[HN Gopher] The "New Chronology" of Anatoly Fomenko
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The "New Chronology" of Anatoly Fomenko
Author : pulisse
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-04-29 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nathangoldwag.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nathangoldwag.wordpress.com)
| orthoxerox wrote:
| My favourite riff on New Chronology must be the "study", using
| the same methods, that "proves" Fomenko and Morozov are the same
| person, just duplicated in the official chronology.
| trhway wrote:
| >Essentially, Fomenko believes that all of recorded history has
| occurred since 800 AD, with the vast majority happening since
| 1000 AD.
|
| The original Russian state of Kievan Rus was started at about
| that time. Before that there were no "Russian" anything. It just
| didn't exist. The Fomenko's timeline solves major fundamental
| problem of the Russian Greatest country on Earth Messianic
| mentality - how could the world's civilization had been developed
| for millennia without Russia? That would mean that the Russia is
| a latecomer who needs to study hard to try to get to the level
| instead of being the leader/driver that it feels like.
| andikleen2 wrote:
| Back when Usenet was still functional, de.sci.history (German
| history group) had some dedicated proponents of a German
| conspiracy theory that the early middle ages (Carolingian dynasty
| in middle Europe) didn't exist. Basically their argument was that
| there are gaps in the respective documents and also a lot of
| forgeries, and the best explanation was that a few hundred years
| were missing. This of course ignored all the carbon dating, and
| as well as the parallel chronology of other cultures (including
| early Islam, which fell exactly into the "missing" period)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
|
| At the beginning I found it amusing, but after some time it got
| just tiring.
| 6510 wrote:
| Ah I [vaguely] remember something about a large gap in German
| history where no one got a diploma. The argument was that
| forging lists of names and attributing credentials to them
| without works or publications was very complicated.
|
| If I remember correctly, it was the same period for which
| Morozov demonstrated the astronomical records to be way off.
|
| Funny stuff.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Here's another, also amusing history retold: https://en-
| academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/149090
| bsedlm wrote:
| > later historians either accidentally or maliciously made so-
| called "phantom copies" of events and rulers, repeating them over
| and over again under different names. For example, he believes
| that the Peloponnesian Wars is just an earlier replication of the
| conflict between the Navarrese Company and the Duchies of Athens
| and Neopatras in the 14th century. All of our traditional history
| consists of mistakes such as this: the same events repeated
| multiple times under different names.
|
| I think there's a deeper metaphysical concept at play here. I
| think of it like echos (or "rhymes of history"); but it's also
| quite easy to grasp what it's being refered to by considering
| "fractals" from a rougher (layman) perspective.
|
| There are events that seem to reverberate throurough reality.
| Some "louder" events reverberate more, other more localized
| events do not get echoed (or similarly repeated as much). and
| many localized events are themselves echos of older "louder" past
| events (? or maybe just events with a historical vantage point)
|
| But this is not science, it's not even admissible in modern
| philosophy. it's at worse pseudo-something. at best a fictional
| artistic expression.
| macrolocal wrote:
| Generously speaking, recurring motifs are a feature of many
| complicated dynamical systems.
| mjreacher wrote:
| This is funny to me because as someone who has gone through some
| of his differential geometry & topology books, they're actually
| quite good. Another example of being excellent in one area yet
| lacking in others (perhaps overconfidence/ego too stemming from
| being excellent in one area?). I guess the type of nationalism he
| grew up under in the USSR also didn't help, I know a few other
| people who have very strange views on history and conspiracies
| relating to it.
| adrian_b wrote:
| > "Fomenko has no historical background, and believes that most
| historical sources are lies anyhow."
|
| Because I have read some Soviet school manuals, which were full
| of shameless lies about most historical events (not only in the
| history manuals, but in all manuals, regardless of subject,
| e.g. in physics manuals, biology manuals and so on, and even in
| the sports manuals, where e.g. sports like boxing and skiing
| had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English
| and the Norse), I find it easy to believe that someone who grew
| in the Soviet Union was convinced that all written history
| sources must contain only lies.
| kgeist wrote:
| > full of shameless lies about most historical events ...
| skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before
| the English and the Norse
|
| I opened Wikipedia and immediately found this as the second
| sentence: "The earliest archaeological examples of skis were
| found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing
|
| They also mention China there.
|
| Sure attributing it to modern Slavs is anachronistic, but was
| there really such attribution in those school manuals you
| read? Or did they simply mean it was the territory of USSR
| where the first examples were found?
|
| It's modern skiing which was developed in Scandinavia.
|
| I'd say it's often quite the opposite, Western historiography
| is largely Eurocentric and disregards a lot of what happened
| in Asia/Africa.
| kjs3 wrote:
| "Found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE" and "invented and
| developed by Russians" are not equivalent.
| adrian_b wrote:
| No, in those manuals (from around 1965) there was nothing
| about archaeological discoveries.
|
| Moreover, the use of skis is not the same with organized
| skiing competitions and special training methods for them.
|
| Also, it was not enough to claim that all kinds of ancient
| inventions were due to Russians, the claims were that they
| were due to Russian _peasants_ , because of course nothing
| good could have originated in Russian "enemies of the
| people", e.g. aristocrats or bourgeoisie.
| gilleain wrote:
| His artwork is also amazing. Somehow only a topologist could
| make works like it (i feel).
|
| I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his
| mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with
| different names seems quite mathematical.
| ncann wrote:
| The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is
| just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely
| detached from the real world.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| it is also very very liberal in interpretation of facts.
| so, 2 sequences of kings reigns, one is 10, 30, 7, 25
| years, another is 8, 45, 9, 20. according to Fomenko's
| methodology, these are copies of the same event, because it
| is a short reign - long reign - short reign - long reign.
| enriquto wrote:
| It makes sense, in a way. His starting hypotheses is that
| all historical record has been falsified (names changed,
| dates changed or invented, etc). Yet, there is some
| information that can still be extracted from the
| historical corpus of falsified texts, by studying the
| statistically significant correlations between series of
| events. That is, correlations that would be nearly
| impossible to occur in purely invented events. As a
| working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding
| the enigma cypher!
|
| Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known
| and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons
| that he must surely explain elsewhere.
|
| I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic.
| But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is
| certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton
| also famously worked in stuff that we consider
| crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh),
| alchemy, occultism, etc.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Well, Fomenko attacks all methods of dating events for
| their drawbacks, but the core of his theory is very
| vulnerable to being self-contradictory. He doesn't trust
| the narrative sources when it comes to names and such,
| considering that Genghis Khan and Ceasar and Jesus Christ
| to be one person (names picked from the top of my head,
| but such conjunctions are typical to F.) based on
| similarities in reign lengths, but he somehow trusts that
| descriptions of astronomical events to be very exact.
| Like, source claimes that during Fukidides eclipse there
| were _stars_ visible, but modern calculation shows that
| at most Venus could be visible. So he discards 1500 years
| of history because of that plural wording. So ancient
| scribes took extreme liberties with names of rulers and
| countries, but somehow preserved the plural form of a
| noun 100% verbatim.
|
| And he also completely ignores all non-narrative
| historical documents, like financial receipts, sales
| invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in
| millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister
| sect in 18th century which decided to falsify all
| history.
| enriquto wrote:
| Heh, I'm not supporting Fomenko's chronology, it seems
| totally bonkers to me. Still, I'd love to be able to talk
| to him and listen what he has to say about all these
| questions that you mention. Or, even better, since he new
| Vladimir Arnold (they wrote a book together), I'm
| extremely curious to know whether they talked about
| history, and what did Arnold think about Fomenko's
| theories; being a remarkably down-to-earth fellow, for
| sure he wasn't having any kind of bullshit. In my mind,
| Arnold mercilessly mocked Fomenko's shit, and Fomenko's
| couldn't do anything but self-deprecatingly joke about
| himself, defenseless in front of the greater man.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| My personal theory is that Fomenko had figured out the
| errors in his books pretty early, yet, they were very
| popular and he had established a very lucrative career
| for himself in the difficult 1990s, so he just continued
| to publish more books rehashing the same thing over and
| over and over again, despite knowing the theory to be
| false.
|
| In Russian bookstores of the period there were very long
| bookshelves filled with his books.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Oh, and if it is 10, 28, 2, 7, 25 it is also the same
| sequence with 8, 45, 9, 29, because 10, (28 + 2), 7, 25
| looks similar enough. That extra number was a clear
| mistake.
| kej wrote:
| My favorite fringe history is the "missing millennium" that
| supposedly realigns the Old Testament with secular archeology:
| http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/millennium.php
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Not to be confused with the "New Chronology" of Rohl,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) for which
| there's actually some pretty solid evidence in an obscure and
| otherwise-unexplained nonlinearity of radiocarbon dating methods.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau
| bigbillheck wrote:
| From your first link, the only mention of radiocarbon dating
| is:
|
| In 2010, a series of corroborated radiocarbon dates were
| published for dynastic Egypt which suggest some minor revisions
| to the conventional chronology, but do not support Rohl's
| proposed revisions.[42]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt Plateau
| is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating, you
| recover Rohl's cronology pretty much exactly. This is
| significant because Rohl arrived at his chronology from
| unrelated observations about entirely different things, so
| the apparent plateau is strong additional evidence. One or
| the other alone would not be decisive in itself, but the
| overlap between them can be.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt
| Plateau is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating
|
| I don't think that you can.
|
| By my reading of https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Geochronol
| ogy/Radiocarbon_da... (and with help of straightedge lined
| up against the graph) the Halstatt plateau refers to a
| particular range of years that standard radiocarbon dating
| has trouble with. Before and after this range, however,
| radiocarbon works as expected.
|
| The only connection I can see between Hallstatt and Rohl is
| the former is 340-ish years of uncertainty, and the maximal
| revision in the latter is 350-ish. (I should also point out
| that this kind of approximate matching is Fomenko's bread
| and butter).
|
| If you try to combine them by saying Hallstatt is a single
| instant and then moving everything up 350 years, I see
| several problems with that. First, Rohl's divergence with
| standard chronology is at the agreed-upon point of 664BCE,
| which is right in the middle of the Hallstatt plateau
| (760-440BCE). Second, Hallstatt was an actual culture with
| its own internal timeline, and whatever the radiocarbon
| numbers say there was substantial evolution during that
| time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "A single instant" when accounting for the ordinary noise
| of radiocarbon dating can be plenty enough for
| significant social evolution to take place. Other than
| that, the rest is simply a disagreement about how best to
| smooth over the "plateau" The assignment of 760-440 BCE
| to the plateau is somewhat conventional, the earlier
| dates in that range are the most "plateau-like" by far
| which is what we would actually expect if Rohl is correct
| and consensus chronology has a phantom time interval
| matching those dates.
| mcguire wrote:
| Be very careful when you see things like, " _Rohl asserts that
| the New Chronology allows him to identify some of the
| characters in the Hebrew Bible with people whose names appear
| in archaeological finds._ "
|
| It's likely that the Biblical identification came first and any
| evidence was identified to support the identification. And, to
| be fair, that's not always invalid.
| enriquto wrote:
| I love this, in an "alternate history" kind of way. Interesting
| and fascinating. It is, however, sad that the author apparently
| takes it seriously!
|
| Moreso that he is a really good mathematician and writer. His
| book with Dubrovin and Novikov is among the best in differential
| geometry and mechanics, and all his other works that I read are
| definitely top-notch. The book about visualization with Kunii is
| particularly lovely.
|
| And he didn't turn a historical crackpot after his work in math.
| His math works and his historical writings are contemporary!
|
| A very interesting character, for sure. I wonder what his math
| colleagues think about him.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Another great historical fan-fiction genre I enjoy is the
| Phantom Time Hypothesis:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
|
| It's obviously completely fake, but I still enjoy reading about
| it.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah I'm a big fan of this sort of conspiracy theory, partly
| because it's a fun what-if scenario, and partly because the
| debunking process tends to be really informative.
|
| The Shakespeare authorship question is another good one.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I had a friend once, who really went nuts on this 20+ years ago,
| so I've dug pretty deeply in this nonsense. However, no arguments
| were able to convince my friend that this 'chronology' is crap.
| He believed that all archeological evidence was forged, all
| starmap calculators were using incorrect formulas, etc. - so even
| taking direct page from Fomenko books where he claimed the stars
| conjunction took place and verifying it in starmap calculator
| proving that stars on that day were 1deg apart didn't impress
| him.
|
| Eventually he also took to loving Putin, so our paths have
| naturally diverged.
|
| The most interesting thing is that he's an overall very clever
| guy, a physics scientist, I think, somewhere in Norway. But some
| brain defects just can't get fixed, I guess: even before that at
| 13yo he dropped out of school and joined the White Brotherhood,
| escaping home and making his way all the way to Kiev from Urals
| in Russia, for the announcement ascension of Maria Devi Christos
| [1] (of was it an apocalypse? I don't remember).
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvigun
| lkrubner wrote:
| This feels like the heart of it:
|
| "Then the Romanov dynasty takes power and with the help of the
| Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation
| (??) writes a series of fake histories in the 17th and 18th
| centuries to hide the true magnificence of the Horde so that
| Russians don't realize the magnificence of their past and
| remained alienated from their Central Asian cousins. In Fomenko's
| history, Peter the Great's western reforms of the 18th century
| aren't an attempt to leverage a backwards Russia to the status of
| a world power but rather the treacherous efforts a usurper
| dynasty to stamp out the legacy of their predecessors and
| subordinate Russia to Western interests."
|
| For 500 years, Russians have been arguing with themselves about
| whether they belong in the West or whether they belong in Asia.
| And this seems like a very roundabout, and yet powerful, way of
| saying "Asia." Sometimes lunatics have their hands on something
| very true, and I suspect that this lunatic history is in fact the
| best expression imaginable of that part of Russia that rejects
| the West. After all, you could use all of the techniques of
| modern science to build an accurate history, but then you'd just
| be playing the West's game. You could use all of the protocols
| and formalisms that Western historians have developed over the
| last few centuries, but that would be akin to letting the enemy
| win. It's better to engage in mysticism and pseudo-science and
| pseudo-math: that is the proper way to reject the West.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > that is the proper way to reject the West.
|
| Maybe, but what about things like Q-Anon? They are just as
| crazy but don't have a geographical preference
| ncmncm wrote:
| The stupid, it burns!
|
| All this is ... well, not ironic, but an odd reversal of recent
| discoveries that stuff we think of as historical development goes
| back much, much farther than we had ever imagined. Gobekli Tepe
| is the poster child, 11,000 ya, but what had been thought a very
| big hill in Java, Gunung Padang, turns out to have been
| constructed c. 22,000 ya. Nascent military fortification at
| Jericho 9000 ya.
|
| And we have a world-altering comet strike right about 10,818 BCE,
| about a thousand years before Gobekli Tepe, pretty close to one
| of the other Tepes.
|
| Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian
| islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South
| China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India,
| and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started to
| vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might have
| been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we know of
| started right upriver from some of it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian
| islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South
| China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India,
| and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started
| to vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might
| have been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we
| know of started right upriver from some of it.
|
| That was the land of Lemuria according to oral history of those
| peoples.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Anyway the Australians still have oral records of conflicts,
| and precise negotiated resolutions, as people had to move
| uphill to where _other_ people had already been living for
| tens of thousands of years. They were not always welcome.
|
| The water rose continually from 20kya to 8kya, but about
| 12.8kya, after the comet strike, it rose very fast for a few
| years, maybe 3m in a decade.
| [deleted]
| bobthechef wrote:
| roywiggins wrote:
| The even more absurd theory in this style I've come across was a
| crudely designed website asserting that humanity came into
| existence in the 16th century, immediately invented the printing
| press, and then a group of monks sat down and produced the entire
| historical written record in a couple of decades for unclear but
| presumably nefarious reasons.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| This reminds me of this book https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-
| borges-tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertiu...
| gojomo wrote:
| Eventually all these creeds will be vanquished, and the world
| will be united under Last Thursdayism.
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
|
| If you repent all other false beliefs & join now, you can be
| reborn with us all as soon as this coming Thursday.
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