT ?
      Well, its 13-books long, 1000+ pages, with data on 1000+ stars
      So, Fomenko's statistical analysis had to take into account the data from a hell of a lot of stars.
    • WHY WAS THE ALMAGEST CONTROVERSIAL ?
      Allegations of fraud by a number of scholars over the centuries.
      Fomenko, for example, mentions the criticisms of physicist Robert R. Newton who wrote the 1977 book The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy .       Fomenko actually disagrees with R. Newton as to the reasons for the discrepancies in the data, saying they are because of a much later time period (sometime between 700 and 1300A.D., not 150 A.D.)
    • WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE LIFE OF THE GREAT SCHOLAR PTOLEMY ?
      Not much.
      • Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations: Dating Ptolemy's Almagest, p.1
        "history treated somewhat strangely the person and the works of Ptolemy. Historians of his time never mention his life and activities... . No facts of his life, neither the dates of his birth and death are known."
    • B. Lukacs, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has reviewed Fomenko's analysis and wrote an essay about it here called "PTOLEMY'S ALMAGEST AND FOMENKO'S OPINION ABOUT IT AND ESPECIALLY: SOME WORDS ABOUT PRECESSION"
      • So ignoring Lukacs comment on possible copier error to explain the switch of star magnitudes, he brings up an important point THAT WE ARE LUCKY TO HAVE A NORTH STAR, because before about 1000 A.D. (because of the precession) there would not have been a Lodestar pointing towards the North pole, meaning that navigation in general would have been more difficult, and the INVENTION OF THE COMPASS less likely to have happened without the ability to regularly verify the NORTH direction. Before 1000 A.D. (perhaps) navigation was possible using more stars, but would have been impossible using just 1 star in the sky.

POPULATION STATISTICS
  • What is the Current Year in Human History? I attempt to calculate the actual current year of human history by figuring out how many years of breeding it takes to reach 6 billion humans assuming a 2% annual growth rate (slower growth than the Amish since 1900), with numbers also for 1% and 3% annual growth.
    • Follow-up post I mention that modern exponential growth includes famines, genocides, and World Wars
      • As to the age of the human species on Earth, I have no idea
        • I wrote: "I would say with a higher level of certainty that evidence of every human civilization that we know of is 1000 to 2000 years old, down from the 8-10,000 years of mainstream history/anthropology"
        • I also wrote: "My bias generally now is to be distrustful of anything mainstream science backdates hundreds of thousands (or millions or billions as far as the Big Bang) of years into the past, while still in an anthropological/biological paradigm that evolution/darwinism creates MORE diversity & MORE species, when the evidence I've seen on almost any scale - from bacteria upwards - suggests that after many generations, reversion to the mean is more likely instead of spontaneous speciation. At a very basic level, I guess humans are getting taller, but that's hardly anything close to speciation, and some of the variation is definitely related to differences in diet/nutrition among nations & cultures over many generations."
  • Garry Kasparov 's essay "Mathematics of the Past" Kasparov (the chess whiz) is a huge fan of Fomenko and New Chronology. I found his essay a few days after my simple population math. His essay uses inferences used by other historians to estimate the population of the "ancient" Roman empire using data (the size of Rome's army) from Edward Gibbon's monumental 18th-century work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The population of "ancient" Rome was likely somewhere between 20 and 50 million. Kasparov writes, "According to J.C. Russell, in the 4th century, the population of Western Roman Empire was 22 million (including 750 000 people in England and five million in France), while the population of the Eastern Roman Empire was 34 million.
    • Kasparov writes:
      "It is not hard to determine that there is a serious problem with these numbers. In England, a population of four million in the 15th century grew to 62 million in the 20th century. Similarly, in France, a population of about 20 million in the 17th century (during the reign of Louis XIV), grew to 60 million in the 20th century ... and this growth occurred despite losses due to several atrocious wars. We know from historical records that during the Napoleonic wars alone, about three million people perished, most of them young men. But there was also the French Revolution, the wars of the 18th century in which France suffered heavy losses, and the slaughter of World War I. By assuming a constant population growth rate, it is easy to estimate that the population of England doubled every 120 years, while the population of France doubled every 190 years. Graphs showing the hypothetical growth of these two functions are provided in Figure 1. According to this model, in the 4th and 5th centuries, at the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the (hypothetical) population of England would have been 10 000 to 15 000, while the population of France would have been 170 000 to 250 000. However, according to estimates based on historical documents, these numbers should be in the millions.

      It seems that starting with the 5th century, there were periods during which the population of Europe stagnated or decreased. Attempts at logical explanations, such as poor hygiene, epidemics, and short lifespan, can hardly withstand criticism. In fact, from the 5th century until the 18th century, there was no significant improvement in sanitary conditions in Western Europe, there were many epidemics, and hygiene was poor. Also, the introduction of .rearms in the 15th century resulted in more war casualties. According to UNESCO demographic resources, an increase of 0.2 per cent per annum is required to assure the sustainable growth of a human population, while an increase of 0.02 per cent per annum is described as a demographical disaster. There is no evidence that such a disaster has ever happened to the human race. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that the growth rate in ancient times differed significantly from the growth rate in later epochs."
      • Kasparov also doubts the ancientness of "ancient" Rome because of the difficulty of mathematical calculations using Roman numerals:"The Roman numeral system discouraged serious calculations. How could the ancient Romans build elaborate structures such as temples, bridges, and aqueducts without precise and elaborate calculations? The most important deficiency of Roman numerals is that they are completely unsuitable even for performing a simple operation like addition, not to mention multiplication, which presents substantial difficulties."
  • Bubonic plague me questioning mainstream history's version of the "Black Death"

DAVIDENCO & KESLER: BOOK OF CIVILIZATION
  • Davidenco & Kesler: Book of Civilization A .PDF file with 101 pages of excerpts from this book can be downloaded here at RevisedHistory.org . The 18-page preface is by Garry Kasparov and seems like an extended version of his "Mathematics of the Past" essay that I mentioned above.
    • My post highlights:
      • a bargain struck between the clericals (church) and humanists (renaissance) to recognize each other's ancient-ness
      • The CRESCENT, the CROSS, and the STAR OF DAVID (meanings for the symbols before the 16th Century) .
        • the crescent was solely a military, imperial symbol, not a Muslim one. It became a Muslim Symbol not earlier than 1603, when sultan Ahmed I made Islam the official religion of the Ottoman Empire.
        • the cross, obviously, was a colonial symbol – the conquered territories and the population surveyed after plague (both the dead and the alive) were marked with it.
        • It is possible, that the "Star of David" originally was not associated with "Jews" but with the record-keepers, scholars. The latter were free of military service and other duties everywhere up to 1453.
      • D&K write:"The proof for absence of modern Orthodoxy as official religion in Russia of the pre-Romanov epoch is the following: the first city that received a biblical name was the city of Saint Michael the Archangel, modern Archangelsk This city got its name with the help of the Stroganovs in 1613 in honor of the reign of Michael Romanov."
      • D&K write:"An actual not legendary papal activity in Rome (Vatican History) takes start only in 1377 after the "pope arrest of Avignon" and the period of multi-papacity. For the first time the question about ecclesiastical schism was raised on the Basel Council of 1431 after Hussites defeat. Moreover there is no mentioning about any preceding schism in the documents of this Council, particularly about the "Great Schism" of 1054. This schism was totally unknown up to the Trident Council (the middle of the 16th) and adoption of the chronology from the Advent (first in Spain in 1556)."
  • Four more excerpts from the Book of Civilization
    • 1) The Hapsburgs hoaxing their ancientness, because of the shoddy "history of science" professors in Uppsala, SWEDEN (Profs from Uppsala mostly decide the NOBEL PRIZES, by the way) couldn't date properly the GOSPEL written in SILVER
    • 2) About the SLAVS,ANTAE/VANDALS, GYPSIES/EGYPTIANS, HUNS, & BARBARIANS
    • 3)The 100 YEARS WAR DID NOT HAPPEN, according to a recent monograph by French historian R. Caratini, because in a time before nation-states, the two apparently opposing French & English rulers belonged to the same Byzantine dynasty: Anjou. IT WAS ONLY A PETTY FAMILY STRIFE THAT LASTED A WEEK. ALSO, JOAN OF ARC DID NOT EXIST.
      [NOTE FROM CRAC: Wait, weren't most of the opposing royals in World War ONE cousins , though?...England, Germany, and Russia ??? If I'm recalling correctly, that's mainstream history]
    • 4) THE SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF A PARABLE FROM THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, which
      shows a clear division of labor like in modern times, work for wages. D&K write:"It is clear, that in chapter 20 of the Gospel of Matthew the time of hired labour is described. Not servitude. Not serfdom."

EUGEN GABOWITSCH
  • Eugen Gabowitsch's essay "Ages in Chaos" - provides a link to the 9-page article that prefaces Fomenko's Chronology 2 which provides a summary of four dissenters from mainstream chronology : Issac Newton, Jean Hardouin, Robert Baldauf , and Wilhelm Kammeier.
    • I excerpt a section on Kammeier because he is the latest dissenter of the four and I find his story of persecution the most interesting. This passage explains why he was persecuted: "According to Kammeier, the key goal of this prolonged and massive campaign for the falsification of historical documents had been the concealment, distortion and arbitrary extension of the pre-Christian history, with all the achievements of the pagan epoch ascribed thereto. Apart from that, "legal" acknowledgement of the possession rights must have been in high demand among the new feudal rulers, whose property was acquired from lawful pagan owners rather recently, and in a violent manner. Falsified donation documents were necessary to declare ancient rights of possession; their authorship could be traced to one of the great Christian rulers of antiquity - fictitious entities invented for this specific purpose in many cases. "
    • essay includes the shocking suggestion that the Great Wall of China was built after 1950 because of a lack of drawings or photographs, with its prior existence being only a European myth
      • Follow-up post on dating the Great Wall of China, including the ridiculous lengths of the wall that are only now being measured exactly, an automatic English translation of another Gabowitsch essay, and me (perhaps relevant, perhaps not) including the full-text of a little known short story by FRANZ KAFKA called the "Great Wall of China" that was written in 1917 but only published posthumously (and against Kafka's wishes) in 1931
      • China: Another Brick in the (Great) Wall ? Another follow-up post with more translations of Gabowitsch's articles using Google Translate. The second article emphasizes two facts that are difficult to fathom if one considers the Great Wall to be ancient:
        • 1) NO OLD PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WALL IN BOOKS!
        • 2) NO OLD GRAFFITI/ARTWORK ON THIS 4000-MILE LONG WALL!
      • Grishin & Melamed (which I mention in another post below about their book) think the Great Wall of China was originally built in the 15th or 16th centuries, but I don't know their reasoning for this conclusion
  • Eugen Gabowitsch's essay "A chronological revolution made by historical analytics" This 38-page essay (34 pages + 4 pages bibliography) is a .PDF file that can be downloaded here . Gabowitsch provides a broad summary of chronological studies, including a nice bibliography of a diverse range of New Chronology books & authors, some of which were mentioned in earlier posts or in his preface to Chronology 2 .
    • Some of the authors and books he mentions in the essay:
      Peter James, Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology
      Wieslaw Z. Krawcewicz, Gleb V. Nosovskij and Petr P. Zabreiko
      Anatoly T. Fomenko and his main co-author Gleb V. Nosovski
      Igor Davidenco & Yaroslav Kesler, Book of civilisation, Moscow, 2001, with a preface of Garry Kasparov
      Clark Whelton, essay "Creating Ancient History in Modern China"
      Alexander Jabinski book Another History of Art (Russian)
      Eugene Gertsman Mysteries of the History of the Ancient Music (Russian, 2004) * Nicolas Morosov *
      Immanuel Velikovsky * Heribert Illig * Roman Landau * Christian Blöss* Christoph Pfister * Christoph Däppen * Ulrich Thomas Franz * Uwe Topper * Trevor Palmer * Emmet Sweeney * Hans-Ulrich Niemitz * Wilhelm Kammeier * Gunnar Heinsohn * Isaac Newton *Jean Hardouin * Robert Baldauf
      • The essay includes a word list from the Book of Civilization where you can see when, according to Webster's Oxford Dictionary, many important notions from history, religion and science were for the first time used in written English. One can clearly see that 'the whole antique cycle appears in the English language in the middle of the 16 century as well as the concept of antiquity. We can see some terms about science - ‘almagest’, ‘astronomy’, ‘astrology’, etc. begin in the 14th or 15th century. If we look for antiquity, ‘Etruscan’ was named in 1706 for the first time, ‘Golden Age’ in 1505, so think about what this means. [Note from Crac: apparently there is a typographical error with "golden age" which is either 1555 or 1505] : Almagest 14th century * History 14th century *Antique 1530 century * Iberian 1601 * Arabic 14th century * Indian 14th century * Arithmetic 15th century * Iron Age 1879 * Astrology 14th century * Koran 1615 * Astronomy 13th century *Mogul 1588 * August 1664 *Mongol 1698 *Bible 14th century * Muslim 1615 *Byzantine 1794 * Orthodox 15th century * Caesar 1567 *Philosophy 14th century * Cathedra 14th century *Platonic 1533 * Catholic 14th century * Pyramid 1549 * Celtic 1590 * Renaissance 1845 * Chinese 1606 * Roman 14th century *Crusaders 1732 * Roman law 1660 *Dutch 14th century * Russian 1538 * Education 1531 * Spanish 15th century * Etruscan 1706 * Swedish 1605 * Gallic 1672 * Tartar 14th century * German 14th century * Trojan 14thcentury * Golden age 1555 * Turkish 1545 * Gothic 1591 * Zodiac 14th century
      • Books on "ancient" Art and "ancient" Music: (from page 10)
        "Not only the history of technology produce arguments against the orthodox history and its chronology. The Russian book Another History of Art by Alexander Jabinski demonstrates that the full history of art is not longer than 1000 years and all other periods of the history of art (old Greek, old Roman, old Egyptian) are projections of the art of later times to these imaginary virtual times. In his book hundreds of examples are presented which demonstrate how the real art of the last millennium was distributed through the whole old history. They all have been, in reality, produced in the last millennium. In Jabinski's book (p. 157) two pictures are presenting almost the same man. Are that really two portraits of the same person? Or of two close relatives? In the history of art this two works of the same art style are dated with 14 centuries in between: a Roman portrait of AD 60 and a Renaissance portrait from the year 1474. Analyzing hundreds of examples from the named book one can understand that a big part of Renaissance and new historic time art was set in ancient times by wrong dating traditions.

        Another Russian book written by a known historian of the music Eugene Gertsman Mysteries of the History of the Ancient Music (Nota Publishing, Saint-Petersburg, 2004) demonstrates that at least 12 centuries of the history of the Ancient music must be cancelled. Important is that the author never before wrote some critical issues on chronology and was itself surprised by his results. "
      • Christoph Pfister, an extremist even among New Chronologers: "Pfister believes that the really documented history does start as late as the 18th century and all “elder” documents were written after 1700. The 18th century is for him also the time of the beginning of book printing and of the Anne Domini time counting. "

GRISHIN & MELAMED: THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE OF THE ISRAELITES
  • Grishin & Melamed : The Medieval Empire of the Israelites; Does the Old Testament= "Catholic"? Grishin and Melamed seem to agree with Fomenko that Istanbul was the original "Jerusalem," but they also believe that the Old Testament was originally part of a widespread universal religion referred to back then as "Catholic." But then supposedly the empire fell apart in the 13th or 14th century after the world's first world war, leading to nations and the nations desperately searching for their own (fake) histories.
    • G&M question whether Shakespeare's character Othello, the Moor of Venice, is actually Muslim or not
    • G&M also think the Great Wall of China was built in the 15th or 16 centuries, which differs from Gabowitsch's 20th century hypothesis, but the preface doesn't give an explanation for this reasoning.




This post was last edited 4/06/2008 at 7:20 P.M.
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