REVELATIONS IN SCIENCE: What if it all happened neither then nor that way
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Historical chronology occasionally runs into inconsistencies — take, for example, King Herod himself. He died in 4 BCE. So how could he have ordered the Massacre of the Innocents four years after his death?
And there have been even more sensational claims, like that of Professor Jean-Baptiste Pérès, who argued that Napoleon never existed — that he was merely a reincarnation of a solar myth, a distortion of «Apollyon», meaning «destroyer», or more precisely, Apollo, son of Leto (Napoleon’s mother was named Letizia — see the resemblance?), born on the island of Delos (and Napoleon was also born on an island), and that Napoleon’s two wives symbolized the Earth and the Moon, as befits the Sun…
Equally amusing was the theory proposed by French academician Garçon, who published a book in 1919 claiming that Molière never existed, and that all of his plays were in fact written by King Louis XIV himself, who, due to his royal position, couldn’t very well publish comedies under his own name. Don’t believe it? Consider this: the name «Molière» is an anagram of the French words Me le roi — «I am the king». Need any more proof?
Everyone understood perfectly well that the authors of these texts were simply jesting, poking fun at certain historical accounts they deemed flawed — and they didn’t try to hide it. But a full-fledged academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945), didn’t question just one historical date or even a few — he cast doubt on nearly all of them! What exactly did he uncover that was so unbelievable, and how did the scholarly world and history enthusiasts respond to his revelations? Let’s take a closer look. It’s quite a fascinating case…
THE BRILLIANT BEGINNING OF ANATOLY’S DAYS
For a long time, the biography of Anatoly Timofeyevich Fomenko seemed nearly exemplary — fit to be placed in a Hall of Standards. He was born two months before the end of World War II in the already-liberated city of Stalino, now Donetsk. His father had experienced the Nazi occupation and, in 1950, moved with his family to work in Magadan (in what kind of train car remains unknown). In 1959, they were able to return to the Ukrainian SSR (to Luhansk), where Anatoly graduated from school with a gold medal — along the way, winning the All-Union Correspondence Mathematics Olympiad and earning two bronze medals from VDNH at the ages of 11 and 14.
In 1967, Anatoly graduated from Moscow State University, defended his PhD thesis three years later at the age of 25, and his doctoral dissertation just two years after that — an almost superhuman pace! He worked in the Department of Differential Geometry at MSU, became a professor in 1981, a corresponding member of the Academy in 1990, and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994. He has published hundreds of scientific works — but mathematics was not his only realm of passion.
Back in Magadan, he wrote a science fiction story titled The Mystery of the Milky Way, which gained nationwide fame after being published in Pionerskaya Pravda in 1958–59. I took the trouble to find and read it — naïve by today’s standards, but it clearly shows a vivid imagination.
This wouldn’t be his last encounter with the muses. In 1988, he worked as the production designer for a half-hour animated film by Yuri Tarasov, based on the book The Pass by another doctor — this time of historical sciences — Kir Bulychev. It’s a curious and rather professionally made film, if a bit eerie; those interested can still find it on YouTube. Yet this was far from his most sensational departure from the mysteries of mathematics — something even more intriguing was yet to come…
THE NEW CHRONOLOGY
Fomenko’s achievements in mathematics were clearly not enough for him — he set out to completely rewrite our understanding of history. Such ideas had been proposed before — for example, by the great Isaac Newton, who famously considered his mathematical and physical works less important than his interpretation of the Apocalypse and who had already posited a key thesis: «True history is much shorter than what is written in books» (Cesare Lombroso would later call this «the dying delirium of a genius»).
Even more similar to Fomenko’s theories were the works of the revolutionary Narodnik Nikolai Morozov, who spent over twenty years imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Shlisselburg Fortress. Morozov suggested that all of human history fits neatly into a period of just under 2,000 years. The Bolsheviks valued him as a revolutionary and published his writings — but gave little attention to his historical concepts.
Fomenko proved to be just as bold — his version of history turned out to be significantly shorter than the conventional one. He argues that only events of the last three centuries are dated with any real accuracy, while everything earlier is almost certainly misdated, based on various unreliable chronologies. According to him, writing itself only appeared relatively recently, in the middle of the first millennium, so any supposedly older written sources are inherently suspect.
But why did everyone believe history was longer than it really is? Because, Fomenko claims, many historical accounts actually describe the same events multiple times — only with different characters and names. Why?
Sometimes, it was deliberate falsification meant to boast of a more ancient heritage. Other times, it was simple confusion. This duplication occurs especially often with non-European countries — whose chronicles, according to Fomenko, mostly recount European events under different names. As a result, the histories of these countries are actually much shorter than generally believed.
HOW TO PROVE AND VERIFY
Traditional chronology — referred to by Fomenko as «Scaligerian» (after Joseph Justus Scaliger, the 16th-century French historian known for developing early historical chronologies) — relies on a vast array of data to establish dates. These include analyses of radioactive isotopes, which indicate when an object ceased to interact with its environment. But Fomenko confidently dismisses nearly all of these methods as either flawed or fundamentally unreliable.
As for dendrochronology — dating objects using tree rings — Fomenko brushes it off as casually as a cook peeling a potato. How can one trust it, he argues, if a tree only lives 300–400 years? He’s equally skeptical of cross-dating techniques, which compare ring thicknesses across different trees to build extended timelines. Researchers in Novgorod developed their own dendrochronological scale using millions of measurements from 12,000 tree trunks found in ancient pavements — but Fomenko simply does not believe it, period.
Another of Fomenko’s arguments lies in astronomical data. According to him, the star map described in Ptolemy’s Almagest corresponds to a sky visible at least 400 years later than the supposed time of its composition (2nd century CE). For his conclusions, he uses data from only eight stars out of more than a thousand, and even then, he claims that some of their coordinates were clearly mismeasured — specifically the ones that unmistakably indicate the Almagest’s observations took place during late antiquity.
He also dismisses the well-established datings of solar eclipses — arguing, for instance, that the eclipses mentioned by Thucydides actually occurred fifteen centuries later than generally accepted (or so he believes). But perhaps the most crucial element in his theory is his statistical analysis of historical texts. Fomenko is convinced he has discovered multiple «layers» — recurring sequences of historical events that repeat across centuries, with only the names of the kings changed. Why would this be?
Because, he argues, the real timeline of history is significantly shorter than the conventional one. It simply gets repeated in the chronicles multiple times, at intervals of approximately 330, 1050, and 1800 years — either to make a chronicler’s favorite country seem more ancient or for some other obscure reason.
A STRANGE WORLD
The conclusions drawn by Fomenko began to be popularized by a whole group of «New Chronology» supporters — on a scale that defies imagination. The number of books they’ve published is now in the hundreds, with more than a dozen available in English. These works make some truly astonishing claims that are hard to immediately wrap one’s mind around.
For instance, that Christianity emerged around a thousand years ago — not two — and that Christ was born either in 1054 or 1052. This, they claim, is supported by the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin, which places its origin near that period (although Fomenko generally mistrusts such analysis, he seems to temporarily forget that here).
Many well-known events, according to them, never happened — such as the Tatar-Mongol yoke. But the Cossacks did exist, and one Cossack warlord, whom his comrades respectfully called «Batya» (as Cossacks often refer to their leaders as «father-ataman»), defeated all the princes of his time. Historians supposedly distorted his name, turning «Batya» into «Batu Khan»!
Naturally, there was no separate state called Judea — it and Rome were always one and the same country (so those coins of Emperor Vespasian marked «Judea Capta» must have meant Rome had conquered itself). And neither Jerusalem nor Rome existed where we think they did — everything actually took place in Istanbul. After all, Mount Beykoz on its outskirts is, according to Fomenko, the real Golgotha. The grand myth of the Roman Empire? Created by medieval monks, who forged countless chronicles to please the popes.
There’s a wealth of other marvels — for example, that the author of the treatise on conic sections, Apollonius of Perga, was in fact Nicolaus Copernicus (after all, «Apollonius» is simply a distortion of «Polonius», meaning «Polish»). But then again, Copernicus wasn’t really Copernicus either — it’s just a nickname, a twisted form of «sopernik» («rival»), because he was supposedly a rival to Ptolemy (though «sopernik» in Polish is rywal — not exactly convincing). According to Fomenko, they were contemporaries who both lived in the 16th century.
Similarly unshocking is the claim that Islam was invented by a Nestorian community living in what is now the Iraqi city of Mosul — hence the name, they say. There are plenty of other such examples, but we’ll stop here for now.
NOT CONVINCING
At first, New Chronology caused quite a stir. Among non-specialists, it even gained some high-profile fans — for example, Garry Kasparov, who reportedly helped fund the research (though he later changed his stance). Professional historians, however, almost unanimously rejected New Chronology, often without mincing words. In 2004, the book series was awarded the infamous anti-prize Abzats in the category «Honorary Illiteracy».
And the award was well deserved — if only for the numerous examples of manipulated and falsified names and dates. In trying to demonstrate suspicious overlaps in the reigns of Roman emperors, Fomenko simply omitted ten emperors, inserted one that never existed, rearranged three of them, merged two pairs of emperors into single «reflections,» and in one case compressed four emperors into one. He also changed reign durations at will — by anywhere from two to five years. If that’s considered science, then what on earth is… (censored)?
One of Fomenko’s favorite techniques is also strikingly weak: pointing out superficial similarities between words — which, of course, proves nothing at all (you’ve seen examples like «Apollonius» and «Polonius», «Batya» and «Batu», «Copernicus» and «sopernik», and these are just a few). Once you start using tricks like this, the possibilities are endless!
As a result, New Chronology has developed a stable reputation as pseudoscience, and interest in it has steadily declined. It’s mentioned less and less; its followers have grown tired of defending it without evidence, and they now do so with noticeably less enthusiasm. What the main proponents of New Chronology — true conspiracy theorists — really need now is a new toy to play with.
As for Fomenko, he’s doing just fine — he is, after all, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Just last year, he was awarded the Medal of the Order «For Merit to the Fatherland», 2nd class (which, all things considered, is not particularly surprising). And yet many can’t shake the feeling that one day, with a laugh, he’ll declare: «I got you all good, didn’t I?»
LITERATURE
- A.T. Fomenko, G.V. Nosovsky. Numbers Against Lies. Moscow: AST, 720 pages.
- A.V. Novikov. The Collapse of the New Chronology. Leningrad: Super Publishing, 380 pages.
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