The “New Chronology” of Anatoly Fomenko
nathangoldwag.wordpress.com
nathangoldwag.wordpress.com
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
It's obviously completely fake, but I still enjoy reading about it.
The Shakespeare authorship question is another good one.
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.
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.
And he also completely ignores all non-narrative historical documents, like financial receipts, sales invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister sect in 18th century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.
In Russian bookstores of the period there were very long bookshelves filled with his books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it was the usual communist propaganda about social classes, but what you originally said sounded more like Russian nationalism.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
At the beginning I found it amusing, but after some time it got just tiring.
If I remember correctly, it was the same period for which Morozov demonstrated the astronomical records to be way off.
Funny stuff.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe, but what about things like Q-Anon? They are just as crazy but don't have a geographical preference
My question to whoever edits yc comments sections: what were your considerations for eliminating this post?
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).
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.
That was the land of Lemuria according to oral history of those peoples.
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.