Fomenko’s New Chronology – Critical Account
History is a science that leaves vast field for guesswork, various assumptions and theories, for there is hardly anything less solid than the past. If we are not sure about what happens at this very moment in some other part of our Earth, how can we be absolutely sure about what happened on this Earth yesterday, a year or a hundred years ago? The further we go into the past, the vaguer our information grows. Such a situation is a fertile breeding ground for theorizing; among the most bizarre of such theories is, undoubtedly, the “New Chronology”, which turned a not very well known Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko into a rather well known scandal figure.
According to him, the Scaligerian chronology we use now is not only inaccurate, but also wildly incorrect as a result of later revisions, rewritings and inclusions by various conspiracy groups, such as Jesuits and the ruling family of the Russian Empire, Romanovs. Based on statistical data, zodiacs, and mathematical elements, used in chronology, he states that the historical period of humankind is shorter than it is supposed to be, with all the ancient history (everything before the 10th century AD) is but a reflection of what happened during the Middle Ages; Jesus Christ lived in 12th century; Mongol Hordes are in fact Russians, etc.
Needless to say, the majority of scientific community considers the entire Fomenko’s work to be pseudoscience, although it has a number of followers. In my opinion, what it reminds me most is one giant, elaborate hoax, for it is way too eccentric to be treated seriously. If everything before certain date is a reflection of later events, what to do with objects from that period that do not fit into any later time? What about written sources? Were they all falsified by some immeasurably powerful organization that had enough time and effort to spare to write and distribute them, destroying everything that doesn’t fit?
Although it may seem to be witty and interesting at a first glance, Fomenko’s theory doesn’t take into account too many things – and there is much more in history than mathematics. There are written sources, material culture, architecture and so on. Probably, it is really a hoax, a prolonged joke of a mathematician played on history – but it is not science, that’s for sure.
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