The new chronology is a pseudohistorical theory which argues that events generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, among others, actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The theory, which further proposes that world history prior to 1600 AD was centered around a global empire called Great Tartaria, has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators, including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov. The theory was first widely disseminated in the 1990s by Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and later by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. Reception from mainstream scholars has been universally negative.
Central concepts The concepts that constitute the new chronology has its origins in the work of Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946), although the earlier work of Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) can be seen as an intellectual progenitor. "Today an intellectual successor to Hardouin claims that it is not classical antiquity that was forged, but instead the history of the Middle Ages. Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko has devised a system he calls the 'New Chronology'..." The new chronology per se is most commonly associated with Anatoly Fomenko, though he has collaborated extensively in his writing on the subject. The theory is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science?, originally published in Russian.
The new chronology features a totally reconstructed timeline, portraying a history that is radically shorter than what is universally accepted, based on a thesis that in effect compresses all of recorded history from the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages into a period less than a millennium long. According to Fomenko's claims, the practice of written history only emerged , with there being almost no real information about events that occurred between 800 and 1000 AD, and most recorded historical events actually having taken place between 1000 and 1500AD.
The new chronology is universally rejected by the scientific and historiographical communities, being totally inconsistent with the accepted methodology used in the relevant fields, including absolute and relative dating techniques. It is considered to be pseudoarchaeological, pseudohistorical, and pseudoscientific."les conceptions fantasmagoriques de Fomenko sur la « nouvelle chronologie » mondiale." Marlène Laruelle, Review of James H. Billington, Russia in search of itself, Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Baltimore – London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; Cahiers du Monde Russe, 45/3–4, pp. 736–737.H. G. van Bueren, "Mathematics and Logic", pp. 206–207 in: Interest in the theory from historians and scientists has primarily stemmed from its popularity among laypeople: in addition to formulating refutations of its methods and conclusions, academics have also tried to understand the social forces underlying its resonance: Halperin (2011) estimates that as many as 30% of Russians may have sympathy for the new chronology. However, it is not known what levels of veracity or salience are generally ascribed to new chronology texts by readers, whether the texts are generally regarded as history or as fiction, or what the demographics of their readership tend to be.
The theory emerged alongside numerous other pseudohistorical and conspiracy-minded literature in a period of heightened nationalism and more lax restrictions on freedom of the press following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While other authors have written on the new chronology theory, such as Russian Gleb Nosovsky and Bulgarian Yordan Tabov (who expanded the theory relating to the Balkans), the theory is mostly understood in terms of Fomenko's writings.
History of the new chronology The idea of chronologies that differ from the conventional chronology can be traced back to the second half of the 17th century or earlier. Jean Hardouin suggested that many ancient historical documents were younger than commonly believed. 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. 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 in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended 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.
In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed the opinion that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
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 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.
Fomenko became interested in Morozov's 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. Alex 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 Soviet journal Questions of History complained that "their constructions have nothing in common with Marxist historical science."
By 1996, Fomenko's theory encompassed Russia, Turkey, China, Europe, and Egypt.Nosovsky G. V., Fomenko A. T., "Empire. Russia, Turkey, China, Europe, Egypt. New mathematical chronology of ancient times / Носовский Г. В., Фоменко А. Т. Империя. Русь, Турция, Китай, Европа, Египет. Новая математическая хронология древности." (in Russian), 1996, with at least 6 later editions – М.: Факториал, 1996.
Fomenko's claims
Central to Fomenko's new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, called "the Russian Horde" (Great Tartaria), which played a dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polans, Dulebes, Drevlians and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.
Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons. The historical Jesus is also claimed a composite figure and reflection of the Old Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven" – emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus was born in Cape Fiolent, Crimea, on December 25, 1152 A.D. and was crucified on March 20, 1185 A.D., on Joshua's Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.
Fomenko's speculations combined the cities and histories of Jerusalem, Rome and Troy into "New Rome", which the Gospels identified as Jerusalem. He identified Troy as Yoros Castle. To the south of Yoros Castle is Joshua's Hill which Fomenko identified as the hill on which Calvary looks placed.
Fomenko claims the Hagia Sophia is the biblical Temple of Solomon and Solomon as the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566).
However, according to Fomenko the word "Rome" is a placeholder and can signify any one of several different cities and kingdoms. He claims: the "First Rome" or "Ancient Rome" or "Mizraim" is an ancient Egyptian kingdom in the delta of the Nile with its capital in Alexandria, that the second and most famous "New Rome" is Constantinople, and that the third "Rome" is constituted by three different cities: Constantinople (again), Rome in Italy, and Moscow. Also according to his claims, Rome in Italy was founded around AD 1380 by Aeneas and Moscow as the third Rome was the capital of the great "Russian Horde".Dmitrii Sidorov, "Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor", Geopolitics, 11 (2006):317–347, at pp. 336-337.
Fomenko's methods
Astronomical evidence Fomenko examines astronomical events described in ancient texts and claims that the chronology is actually medieval. For example: He explains the mysterious drop in the value of the lunar acceleration parameter D" ("a linear combination of the [angular] accelerations of the Earth and Moon") between the years AD 700–1300, which the American astronomer Robert Newton 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.Anatoly T. Fomenko, History: Fiction or Science vol.I, Chronology, 2nd. ed. (Paris, London, New York: Delamere Publishing, 2006), pp. 93–94, 105–106. Newton's analysis has since been criticized as suffering "from two fundamental defects. The two parameters he sought to determine were highly correlated; and he also adopted a somewhat arbitrary weighting scheme in analysing suspected observations of total solar eclipses. Many of the observations he investigated were of doubtful reliability. Hence, despite the low weight he assigned them, they had a disproportionate effect on his solutions." He associates initially the Star of Bethlehem with the AD 1140 (±20) supernova (now Crab Nebula) and the Crucifixion Eclipse with the total solar eclipse of May 1, AD 1185. He also believes that Crab Nebula supernova could not have been seen in AD 1054, but probably in AD 1153. He doubts the veracity of ancient Chinese astronomical data. He argues that the star catalog in the Almagest, ascribed to the Hellenistic astronomer Ptolemy, was compiled in the 15th to 16th centuries AD. With this objective in sight he develops new methods of dating old stellar catalogues and claims that the Almagest is based on data collected between AD 600 and 1300, whereby the telluric obliquity is well taken into account.