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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
So it was the usual communist propaganda about social classes, but what you originally said sounded more like Russian nationalism.
Well, if we think about it in generic terms, skis probably were developed in places where there's a lot of snow, but also some wood suitable for making skis. Also, finding those from thousands years old would be an unfrequent occasion since wood usually does not preserve that well. So, the highest probability for such discovery would be in the country that has a lot of territory that has both wood and snow. Russia is definitely one of such countries, so I am not surprised by that claim.
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.
The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely detached from the real world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> As a working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding the enigma cypher!
More like decoding the Bible code. The method is so broad that it's always possible to find some parallel, no matter how fuzzy and distant. But this is not proof of anything, you can only start from the assumption that the replicas Fomenko talks about must exist.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
Famously, Issac Newton also thought that the chronology was off even in his time, by at least 500-800 years. And like Fomenko, he had a mathematical basis for his theory which couldn't be refuted by any soft scientist. There are others, the Jesuit chief librarian to the King of France, Jean Hardouin, for example.
I don't think I've ever seen anybody attempt to refute any of these works. Just lots of kvetching and "literally how could you believe this" type bloviation.
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.
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]
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.
> 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/Geochronology/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.
"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.
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.
I'm reminded of some of Philip K Dick's later books, after he well and truly went off his rocker. He also believed in a false chronology, where around a thousand years were missing. Like Fomenko, this constructed history of his aligned with his political beliefs: in particular, Dick believed the fall of the Roman Empire was fiction, and that the world was ruled by an evil hegemony.
Dick believed that the truth was revealed to him via laser beam from a satellite that was an agent of the true God, and his beliefs about chronology extended into a spiritual view based on Christian Gnosticism, where the visible world is an illusion perpetrated by an evil entity playing at being God. While that's clearly pants-on-head bonkers, I feel like it's better-motived and more self-consistent than New Chronology.
>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.
"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.
Conspiracy theories are all fun and games until some idiot decides to shoot a pizza parlor or even start a war. Like any country Russia has a handful of conspiracy theorists, sadly it also has a phenomenal domestic propaganda machine which feeds directly into mass psyche.
This is intetesting: I posted here a link to what S.P. Novikov writes about Fomenko's "history", which I think to be quite informative. It got quickly eliminated.
My question to whoever edits yc comments sections: what were your considerations for eliminating this post?
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 1° 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).
Anatoly Fomenko is not unique by any means. The boredom, forced bullshit, and strict conformance requirements of the developed socialism phase of USSR gave birth to the Soviet New Age of a sort. Some people invented spiritual practices and started their own cults, others turned to ufology, conspiracy theories and writing "new histories", like Fomenko or Yuri Petukhov, the rather infamous pulp fiction writer and self-described anthropologist who claimed that all people on Earth descended from Ruses and all languages are developed from Russian.
It peaked in early 90s in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet republics, ending up in a massive wave of new-age cults and pulp fiction, but Fomenko has been particularly persistent.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.