Fomenko's New Chronology - are you convinced?

[Blarni]

If you are, you know what I mean, but if not, the elevator speech:

As the western media and commentators translate it, Russian Anatoly Fomenko's take on New Chronology (originally proposed by Frenchman Jean Hardouin) is that world history is basically a lie - our basic understanding of the world's timeline is flawed: all events of antiquity actually occurred in the medieval period, including all Greek/Roman history - and almost all key figures (and not so historical including Jesus and King Arthur) are in fact based on Byzantine Emperors, and their successors (the key point: the Slavic-Turkic empire that in fact ruled and shaped Europe up until the 16th century). Apparently gaining a lot of fans among Slavocentrics.

Wikipedia's description (if it's typical wikipedia distortion, shout out)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chr...#Brief_summary

So I'm intriqued: do you buy into this?

[Gromovnik]

Im not, and I'm a Slavocentric. This guy is a loon and he's full of bs.

[saglam2000]

Jews after Christians... really. This guy was definitely dropped as a child

[Border Patrol]

It's like watching a Hollywood period piece. They name all the big names and have them do things that are wildly out there.

[KaRoU23]

Reminds me of Xena:Warrior Princess, where everything was mixed up..... She fought Ancient Greeks, Romans, Samurai, Chinese and many others in some years....

[conon394]

A load of rot.

So the Byzantine Empire build all those classical non christian remains under their cites just as theme parks? In any case there are too many frozen classical cities that can be dated by carbon dating, dendrochronology etc (Olynthus, Pompey, Helike).

Or take this ideal

"Histories of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy mostly on the basis of documents of their own making."

So the clergy made up Thucydides OK fine. But than they also buried fragments in the Egyptian sands (in Attic Greek mind you), and produced the actual stone decrees of the assembly and buried them in Athens at the appropriate depth? They were so clever as to have their made up Thucydides continue to use the old fashion traditional names 'X son of Y' but the fake buried decrees in stone use the revolutionary democratic from 'X of the Deme Y'???. Not only they were so uber clever they developed a whole fake progression of Attic and Ionic script and subtle changes in language?

The problem is History is just not made up off medieval era manuscripts - the same text and or events can be show from Athenian decrees in stone and fragment of parchment and papyrus from Egypt

[KaRoU23]

A load of rot.

So the Byzantine Empire build all those classical non christian remains under their cites just as theme parks? In any case there are too many frozen classical cities that can be dated by carbon dating, dendrochronology etc (Olynthus, Pompey, Helike).

Or take this ideal

"Histories of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy mostly on the basis of documents of their own making."

So the clergy made up Thucydides OK fine. But than they also buried fragments in the Egyptian sands (in Attic Greek mind you), and produced the actual stone decrees of the assembly and buried them in Athens at the appropriate depth? They were so clever as to have their made up Thucydides continue to use the old fashion traditional names 'X son of Y' but the fake buried decrees in stone use the revolutionary democratic from 'X of the Deme Y'???. Not only they were so uber clever they developed a whole fake progression of Attic and Ionic script and subtle changes in language?

The problem is History is just not made up off medieval era manuscripts - the same text and or events can be show from Athenian decrees in stone and fragment of parchment and papyrus from Egypt

Don't even bother my friend! This guy is a retard, that's for sure.He's that stupid, he's not taking account of nothing that you mentioned(Egyptian papyruses or Greek stone tablets).He's just focusing on medieval manuscripts too much.I really wonder whether he takes into account Pseudo-Callisthenes and his legends about the mythical substance of Alexander the Great too... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Callisthenes )

[boofhead]

Weird.

Thanks for the thread, I've never heard of this theory before.

[Carpathian Wolf]

Seen it before. Idiotic.

[Odovacar]

We debated this already. Dendrochronology alone falsifies it, not to mention everything else. He can flush his theory on the toilet.

[Rolling Thunder]

Oh, I'm convinced. Convinced that it's bloody delusional.

[Celsius]

what do you know, Ivan the Terrible wasn't a person, but a coalition of 4 people....

Send this man to the Gulag....now.

[Lуra]

Almost as bad as the creationist theories.

[Dromikaites]

Yet another example expertise in one field (he is a very high-caliber mathematician) can't always be translated in another field (history, in his case).

What is more fascinating is that during his training to become a top mathematician he had access to the mathematics underlying statistics. So he must be at least aware that if some data are left out then the conclusions of the statistic analysis might be radically different than when that data is factored in (deciding what data can be left out and what data must be factored in is sometimes a very difficult issue in statistics).

He also must be aware of Ramsey's theorem (which in layman terms states that if we have enough interconnected data we can extract out of them any pattern we would like to).

So it's not like he wasn't forewarned by knowledge from his own general area of expertise that he might end up fooling himself when looking for patterns and "hidden truths".

[Getwulf]

He also must be aware of Ramsey's theorem (which in layman terms states that if we have enough interconnected data we can extract out of them any pattern we would like to).

So it's not like he wasn't forewarned by knowledge from his own general area of expertise that he might end up fooling himself when looking for patterns and "hidden truths".

Sure... that is in fact what historians do... They pull out patterns out of overlapping data. But the real problem is that he has no real point of reference himself. See... If all of the chronology is arbitrary... then isn't his chronology arbitrary as well...?

He has to start from an axiomatic point for any of it to be true. In a sense, by throwing out all of the chronology then there is no axiom for a time frame. So...? When did the events happen...?

The fact of the matter is that the chronology is probably wrong in a lot of cases but with probability you can narrow it down to a certain period. So his theory is wrong...

This is where it went wrong...

One of Fomenko's simplest methods is statistical correlation of texts. His basic assumption is that a text which describes a sequence of events will devote more space to more important events (for example, a period of war or an unrest will have much more space devoted to than a period of peaceful, non-eventful years), and that this irregularity will remain visible in other descriptions of the period. For each analysed text, a function is devised which maps each year mentioned in the text with the number of pages (lines, letters) devoted in the text to its description (which could be zero). The function of the two texts are then compared.[21]
For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary history of Rome written by Titus Livius with a modern history of Rome written by Russian historian V. S. Sergeev, calculating that the two have high correlation, and thus that they describe the same period of history, which is undisputed.[22] He also compares modern texts which describe different periods, and calculates low correlation, as expected.[22] However, when he compares, for example, the ancient history of Rome and the medieval history of Rome, he calculates a high correlation, and concludes that ancient history of Rome is a copy of medieval history of Rome, thus clashing with mainstream accounts.[23]

The theory here is that because of this corellation then the history is actually from the Middle Ages... He forgets that historical patterns repeat themselves. AND that people tend to stick to their archetypes. Also, the correlation is based on the number of lines and pages describing an event. Grouping events as correlated based on page numbers is subjective due to the fact that he never considered that the correlation might be a coincidence...! I write a history of 1000 AD ... You write a history of 100 BC... They both have close to 150 pages... So are they the same story...? Did you copy from me...? Probably not... A lot of books have similar page lengths... When averaged out they also correlate. It is BS... A very bad cognitive fallacy on his part.

[NikeBG]

He probably makes good money from those books, though.
Btw, I can't remember whoever said that "Mathematicians don't make good historians and historians don't make good mathematicians" (as an example of the different patterns of thinking of the precise and the humanitarian sciences, I presume), but in this case that's quite obvious.

[Dromikaites]

There's a whole 275 pages long PhD dissertation on Fomenko's theories, why they had enjoyed a significant commercial success in Russia and the context in which evolved.

What is important to mention on this thread is the Russian professional historians and the academic publications (magazines, reviews) are unanimously rejecting his ideas. His theories have zero value in the eyes of the Russian historians, except, maybe as examples of how not to conduct historical analysis.

According to that PhD dissertation, Fomenko's work has a personal ax-grinding component - when he first proposed in the '70s his method for statistically deciding if two different texts actually deal with the same subject, he was severely reprimanded by Soviet administrative structures in charge with overseeing the scientific activities.

For people who never lived in a dictatorship this episode needs some clarifications: in the communist countries it was believed science has direct political implications. Therefore a scientist's work was under scrutiny by the authorities.

After Stalin's death the scientists in the communist countries weren't forced anymore to adopt the party line in the scientific research. In this respect they were required to search only for the scientific truth, just like in the West. The difference from the work of a Western scientist came in several areas:

1. Sloppy scientific work was considered almost a criminal act (most lenient view was the sloppy scientist was squandering the country's resources, the hard-line view being that sloppy scientific work was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the country);

2. The results who seemed to contradict the party line (=had obvious and immediate implications on how the economy or the country should be run) could not be made public before the party had adjusted the respective economic, politic or social policies accordingly. In practice that meant some things were kept secret for years;

3. In the field of the social sciences, which by their very nature were about people and therefore carried political and economic implications, the situation was the most delicate.

On top of that, the communists held the opinion that history has some clockwork-like mechanisms and therefore there was only one correct way to interpret a historical event. More than that, the communists maintained that "the gears of history" were "coupled" in such a way the "clockwork" would ultimately lead to the whole mankind adopting communism.

The concept history could be a matter of competing interpretations was therefore unacceptable because it implied the world might chose a different trajectory than the complete victory of communism.

Roughly speaking, the only way to change the official view of a historical event was by means of coming up with some new material evidence, not a new way of interpreting the already existing evidence. The very rare occasions when a new interpretation of old data was allowed was when the new interpretation was considered to have desirable (by the communist party's standards') economical, social or political results.

It's in that context that Fomenko came up with his idea that the oldest Russian chronicles were actually 17th century forgeries. Not only was that sloppy scientific work even by the Western standards tolerant to competing views and critique of existing works. It was also interpreted as a criminal attempt at wiping out all the Marxist works which "proved" that communism in Russia was the result of the functioning of the "historical clockwork". Since the victory of communism in Russia was the "proof" eventually all the world would be communist it's easy to understand how severely was Fomenko reprimanded.

What probably saved him for more serious consequences was he was already a highly respected mathematician. By serious consequences I do not mean a trip to a gulag. But he did risk something like relocation to a remote village in Central Asia where he was to teach arithmetic to first graders for the rest of his life.

Apparently the episode left Fomenko with a strong desire to show the professional historians in a bad light.

[Odovacar]

Commies usuallly made martyrs from idiots too, not just from honest people. Now they resurface and claim to have right since they were persecuted, and if "they" persecute you, you can be only right...All kinds of wacko theories...

[AdamWeishaupt]

Fomenko's New Chronology - are you convinced?

It's not really new and not really a chronology.

[iksterminator]

some of it is true, some BS, use brains to divide truth from false