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And he also completely ignores all non-narrative historical documents, like financial receipts, sales invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister sect in 18th century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.
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.