Customer Reviews

History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

You learned history when you were a young lad from someone who learned it from someone who..... but who started it all?
What's wrong with asking this question? Some people would burn Mr. Fomenko at the stake for saying the Earth isn't flat.

I bought this book as a novelty but I ended up being quite impressed with it. I wouldn't say I'm totally sold on all the crazy ideas Mr. fomenko puts out but they certainly are more plausable than you might think. He does a thorough job of showing how early "historians" were really working for the pope. Most were monks with limited resources, personal and religious agendas, and a willingness to fudge it whenever they didn't know (or like) the truth. You'll be amazed at how meticulously he presents his evidence that the dark ages were so dark because they never happened. Your head will probably start to ache when you get to the section where he analyzes historical timelines statistically (at least mine did). However, the parallels truly are startling.

The first four chapters alone are worth the price of the book. Even if you don't believe any of it I'm sure you will at least question why we take the foundations of historical knowledge so seriously without solid justification. There's more to this book than you could know without actually reading it!

This book presents a wildly radical restructuring of the timeline of world history. It is written by an outsider to the world of historical scholarship: Fomenko is a non-historian (a renowned mathematician) and an non-Westerner (from Russia.)

Fomenko's theory says, basically, that everything we are told about history pre-1600 is BS. Ancient history is, according to Fomenko, based on evidence quote-unquote "discovered" since the 15th century and arranged into a spurious standard timeline in the 18th century. (In some cases, the evidence was discovered much more recently: some Eastern religious texts were only uncovered in the 20th century.) Fomenko collates this evidence to argue that all those ancient chronicles are different versions of events which really happened roughly between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. The key event in Fomenko's timeline is the life of Christ (who was born in 1053 AD rather than 6BC, Fomenko believes.) After a relatively short-lived Eurasian empire disintegrated, each nation made up their own version of the empire's history, and generally each new version of the story was set farther back into the past than the previous one. (The newest version is the Hindu Krishna myth which is set about 10,000 years before the present day.)

This is an appealing theory, since it eliminates the various "dark ages" which blemish the conventional chronology. On the other hand, this is an appalling theory, since it creates one big dark age extending from the beginning of time till 900 AD or so.

The book is translated from the Russian. There is no index, and the bibliography is rather annoyingly arranged in the original Russian alphabetical order (so for example, B's and V's are mixed together.) But the translation is extremely readable, more readable than most historical works originally written in English.

This is the first book in a projected 7-volume set.

The online bookstore entries for this volume rather amusingly show easily history gets mixed up. The translator is someone named Michael Jagger who is almost certainly not the singer Mick Jagger (whose full name is Michael Phillip Jagger.) However, some online bookstores do list Mick Jagger as a coauthor. Amazon.com says the translator is someone named Mike Jagupov. This is hard enough to keep straight while the singer is still alive, and a few decades from now, I am sure that many sources will say that the legendary Rolling Stones frontman translated this book into English.

(I have no idea if Mick Jagger speaks Russian or not. Although he is an educated man--- an alumnus of the University of London--- one would assume that he doesn't. Certainly, in all the millions of words which have been written about him, no one has commented on his knowledge of the Russian language. And, if he actually was the person who translated this controversial text into English, the book's publishers would presumably be aggressively advertising that fact.)

The only conspiracies here have to do with the number of insanely positive reviews. There are twenty(!) here where the reviewer only has one review to their name and it's a five-star review for this book. And more coming. Funny that. It's almost like somebody has set up multiple accounts and is trying to up the rating. Two with no other reviews may be coincidence. But twenty? Twenty! Good job buddy. Very subtle. You might as well have just copied and pasted your review.

So, I'm not a mathematician and I don't know enough to contradict Fomenko's math, but I don't have to. By that reasoning Fomenko wouldn't be able to contradict me because I'm a Classical History Major and this is (ostensibly) a History book. I can tell you exactly why his math must be wrong and why he should be ashamed to call himself a scientist. Scientists must make the models match the data, not the other way round. When the facts don't fit your theory then the problem isn't with the facts, it's with your theory. And boy do the facts not fit this 'theory.' It would be hard to think of a way in which history could make less sense than it does through his model.

First, a brief explanation for anyone not familiar with this book. Anatoly Fomenko is a Doctor of Mathematics at Moscow State University. Despite a lack of support from his colleagues (who consider his ideas on history nuts) he published a series of seven books in which he rewrote the history of the world based on his ideas of Statistics. As explained on the back cover, "Jesus Christ was born in 1053 A.D. and crucified in 1086 A.D. The Old Testament refers to mediaeval events. Apocalypse was written after 1486 A.D." I'll go more into why he thinks that makes sense later. The Roman Empire and all of Classical civilization was invented by Jesuit monks who wrote in a remarkably short time all of Western literature and invented an entire civilization which people then immediately forgot never existed. All Classical buildings are simply medieval ones that have been misdated.

And now a brief history of... well history, as seen through Fomenko-vision: History begins when Andronicos Comnenos dies and becomes Jesus. History records him as an unsuccessful Greek emperor with no real successes who was beaten to death by the mob and not a poor prophet from Nazareth who was crucified but hey, what do they know. It's not like the crucifixion was an important part of the story or anything. Immediately all of Europe decides that they're Christian and march against the Muslims. It may sound confusing why they'd blame the Muslims for what was an internal coup but they were probably just confused because Mohammed wasn't born yet. At some point they changed their minds and decided to skip the first three crusades and jump straight onto the Fourth (except that they didn't. It was actually the same as the First. Obviously. Please try and keep up). They then sacked Constantinople which was also Rome which was Troy which was Jerusalem. At some point they get confused and occupied the Holy Land as well and then forget all about Constantinople and let it fall back to the Greeks since Jerusalem was now Constantinople which was Troy which was Rome. People back then had very short memories often forgetting why they did something before they even did it. Very sad. During the First Crusade the Greeks decide to avenge the kidnapping of their queen by... also sacking Constantinople. After sacking their own city they quietly vanish for a few years, probably in embarrassment. Some time later Erasmus wrote the New Testament confusing generations of scholars who wondered what they had been copying out for all that time. Having now written a New Testament it was decided that they needed an Old one. I'm sure the reasons for the reversed order are as obvious to everyone else as they are to Fomenko. Some time in the 15th Century David rose up, except that he was Turkish and ruled in Constantinople. Despite the many wars with the Turks Europe had never warred with the Turks and accepted all of these events as holy writ. After all, the Turks were really Russian in funny hats and the Russians ruled the world. The Byzantines were secretly ruling in England. After the death of Solomon (Suleimon) the Jews split off from Christianity because they were tired of not being persecuted because of something they didn't do and decided that being hunted by the Inquisition was more fun. In the confusion the Catholics and Orthodox Christians split apart as well because everyone else was doing it and it seemed a good idea at the time. They were to regret this later when the Catholics sacked their city but that had already happened so it was fine.

It turns out that Russia has dominated the world since the earliest recorded history (what nationality was Fomenko again?). The Mongols were not from Mongolia because the people there are nothing but worthless servants of the Russian Empire (it's ok. Fomenko assures us that the Mongols never knew of Genghis Khan until some pesky monks told them that they used to rule the world). Russia was actually the major Empire that the Romans were based off of and have existed since the dawn of civilization. Silly Georgians thinking they are anything but the personal property of Russia! Ha ha. They also controlled America, Europe and North Africa by 1300 so I guess that we should all submit to the Russian yoke as is our hereditary duty. Occasionally a czar would allow the governors of Europe (kings hah!) to wage war on each other if they pleased him. Presumably the English sucked up to him better than France which is why they did so well in the Hundred Years War but then lost his favor again which resulted in the French winning. Joan of Arc was probably the czar's sister or something. The czar could summon anyone to his court and they had to obey which is why Moscow is renowned the world over as being filled with better artwork and architecture than such dives as Paris and Rome (which isn't the REAL Rome after all). After Russia fell in the 1600s (through internal troubles. No one could EVER conquer Russians) the rest of the world immediately conspired to hide that they ever existed lest they should try to rule over them again. Thus they erased this empire from the history books and replaced it with such lies as Rome and the Holy Roman Empire (couldn't they even pick a new name? Obvious!). Thus the treacherous Romanovs rose to power (did I mention that he first published this under the Soviets?) and they too decided to forget there had ever been a Russian Empire of such a scale. Many "Roman" documents are simply Russian ones with a few name changes. I'm not sure where Latin came from but the Russians probably invented it to confuse future generations of schoolkids. They had after all had it engraved all over the southern part of their empire on specific styles of buildings which they immediately buried and built medieval cities on top of to confuse archaeologists. It never showed up in Russia itself. Perhaps they punished the provinces by making them write everything in Latin. Oh those cruel Russians. After the late 18th Century things begin to return to what is normally called history.

As you can see it is far less confusing than the 'conventional' timeline. You might think I'm making this up but that is what you get when you put all his history together. Minus the sarcasm perhaps.

It seems best to explain why he is wrong about the facts he lists before going into the facts that he's ignoring. First off comes a good example of how he combines Classical and Medieval history together. To him the First Crusade and the Trojan War are the same event. One of Fomenko's favorite tools, a chart, might demonstrate why this is.

Simularities:
First Crusade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| Trojan War
A war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| A war
Sieges involved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| All about a siege
East vs. West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| East vs. West
Um, took place on the planet earth . . . . . . . . . . .| Probably the same if it happened at all...

The differences:
First Crusade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| Trojan War
Lead by Bohemund, Raymond, Geoffrey, etc. . . . ..| Led by Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, etc. (No matching names)
Fought for religious reasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| Fought for political/personal reasons
Traveled by land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| Traveled by sea
Leaders fought on horseback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| Leaders arrived on chariots, fought on foot
Weapons: lances, spears, iron swords, chain mail ..| Weapons: spears, bronze swords, bronze greaves
All participants monotheist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| All participants polytheist
Came from all over Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| Came from Greece
Lasted three years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| Lasted ten years
Went to recover city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..| Went to destroy city and recover wife
Set up a kingdom on enemy land . . . . . . . . . . . . .| Immediately returned home
Leaders became kings and lords of new land . . . . ..| Leaders offend the gods and are punished
Archaeology confirms presence in Israel . . . . . . . ..| Archaeology confirms presence in Greece
Mentioned the Trojan War in documents . . . . . . . .| Was the Trojan War...

As you can clearly see there is a great deal there fully justifying the combination of these two events as the same war. How could it not be?...
Clearly this idea is nuts and fails on any comparative level. There are almost no similarities between the two events except that they were both famous. To combine the two would require removing all facts except for the sieges. If you discard all that then there is nothing left.

His arguments for this are all mathematical and rely on eclipse records and other such information as well as a statistical analysis so vague that multiple mentions of sieges mean they must be the same one. By that reasoning my name is Stuart therefore I must be a king since previous Stuarts were kings of England. QED. Can I have my crown please? A key fact of mathematics is that garbage in=garbage out. He may have done all his calculations correctly, but if he feeds in the wrong data or assumptions then he'll still get worthless data back. Even I know better than to do what he does. By selecting only those sections of chronology which match his conclusions and ignoring those that don't he violates a key rule of statistics. My Statistics I teacher taught me that. It's as basic as you can get. For example he selects a segment of Byzantine Emperors and matches them with a series of Old Testament kings. The two dynasties match up very well indeed so he concludes that they must be identical. Sounds convincing. But why did he choose to compare that stretch of kings with that stretch of Emperors? Because they matched of course! Statistically speaking if you try hard enough you will be able to find matches in the lengths of reigns for various civilizations if you have no other qualifying factors. If he'd chosen Roman Emperors to match with the Byzantine ones he probably wouldn't have found his correlation. Or Frankish ones. Or English ones. Or even earlier Old Testament ones. In fact, even with that it doesn't fit because he has to combine Justinian and Justin I to make it match Manasseh. He had an even worse time fudging the list of ancient Spartan kings to make them match the despots of Mistra (p. 304). He actually inverted the Spartan king list, which makes total sense because people trying to hide what they did would naturally just invert the chronology instead of, y'know, making the dates up? It's not like there are any other similarities between the names he's matching. I should also point out that unlike the despots the Spartans had two kings at a time. He's actually skipped over the most famous king Leonidas (of SPARTANS! fame) because he didn't fit as well as the other one.

He also thinks he's being clever by comparing the ancient kings of Rome with a list of Emperors from the later Empire (p.305). This shows his fudging at its worst although people who've never studied it might not know it. It looks reasonable at first glance. Kings of Ancient Rome: Romulus Quirin, Numa Pompilius, Tuttus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquin the Ancient, Servius Tullius, Tarquin the Proud lasted in total 244 years. In the later Empire Constantine I, Basileos the Great/Asa, Valentinian I, Honorius, Aecius, Valentinian III, Recimer, Odoacer, Theodorich, The Goths last 252 years. The first thing that any Classicist will note is that those are not the correct English transliterations of their names. The translator didn't even try to get them right. Basileos the Great is St. Basil despite never being called "Basileos" or "the Great" in English. I have no idea who Asa is supposed to be. The problems with this: First the ancient kings are fake. Probably made up by Roman mythologists. Certainly they didn't know the exact dates when they ruled. So he's comparing a fictitious dynasty with a factual one. He'd undoubtedly say they're both fictitious but this chart was supposed to prove that and it doesn't prove anything of the sort. Moving on to the real Emperors. St. Basil wasn't an emperor, he was a bishop and theologian. He has no place on this chart. Fomenko has skipped over Constantius, Constantine II, Constans, Julian, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, Gratian, Thodosius, and Valentinian II unless one of them is Asa. So one king ruling 43 years has become 11, including Valentinian I who shows up next on the list after he's been dead for about 5 years. Actually he only shows up on the chart after he dies. Perhaps he's supposed to be Valentinian II? He is followed by Honorius who actually shows up at the right time for once but they do neglect to mention that the Empire has been split in two by this point and thus there are two Emperors whom he can chose from to fit his chart. Apparently that's not enough because the next man is... well I don't know who he is to be honest. He's certainly not an emperor. If Aecius is in fact Aetius then he was magister utriusque militiae (sort of head general) under Valentinian III who shows up next. Even someone who's never read anything about the Later Empire should note that Fomenko jumped straight from Valentinian I to III. Aetius in fact lasted a further ten years dying in 454 a few months before Valentinian III who had him killed. He only lists him as dying in 444 because that way he matches with Ancus Marcius giving him a 'reign' of 21 years. Following Valentinian III comes what is definitely supposed to be Ricimir. He was also not an Emperor but a general and had been killed several years before the Empire fell. There were nine Emperors during this time (in the West) and then the Western Empire fell. Not one to let facts get in the way Fomenko continues with the first of the Gothic kings. Finally he's met another section that matches with his list. Odoacer and Theodoric last 50 years to Servius Tullius' 44 (according to Fomenko). At this point he just gives up and the next king is "the Goths." Huh. Well that makes perfect sense. As you can see, despite his neat graph he's made up most of his dates and skipped over dozens of Emperors. The only ones that actually fit are Constantine I (the first one on the list) and Odoacer/Theodorich who were kinda two different people and not the same one like Servius Tullius. Even the bits that do match don't do so exactly and to have any significance it would have to match exactly. It's like saying that 2+2=5 because 2 is approximately 3. The average length of rule for a king is 20 years (look it up) which means that even a few years difference is a major deal statistically. That by the way is a valid and important use of statistics in historical studies.

I leave the astronomical stuff to people more qualified than I to judge it. Clearly if his statistical analysis is this far out of whack his astronomical analysis isn't gonna be much better. I shall stick to the limited attempts he makes to explain away all non-mathematical historical evidence.

The biggest problem that he finds is that all documents from Antiquity are copies. None of them are older than the 11th Century and thus must be fake. There are no original documents from the classical era (except that there are. See below). While this may sound convincing to anyone who has no contact with the subject it is inevitable if you think about it. The Romans were destroyed 1500 years ago. Parchment simply doesn't survive that long under ordinary circumstances. Any documents surviving must be copies. This doesn't mean that there is no way to test their authenticity. Comparisons of documents is one key way. If two documents are identical, or nearly so, then they may be presumed to come from the same source. Since it is possible to date documents in this way it can be worked out what the oldest one is and which document was copied from which source. What you find is that most of the more numerous sources are copies of multiple originals from unconnected authors on opposite sides of Europe. Which means that those documents must be based on even earlier sources. So already we're past Fomenko's 11th Century limit. Many forgeries can thus be detected by when they first appear on record, what sources they used to write it, and stylistic and factual variations. Fomenko is a mathematician. Every fact must be either true or false. Therefore this system must seem maddening and imprecise to him. And it is imprecise, at least on mathematical terms. That doesn't make it inaccurate.

Since dates do show up in documents from time to time he needs to come up with a way to discredit every writer who's ever lived and I have to admit he has a highly original way of doing so. Without offering any proof he asserts that Roman Numerals didn't have a number for ten. X stood for ten in Roman numerals but Fomenko believes that they only had I's and V's since X stood for Christ (p. 337). X was the first letter of Christos (Ch was spelt X) in Greek and therefore they put it in there to indicate that it was the 1st Century of the Christian era. It makes me wonder how a 12 (XII) year old boy can really be a 200 year old man but I'm sure that the mathematician knows what he's doing. 1 is also fictitious. As a Russian who doesn't use the Latin alphabet 1, I, J, and l look much the same to Fomenko and as he does with all things that look the same he combines them. 1 was not actually a number but the letter I (or J) and stood for Jesus (Iesus in Latin). So the year 1300 is actually the year 300 after Jesus. As proof of this he includes a picture of a tombstone in Britain with what he claims is a J for a 1. Sure it is Dr. Fomenko. Sure it is. Don't worry. We believe you. As you might imagine he gives no evidence apart from the similarity (to a Russian) of appearance and treats his idle and unsupported speculation with the same weight as solid fact. He also views anno domini (AD) as being misunderstood (p. 351). While anyone who's taken even a little Latin will tell you that it means 'in the year of the lord' Fomenko has an alternate translation. Since 'dom' means house in Russian he assumes that it means the same thing in Latin. Thus anno domini would mean 'in the year of the (ruling) house' and would refer to the current ruler and not Jesus making it impossible to determine dates from AD. This is an early example of the ethnocentrism that is to dominate his later works. Needless to say this doesn't work in Latin. While the word house in Latin is domus I refuse to give him credit for this since he referred to a Russian word, not the Latin one. However 'in the year of the house' in Latin would be anno domi, not anno domini. Domini is the genitive of dominus which means master. While it is connected to the word for house (being one who is in charge of it) it has an entirely distinct meaning from it and the word cannot be used in that way. Clearly the fact that he doesn't know Latin isn't stopping him from making sweeping assumptions about it. Anyways this makes dating from the dates included in documents impossible which is certainly convenient for him isn't it? Of course all of this makes it hard to explain the many medieval Universal Histories that went from the Creation to the present and used BC and AD in exactly the same way they do now. I love the idea that Bede was actually living in the 18th Century describing the goings on of the Stuarts and Hanovers as if they were a dozen petty feuding monarchs in an only-recently Christianized land.

Another way to determine a document's (or artifact's) age is Radiocarbon dating. Fomenko dismisses this entire branch of science as unreliable because it disagrees with him. Carbon Dating never provides exact dates, merely dates +- a certain number of years. It can usually be stated to within 30 years or so. This isn't a science that we're asked to have blind faith in. It can, and has been, verified. Radiocarbon dating is used most frequently in archaeology where it is one of the only ways to date a structure in the absence of written evidence. Fomenko dismisses this because it completely eradicates his 'theory.' Radiocarbon dating matches historical dating with high accuracy. Only in documents written about prehistory is there any variation which is to be expected given how little data there must have been for ancient historians to go on when they were dealing with events before their time. This is the factor that most of his supporters jump on because it is seen as harder to disprove. I admit I'm not sure how accurate it is, although it's certainly far better than +-1,000 years. But then, this isn't the foundation of his argument. He only attacks it because his 'theory' requires that it not be true. The real 'strength' of his argument lays in his statistical analyses and astronomical work. Even if Carbon Dating turned out to be rubbish he would be no closer to proving his 'theory.'

To conclude: his events don't combine, his dismissal of carbon dating doesn't hold up, and his statement about forged documents is completely inaccurate. That last point I will demonstrate further below under the section which deals with the evidence that he denies or ignores. And speaking of...

Having shown what utter rot his selective use of facts is it's time to turn to the facts that he doesn't want people to know. Starting with something I mentioned above: documents. While parchment doesn't last forever as I have said, there are certain conditions which allow it to be preserved for much longer than it would normally be. These finds are rare but offer a valuable insight into the ancient world. The most famous of these finds comes from Vindolanda. This was a Roman fort just below Hadrian's Wall. There were a series of letters written on thin slivers of wood which were preserved underwater in the muddy ground. These letters dealt with common every day things including troop strength, parties, new clothing, etc. They also include selections from Roman literature that Fomenko dismisses as forgeries. These documents are originals, not copies, and deal with an everyday Roman life that Fomenko claims never existed. The key points is this: there was no way that a group of Jesuits working in the 16th Century could have known that anyone would have the technology to read what was written. The processes used to recover the letters was invented by archaeologists in the 1970s including the infrared photography needed to recover them. There was no way that Jesuits could have known that they would survive by chance, would be discovered, or could be read once they had been. Furthermore, what would be the point? It's not like people doubted the Romans existed. Why create all of this useless information only to bury it forever in a place where it should have rotted away. This parchment find is not the only one. There is a major dump in Egypt and smaller ones in several other places around Europe and the Middle East. Furthermore, the building that the Vindolanda documents was found in was clearly Roman in design and structure. Which brings me 'round to my next point.

Clearly Fomenko has no interest in the arts or humanities. He dismisses art historians with all the contempt he clearly feels for any field that isn't Math or Physics. Which explains how he can make some of his outlandish claims. I should point out that he considers none of these claims as proof of his 'theory.' He doesn't even take artistic studies seriously enough to dispute them. He simply assumes that they are wrong because he is right and leaves it at that. His sections on architecture are masterpieces of arrogant disdain. The only reason he even deigns to mention them is because his 'theory' is correct and therefore they must be wrong. I don't think that I need to explain why that is the wrong attitude to take.

As an example he considers the Parthenon to be a Turkish mosque. The Parthenon is of course a masterpiece of Classical architecture and is lacking the traditional Muslim mosque design. Particularly the dome. Yes the roof was blown off, but they can still tell the structure of the thing from what remained. And what remains is remarkably similar to other temples traditionally labeled as Classical. I'm not kidding when I say he makes this claim based on no evidence either. His logic is that the Ancient Greeks never existed therefore this building cannot be Greek. He says that there was a Turkish tower on the Acropolis and therefore it must have been built there at the same time. His rather poor photo from the 1860s shows the tower right next to the temple of Athena Nike and it seems to be constructed of similar material to what is underneath it. By his reasoning this alone is enough to conclude that it was originally there when the temple was constructed.

His conclusion ignores the similarity of design between classical buildings and assumes that they are all more modern. The fact that there are buildings of similar design and function located throughout Europe is ignored. Why these buildings were all built, covered in Roman inscriptions, and then abandoned is left as something of a mystery. Or it would be if he mentioned it. Also missing is a discussion of artifacts and how some artifacts are found throughout the Mediterranean despite the highly different cultures that exist there. Why do Turkish buildings and artwork differ so much from Italian buildings and artwork if they were all the same a few hundred years ago when they built Classcal temples? And for that matter, why were they the same? Roman armor is especially strange since the only conclusion possible from his 'theory' is that everyone around the Mediterranean adopted Roman armor, sculpted and painted it (but only on Classically styled buildings), and then abandoned it without it ever having an effect on medieval armor and weaponry. This entire section is a blatant insult to the reader's intelligence and his own. And it gets worse.

When mentioning the dating of buildings he neglects to explain the layering. Specifically how one building is often built upon another. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the building on top is the newer building. Yet he would have us discard such obvious facts. Because when Classical buildings are found in a medieval city they are INVARIABLY found on the bottom. That's right, all those Classical buildings being built at the same time as medieval ones somehow all ended up on the bottom while their contemporaneous medieval ones ended up above them. Gosh, isn't that surprising?

Additional 'proof' of his 'theories' comes from a series of drawings throughout his book. On page 28 he shows a medieval document that depicts Cicero and he's wearing medieval clothing. From this he concludes that he was a contemporary. What he doesn't question is how else Cicero was supposed to be portrayed? Everyone in medieval manuscripts looked medieval just as all Chinese paintings reflected contemporary Chinese dress, and Roman drawings reflected contemporary Roman dress, etc. Until relatively recently people didn't really conceive of the past as looking very different from the present. The important point is how the manuscript writer was supposed to know what Romans looked like? Sure there were Roman statues and monuments around but unless the writer was fortunate enough to live in Rome or somewhere with a standing monument they wouldn't have a clue what the Romans dressed like. That's why they depict everything the same way right into the Renaissance. Biblical stories, Classical stories, ethnic stories, they all looked modern at the time when the work was commissioned. If Cicero was truly a contemporary of some medieval scribe because these scribes always reflected the appearance of historical figures accurately then why did those figures' appearances change over the years? In the 16th and 17th Centuries there are plenty of historical paintings which depict the subjects in Renaissance dress. Are we to conclude from this that Cicero and others lived from the 1200s through the 1600s? Similarly on page 44 he shows Babylon depicted as a medieval town without asking how the artist was supposed to know what ancient Babylon looked like. In one last example of many he shows Augustus wearing a crown with a Christian cross on top in a medieval map and thus concludes that Augustus was a Christian and therefore came after Christ. The lengths that this man will go to to enhance his ignorance is amazing.

So there you have it. This sad little pile of pseudohistory manages to waste 586 pages in his first book alone trying to prove something that your average five-year-old would know is nuts. A very sad thing. I'd feel more sorry for a man who's clearly slipped his bolt if it weren't for his unshakeable arrogance and contempt for all other fields. The basic assumption of the book is that mathematics trumps history. Clearly he knows better than all those stupid historians who can't see that they wasted their time in not becoming mathematicians. He actually says that one of his goals is to reclaim chronology for the field of mathematics from which he is convinced the church stole it. His contempt for other fields is staggering. He clearly knows this field better than any artist, art historian, historian, physicist, or even just plain commonsensical human being and has no hesitation in stating it. In doing so he never stoops to their level by debating facts, he simply states them as truths and then ridicules them. This book really doesn't deserve a response, but what the hey, it's a pretty funny read.

Looking through this book reminded me of the movie "A Beautiful Mind". A brilliant mathematician constructs a fantasy world complete in every detail. The only problem is that it doesn't exist, and that he's as mad as a hatter.

Just two examples of the many "possibilities" suggested by our schizoid author:

(1) The Biblical flood and the Trojan War were the same event because Noah was Aeneas, who fled Troy to found Rome. (Noah and Aeneas had names that sound alike. Thus it is proven.)

(2) Nine kings fled the fall of the Tower of Babel and seven kings founded Rome. Therefore, Rome was founded by the kings who fled the fall of the Tower of Babel. (In the author's words, the Biblical figure of nine is "close enough" to the Roman figure of seven.)

Most of this book's positive reviewers don't support their opinions with science, but those who do cite what they think are the author's strongest arguments: (A) carbon dating isn't accurate; and (B) the Bronze Age can't be thousands of years old because tin, a bronze ingredient, wasn't isolated until much later.

(A) Carbon dating is indeed accurate, and gets more accurate all of the time. But even if it wasn't, taking many disparate samples from a single site, and averaging the results, gives an extremely reliable estimate of the site's age. For example, the pyramids of Egypt contain many different forms of carbon, all of which have been tested in the last decade - and not, I might add, by Fomenko's bete noir, the Jesuits. All of these different samples, averaged out, give a date many thousands of years old, far outside even the "1,500-year error range" claimed by Fomenko and his defenders.

(B) The first bronze artifacts were made by ancient metallurgists who inadvertently mixed increasingly scarce copper ores with those of antimony, zinc and other metals found naturally with copper. Tin is one of those metals, so pure tin was never required for the ancient production of bronze. The same can be said for brass, which is made with a metal - zinc - never isolated in ancient times.

Fomenko's nutty conspiracy theory has feet of clay.

I do not agree with everything written in this book. For example, I do not agree with the idea that ankhs are supposed to be Christian crosses. I also disagree with the observations that different objects look like crescents and symbolize Islam. But there are a great number of valid observations contained in the book. Radiocarbon dating is not the science most of us think it is, as put forth in the book. I also have to agree with the author's idea that many pieces of evidence taken from old books and used to date people or events were either false and inserted by later editors, or otherwise erroneous. Let's face facts: the majority of ancient history is conjecture, or "educated guessing". It's about time an author came along and, in the author's own words, "called a spade a spade". Is this book 100% correct? Who knows? Do many of the theses contained within deserve further study? Yes, if history is to be a record of events and not propaganda or fuel for dogma. The more accurate we can make our history books, the better off other sciences will be, especially the humanities and any sciences concerned with gauging human progress in different areas throughout the ages. I give the book three stars mainly because I find some of the ideas put forth to be less than credible (the author shoud enlist other researchers with expertise in those areas besides math and physics), the translation to be not quite perfectly clear in some areas, and I dislike the organization of the book. The three stars are for the rest of the ideas and theories in the book that do make sense and deserve further exploration, or a reasoned rebuttal, especially the mathematical analysis of ancient texts. To the academics who summarily dismiss the book as rubbish...please point us to reasoned explanations. Us grown-ups who can read big words and read a book longer than a paperback novel deserve that much. Also, as an adult in this day and age, I will never just "take someone's word for it". How's that song go.."won't get fooled again!" I am especially waiting for someone to convince me that radiocarbon dating is worth using on objects less than many thousands of years old. I doubt it's going to happen!

About 10 years ago, I ploughed through Fomenko's two-volume Kluver set of independent papers that, taken together, form the outline of the current volume. It was tough going (non-idiomatic translations, lots of repetition, often written like a mathematical proof). I became instantly disoriented, thought about it long and hard for years, reviewed the volumes on Amazon, and spent bunches of hours in a local university library following odd leads and trying to see if there was any possibility that any of Fomenko's theorizing could be grounded in reality.
I read Robert Newton's condemnation of Ptolemy; Anthony Grafton's dissertation on Scaliger (and other writings about Medieval forgeries); F.F. Arbuthnott's peculiar disquisition (ca. 1900) on English history and the probability that the further back from Henry VIII you go the less you know (and why the Irish monks who "saved civilization" may have had other agendas); about Isaac Newton's chronological explorations; about the inconsistencies in radio-carbon dating; about an odd series of parallel "dark ages" in circum-Mediterranean cultures ca. 1200-to-800 BCE that can best be explained by positing that the period in question didn't exist; and a volume about the relatively late evolution of the concept of "absolute time." Taken together with the astronomical and mathematical data presented by Fomenko that, to this educated non-scientist, seems eminently plausible, I have pretty much concluded that there is a lot of room for irregularity in the received chronology of history.
This first (of seven!) volumes of Fomenko's work explains in far better English and more detail what his earlier papers explicated. It should be approached critically, will be derided and dismissed everywhere (and is not aided by Fomenko citing Velikovsky as one of the early "fellow travellers" along this path), but lays out a fascinating possibility that will take more than one reading and a lot of deep thought to assimilate and form any judgment about.
But it gives new lives to the common aphorism "History is written by the winners," Henry Ford's offhand dictum "History is more or less bunk," and Napoleon's prescient (?) "History is fable of fiction agreed upon."
I suddenly don't look at anything that happened before the Renaissance with anything like the certitude I once did.

When I picked up "History: Fiction or Science?" for the first time, it was out of sheer curiosity. I appreciate crackpots and crackpot conspiracy theories of all sorts - one could say that I have a private freak collection on a separate bookshelf. Therefore, this entire history revision business looked very much like it belonged there as well, so I decided to give it a go. My initial reaction was disappointment; the author sounded perfectly sane, which is simply out of order, if you ask me (a good crackpot theorist is always stark raving mad, hence the interest - never a dull moment anywhere). Then I started to read deeper into the book and, as I submerged about thirty pages deep, the remnants of my ironic grin dropped to the floor along with my jaw. The stuff actually made sense. No hysterical overtones or complex paranoid theorizing anywhere - it is certainly a scientific work written in a manner that has academia stamped all over, no doubt about it.

The critic in me would keep arguing with the authors every now and then - yet they never fail to emphasize the hypothetical nature of their reconstructions. Some of the hypotheses make perfect sense, others do not - which pleases me greatly, since I am most wary of books that make me agree with everything instantly; their integrity is nearly always heavily compromised in some way, yet never too obviously (the best crackpot conspiracy theorists are the ones you can't help agreeing with, and once you agree with enough, you find yourself ready to agree with the bloke who says reptiles rule the world). Here, you may be offered several contradictory renditions of the same historical event. Once again, I wouldn't have it any other way - anyone who is gullible enough to believe simple and unequivocal explanations offered by the official historical sources is usually unaware that those, in turn, contain numerous gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

I always knew that history, especially ancient history, has been a collection of fairy tales all along; still it took me some time to accommodate the thought that, for want of a better metaphor, even the fairy tales it consists of were culled from a wide variety of books, shuffled together like a very dodgy deck of cards, then put into a random sequence, given a new index and proclaimed the only authorised collection of fairy tales in the world (and children who ask silly questions about why certain things make no sense or whether there are any other, more interesting tales available elsewhere need spanking, of course - a time-honoured tradition, isn't it then?). Well, the Russian mathematicians do ask questions. Lots of questions. Questions which there was a very long tradition of not asking; ones that concern the very foundations of modern chronology (although "modern" might be a misleading term here, since said chronology is a child of the Middle Ages). And the historians who demand a spanking shaking fists and frothing at the mouth make me want to put every book on history that I own on the crackpot shelf - certainly not Fomenko and team. Indeed, I haven't put them on any shelf yet, since I'm reading the book for the third time over, and eagerly anticipating the second volume.

This is a most unusual book, one that undermines the very foundations of History. According to the author and his team of researchers, History as it has been taught in Europe ever since the Renaissance is fundamentally false, verified history beginning around 1250 AD the earliest. Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086, the First Crusade being an immediate reaction to his Crucifixion. Homer identifies an an anonymous poet of the second half of XIII century AD, and the event led to the creation of the Iliad had been the fall of the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1261 AD. The list goes on and on.
Historians generally oppose the author's views without making much commentary. The author is not a historian, they say, period. He is only a leading differential geometrician, successful and respected, author of many advanced textbooks. A. Fomenko is also a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; his main argumentation is of a statistical and astronomical nature. I happen to be a physicist myself and not a historian. However, astronomy and differential geometry are known to me well from the area of general relativity, and I cannot recommend this book enough, since its author approaches History, usually a highly emotional discipline ascribed to the field of humanities, armed with impartial mathematics.
History is collective memory; yet even our own memory errs at times, and no real memory extends beyond three generations. There are written sources, but each one of those might easily prove a forgery. There are material remnants of archaeological nature, but they may be misadated and misinterpreted.
Astronomy is precise by definition, and a historical dating that can be calculated from information about eclipses should satisfy any researcher. Yet the XIX century astronomers did not use the lunar tidal friction value in the equations of lunar motion, which would make ancient lunar eclipses appear several hours off the mark and relocate completely several total eclipses of the sun geographically (assuming tidal friction value has remained the same all the time but there is no reason to believe it hasn't). How could XIX century calculations have conformed to consensual history?
I must say that a methodical recalculation of ancient eclipse datings shall invariably bring surprises; in the unlikely case these datings are correct, we shall prove the existence of erratic changes in telluric rotation over the last 4,000 years instead. Both possibilities are highly alarming.
Fomenko demonstrates the incompatibility between consensual history and modern astronomy. This incompatibility is a sad fact. (He exposes a number of other contentious issues as well, but those do not fall into my professional scope). Which is more reliable - history or hard-boiled scientific facts? Science cannot afford subjectivity; most of us would feel the same way about history as well.
Chronological problems are very serious indeed; Fomenko offers a viable solution to most of them, and a radical one at that - a "Copernican revolution" of history, no less. I am not using the term to predict the final and total victory of his version; that is a matter for a multitude of scientific and scholarly discussions to come. But the contradiction between history and astronomy that becomes graver with the day cannot and must not be tolerated, in the best interests of both history and the theory of telluric rotation.
Dr.PhD B. Lukács

Sky&Telescope Magazine confirms results, but does not buy Fomenko's theory
Fomenko uses astronomy data to support his argument that history is too long and that many historical events happened more recently than we thought. The temple walls and sarcophagi of some Egyptian ruins are decorated with depictions of the sun, moon, and planets as observed in the different zodiacal constellations. If a given depiction is accurate - that the celestial bodies were observed and placed correctly in the constellations - a horoscope can be used for dating. Fomenko has deciphered over a dozen Egyptian horoscopes. He claims, that the latter show dates that are 2-3 thousand of years later than conventionally thought. Most well-documented ancient eclipses actually took place in the Middle Ages.

Roger Sinnott, studied astronomy at Harvard and is an editor at the respected Sky & Telescope Magazine checked Fomenko's calculations for the famous trio of eclipses from Thucydides's account of the Pelopponesian War. The three eclipses are conventionally dated to 431, 424, and 413 BC. Fomenko finds these dates as non adequate to narrative of Thucydides's and finds exact solutions as late as in 1133, 1140, and 1151 AD.

The second example is the eclipse of 190 BC described in Livy's history
of Rome. Fomenko redates this event to 967 AD.

Fomenko`s dates accommodate details from ancient descriptions that the conventional dates do not. For example, Thucydides wrote that the first of his three eclipses was solar and that the stars were visible, that means that the eclipse was total. The accepted solution of August 3, 431 BC involves an eclipse that was only partial in Greece. Similarly, the Livy eclipse is supposed to have happened five days before the ides of July, which by our conventional reckoning would date it July 10. Fomenko's 967 AD solution nails that date, while the conventional 190 BC eclipse actually occurred on March 14.

Sinnott confirms that eclipses did take place on the dates Fomenko has chosen and concludes, "Even though Fomenko has found valid eclipse dates that seem to fit the descriptions, I think it is far-fetched in the extreme to conclude that the chronology of the ancient world is 'off' by more than one thousand years." Free country, isn't it?
Check Fomenko's calculations with ANY sky mapping software, professional or amateur, you'll get his results confirmed.

Earth was flat. Humans saw that it was flat, books were telling scholars that it was flat, teachers were teaching students it was flat; scientists knew it was flat. There was some disagreement about the way it was kept afloat, most common versions were elephants, whales and turtles, but that was subject for scientific discussion. Until Magellan sailed around the globe and proved all this science wrong.

This book is precisely about same situation. Although it is written for casual reader, it still bears all the traits of scientific research. I was suspicious about credibility of this book, because of the scandalous 10,000.00 bet placed as advertisement here (you can beat math only by math, and guy who posted the ad knows this).

I've studied math using Fomenko's textbooks as supplementary source at Fraser university (there are around 14 textbooks on math, at least known to me, written by Fomenko and translated to English, pretty expensive and rare as all advanced textbooks, but I'm pretty sure it is possible to fish something at your local university, here is the one for the start - ISBN: 0792326067).
I've run some of the statistical examples in SPSS (of course simplified and using data from the book) and results were similar. Math doesn't lie, but there is old saying "garbage in - garbage out", so take my results as is. Anyway, history as a science is based on books written by previous generation of historians, who based their works on works of previous generation of historians, supplemented by archeological digs (great deal of assumptions was made there too, as people didn't usually mark their belongings with dates), so it definitely needs some mathematical treatment.

It is very difficult to digest the new version of history from Fomenko without getting allergic shock. Official timeline is accepted in the same way as gravity, and movement of the sun; many nations have developed their identity based on official history. Literally speaking chronology is in our culture, in our roots, personal identity. Someone said here that this book was written by Russian nationalist to reassure Russian national identity. May be so, but I think for Russians will be very difficult to swallow that they were actually Mongols and Tatars too.

This book will turn your world upside down. Literally.