Customer Reviews

Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and its Applications to Historical Dating, Vol. 2: The Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Records

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This book, and its companion volume, represent fairly unidiomatic translations (from the Russian) of a long series of papers that explore various statistical techniques used by the author and his colleagues to delve into the subject of historical chronology -- i.e. the "science" of dating historical events. The going can be heavy because many of the papers are written in mathematicalese ("Let" statement . . . "Then" statement . . . "It follows that" . . . etc."), there is a lot of duplication of information because each was written to stand on its own, and there is a frustrating lack of summing up because the conclusions defy definitive conclusion. Nevertheless, the mathematical methods look sound (to a mathematically literate non-mathematician) and the hypotheses will turn your world upsidedown. To wit: We can't trust the dating of any historical event that happened before the 14th or 15th century; that whole sequences of! events in the historical record may be mistranscriptions of other sequences of events (the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, for instance); that history is thus much compressed from what we have learned since kindergarten, and civilization could be much younger than we believe. Because these lines of inquiry (the non-mathematical ones) began in the early days of the Soviet Union, one may be suspicious about ulterior (political) motives, and some independent verifying of some of the accepted "facts" is called for. But this raises more questions about the knowability of history than it can possibly attempt to answer, and it does plunge one headlong into the mysteries of the now ignored study of historical chronology. We've used the same temporal scaffolding for centuries without recently examining its foundation. Maybe its time for a new look. Turgid going, but dizzying implications.

First of all, the price for this English edition of Fomeko's book on chronology is too high, but that's a common practice to price high monographs in math (simply, it's assumed that nobody except few sepecialists in the area would ever read them), so I read this book in Russian. But, this is not a math book in usual sense. Russian is not my first language, so I had plenty of trouble reading this book but it was worthy of my effort. It is an excelent example how mathematics and statistics enter new areas to examine their accuracy and correctness. Traditionally, math-free history enjoyed lots of flexibility in presenting its descriptions of historical events. History, as we know, may sometimes be incorrect, but how incorrect can it be? According to Fomenko the magnitude of this incorrectness is so massive that it is simply shocking. He supports his claims by mathematical and statistical methods - i.e. scientific methods which became a new exciting area of the applied mathematics. Some of the most shocking statements of Fomenko are related to the global chronology of historical events. Simply, he claims that our history was extended artificially (by mistake or intentionally) by about 1000 year. That means, it's not the year 2000 but the year 1000. In order to learn how these claims were made, the reader should read the books by Fomenko devoted the global chronology of historical events.

I find this book most amazing one I ever have read. If you read this book carefully you will be impressed how many things we take for granted and without any critique. You will be surprised how subtle and non-reliable is the building of modern history and chronology. To read this book is more interesting than any novel of Steven King.

Words in reviews cant make you believe thet history you`ve learnd might not be the correct one, but onec you get hands on this book and read just the readeble parts you`ll see all events in new light. My advice for everyone interested in history is to read this book in order to be able to manage history data better. Fomenko did not present any suggestions on how the real history did look like and explains how hard it is going to be to put all peaces togeather. Aditional efforts could make this book more readable. The whole prepress could have been better. That would make it far more understandable. I`ll just poit out once more - if you realy want to believe in your history picture you will have to put it now to much serious tests that Fomenko and his assosiates have developed.