6 ms·

The “New Chronology” of Anatoly Fomenko

54 points by pulisse 4y ago

enriquto 4y ago
I love this, in an "alternate history" kind of way. Interesting and fascinating. It is, however, sad that the author apparently takes it seriously! Moreso that he is a really good mathematician and writer. His book with Dubrovin and Novikov is among the best in differential geometry and mechanics, and all his other works that I read are definitely top-notch. The book about visualization with Kunii is particularly lovely. And he didn't turn a historical crackpot after his work in math. His math works and his historical writings are contemporary! A very interesting character, for sure. I wonder what his math colleagues think about him.
- Imnimo 4y ago
  Another great historical fan-fiction genre I enjoy is the Phantom Time Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis It's obviously completely fake, but I still enjoy reading about it.
  - TillE 4y ago
    Yeah I'm a big fan of this sort of conspiracy theory, partly because it's a fun what-if scenario, and partly because the debunking process tends to be really informative. The Shakespeare authorship question is another good one.
roywiggins 4y ago
The even more absurd theory in this style I've come across was a crudely designed website asserting that humanity came into existence in the 16th century, immediately invented the printing press, and then a group of monks sat down and produced the entire historical written record in a couple of decades for unclear but presumably nefarious reasons.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  This reminds me of this book https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius-annotated https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertiu...
- gojomo 4y ago
  Eventually all these creeds will be vanquished, and the world will be united under Last Thursdayism. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism If you repent all other false beliefs & join now, you can be reborn with us all as soon as this coming Thursday.
bsedlm 4y ago
> later historians either accidentally or maliciously made so-called “phantom copies” of events and rulers, repeating them over and over again under different names. For example, he believes that the Peloponnesian Wars is just an earlier replication of the conflict between the Navarrese Company and the Duchies of Athens and Neopatras in the 14th century. All of our traditional history consists of mistakes such as this: the same events repeated multiple times under different names. I think there's a deeper metaphysical concept at play here. I think of it like echos (or "rhymes of history"); but it's also quite easy to grasp what it's being refered to by considering "fractals" from a rougher (layman) perspective. There are events that seem to reverberate throurough reality. Some "louder" events reverberate more, other more localized events do not get echoed (or similarly repeated as much). and many localized events are themselves echos of older "louder" past events (? or maybe just events with a historical vantage point) But this is not science, it's not even admissible in modern philosophy. it's at worse pseudo-something. at best a fictional artistic expression.
- macrolocal 4y ago
  Generously speaking, recurring motifs are a feature of many complicated dynamical systems.
mjreacher 4y ago
This is funny to me because as someone who has gone through some of his differential geometry & topology books, they're actually quite good. Another example of being excellent in one area yet lacking in others (perhaps overconfidence/ego too stemming from being excellent in one area?). I guess the type of nationalism he grew up under in the USSR also didn't help, I know a few other people who have very strange views on history and conspiracies relating to it.
- gilleain 4y ago
  His artwork is also amazing. Somehow only a topologist could make works like it (i feel). I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with different names seems quite mathematical.
  - ncann 4y ago
    The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely detached from the real world.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      it is also very very liberal in interpretation of facts. so, 2 sequences of kings reigns, one is 10, 30, 7, 25 years, another is 8, 45, 9, 20. according to Fomenko's methodology, these are copies of the same event, because it is a short reign - long reign - short reign - long reign.
      - enriquto 4y ago
        It makes sense, in a way. His starting hypotheses is that all historical record has been falsified (names changed, dates changed or invented, etc). Yet, there is some information that can still be extracted from the historical corpus of falsified texts, by studying the statistically significant correlations between series of events. That is, correlations that would be nearly impossible to occur in purely invented events. As a working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding the enigma cypher! Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons that he must surely explain elsewhere. I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic. But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton also famously worked in stuff that we consider crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh), alchemy, occultism, etc.
zozbot234 4y ago
Not to be confused with the "New Chronology" of Rohl, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) for which there's actually some pretty solid evidence in an obscure and otherwise-unexplained nonlinearity of radiocarbon dating methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  From your first link, the only mention of radiocarbon dating is: In 2010, a series of corroborated radiocarbon dates were published for dynastic Egypt which suggest some minor revisions to the conventional chronology, but do not support Rohl's proposed revisions.[42]
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt Plateau is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating, you recover Rohl's cronology pretty much exactly. This is significant because Rohl arrived at his chronology from unrelated observations about entirely different things, so the apparent plateau is strong additional evidence. One or the other alone would not be decisive in itself, but the overlap between them can be.
    - bigbillheck 4y ago
      > But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt Plateau is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating I don't think that you can. By my reading of https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Geochronology/Radiocarbon_dating#%22Hallstatt_disaster%22 https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Geochronology/Radiocarbon_da... (and with help of straightedge lined up against the graph) the Halstatt plateau refers to a particular range of years that standard radiocarbon dating has trouble with. Before and after this range, however, radiocarbon works as expected. The only connection I can see between Hallstatt and Rohl is the former is 340-ish years of uncertainty, and the maximal revision in the latter is 350-ish. (I should also point out that this kind of approximate matching is Fomenko's bread and butter). If you try to combine them by saying Hallstatt is a single instant and then moving everything up 350 years, I see several problems with that. First, Rohl's divergence with standard chronology is at the agreed-upon point of 664BCE, which is right in the middle of the Hallstatt plateau (760-440BCE). Second, Hallstatt was an actual culture with its own internal timeline, and whatever the radiocarbon numbers say there was substantial evolution during that time.
trhway 4y ago
>Essentially, Fomenko believes that all of recorded history has occurred since 800 AD, with the vast majority happening since 1000 AD. The original Russian state of Kievan Rus was started at about that time. Before that there were no "Russian" anything. It just didn't exist. The Fomenko's timeline solves major fundamental problem of the Russian Greatest country on Earth Messianic mentality - how could the world's civilization had been developed for millennia without Russia? That would mean that the Russia is a latecomer who needs to study hard to try to get to the level instead of being the leader/driver that it feels like.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I had a friend once, who really went nuts on this 20+ years ago, so I've dug pretty deeply in this nonsense. However, no arguments were able to convince my friend that this 'chronology' is crap. He believed that all archeological evidence was forged, all starmap calculators were using incorrect formulas, etc. - so even taking direct page from Fomenko books where he claimed the stars conjunction took place and verifying it in starmap calculator proving that stars on that day were 1° apart didn't impress him. Eventually he also took to loving Putin, so our paths have naturally diverged. The most interesting thing is that he's an overall very clever guy, a physics scientist, I think, somewhere in Norway. But some brain defects just can't get fixed, I guess: even before that at 13yo he dropped out of school and joined the White Brotherhood, escaping home and making his way all the way to Kiev from Urals in Russia, for the announcement ascension of Maria Devi Christos [1] (of was it an apocalypse? I don't remember). [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvigun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvigun
ncmncm 4y ago
The stupid, it burns! All this is ... well, not ironic, but an odd reversal of recent discoveries that stuff we think of as historical development goes back much, much farther than we had ever imagined. Gobekli Tepe is the poster child, 11,000 ya, but what had been thought a very big hill in Java, Gunung Padang, turns out to have been constructed c. 22,000 ya. Nascent military fortification at Jericho 9000 ya. And we have a world-altering comet strike right about 10,818 BCE, about a thousand years before Gobekli Tepe, pretty close to one of the other Tepes. Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India, and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started to vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might have been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we know of started right upriver from some of it.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India, and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started to vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might have been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we know of started right upriver from some of it. That was the land of Lemuria according to oral history of those peoples.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Anyway the Australians still have oral records of conflicts, and precise negotiated resolutions, as people had to move uphill to where other people had already been living for tens of thousands of years. They were not always welcome. The water rose continually from 20kya to 8kya, but about 12.8kya, after the comet strike, it rose very fast for a few years, maybe 3m in a decade.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
orthoxerox 4y ago
My favourite riff on New Chronology must be the "study", using the same methods, that "proves" Fomenko and Morozov are the same person, just duplicated in the official chronology.
lkrubner 4y ago
This feels like the heart of it: "Then the Romanov dynasty takes power and with the help of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation (??) writes a series of fake histories in the 17th and 18th centuries to hide the true magnificence of the Horde so that Russians don’t realize the magnificence of their past and remained alienated from their Central Asian cousins. In Fomenko’s history, Peter the Great‘s western reforms of the 18th century aren’t an attempt to leverage a backwards Russia to the status of a world power but rather the treacherous efforts a usurper dynasty to stamp out the legacy of their predecessors and subordinate Russia to Western interests." For 500 years, Russians have been arguing with themselves about whether they belong in the West or whether they belong in Asia. And this seems like a very roundabout, and yet powerful, way of saying "Asia." Sometimes lunatics have their hands on something very true, and I suspect that this lunatic history is in fact the best expression imaginable of that part of Russia that rejects the West. After all, you could use all of the techniques of modern science to build an accurate history, but then you'd just be playing the West's game. You could use all of the protocols and formalisms that Western historians have developed over the last few centuries, but that would be akin to letting the enemy win. It's better to engage in mysticism and pseudo-science and pseudo-math: that is the proper way to reject the West.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > that is the proper way to reject the West. Maybe, but what about things like Q-Anon? They are just as crazy but don't have a geographical preference
  - lkrubner 4y ago
    What about things like Q-Anon? I don't understand the question. How does that relate to Russian history?
andikleen2 4y ago
Back when Usenet was still functional, de.sci.history (German history group) had some dedicated proponents of a German conspiracy theory that the early middle ages (Carolingian dynasty in middle Europe) didn't exist. Basically their argument was that there are gaps in the respective documents and also a lot of forgeries, and the best explanation was that a few hundred years were missing. This of course ignored all the carbon dating, and as well as the parallel chronology of other cultures (including early Islam, which fell exactly into the "missing" period) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis At the beginning I found it amusing, but after some time it got just tiring.
- 6510 4y ago
  Ah I [vaguely] remember something about a large gap in German history where no one got a diploma. The argument was that forging lists of names and attributing credentials to them without works or publications was very complicated. If I remember correctly, it was the same period for which Morozov demonstrated the astronomical records to be way off. Funny stuff.
bobthechef 4y ago
[dead]
kej 4y ago
My favorite fringe history is the "missing millennium" that supposedly realigns the Old Testament with secular archeology: http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/millennium.php http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/millennium.php
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Here's another, also amusing history retold: https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/149090 https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/149090
midislack 4y ago
Famously, Issac Newton also thought that the chronology was off even in his time, by at least 500-800 years. And like Fomenko, he had a mathematical basis for his theory which couldn't be refuted by any soft scientist. There are others, the Jesuit chief librarian to the King of France, Jean Hardouin, for example. I don't think I've ever seen anybody attempt to refute any of these works. Just lots of kvetching and "literally how could you believe this" type bloviation.
lmkg 4y ago
I'm reminded of some of Philip K Dick's later books, after he well and truly went off his rocker. He also believed in a false chronology, where around a thousand years were missing. Like Fomenko, this constructed history of his aligned with his political beliefs: in particular, Dick believed the fall of the Roman Empire was fiction, and that the world was ruled by an evil hegemony. Dick believed that the truth was revealed to him via laser beam from a satellite that was an agent of the true God, and his beliefs about chronology extended into a spiritual view based on Christian Gnosticism, where the visible world is an illusion perpetrated by an evil entity playing at being God. While that's clearly pants-on-head bonkers, I feel like it's better-motived and more self-consistent than New Chronology.
bigodbiel 4y ago
Conspiracy theories are all fun and games until some idiot decides to shoot a pizza parlor or even start a war. Like any country Russia has a handful of conspiracy theorists, sadly it also has a phenomenal domestic propaganda machine which feeds directly into mass psyche.
orbital-decay 4y ago
Anatoly Fomenko is not unique by any means. The boredom, forced bullshit, and strict conformance requirements of the developed socialism phase of USSR gave birth to the Soviet New Age of a sort. Some people invented spiritual practices and started their own cults, others turned to ufology, conspiracy theories and writing "new histories", like Fomenko or Yuri Petukhov, the rather infamous pulp fiction writer and self-described anthropologist who claimed that all people on Earth descended from Ruses and all languages are developed from Russian. It peaked in early 90s in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet republics, ending up in a massive wave of new-age cults and pulp fiction, but Fomenko has been particularly persistent.
etotolkoya 4y ago
[dead]
etotolkoya 4y ago
This is intetesting: I posted here a link to what S.P. Novikov writes about Fomenko's "history", which I think to be quite informative. It got quickly eliminated. My question to whoever edits yc comments sections: what were your considerations for eliminating this post?

54 points by pulisse 4y ago

I love this, in an "alternate history" kind of way. Interesting and fascinating. It is, however, sad that the author apparently takes it seriously! Moreso that he is a really good mathematician and writer. His book with Dubrovin and Novikov is among the best in differential geometry and mechanics, and all his other works that I read are definitely top-notch. The book about visualization with Kunii is particularly lovely. And he didn't turn a historical crackpot after his work in math. His math works and his historical writings are contemporary! A very interesting character, for sure. I wonder what his math colleagues think about him.

Imnimo 4y ago
Another great historical fan-fiction genre I enjoy is the Phantom Time Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis It's obviously completely fake, but I still enjoy reading about it.
- TillE 4y ago
  Yeah I'm a big fan of this sort of conspiracy theory, partly because it's a fun what-if scenario, and partly because the debunking process tends to be really informative. The Shakespeare authorship question is another good one.

roywiggins 4y ago

The even more absurd theory in this style I've come across was a crudely designed website asserting that humanity came into existence in the 16th century, immediately invented the printing press, and then a group of monks sat down and produced the entire historical written record in a couple of decades for unclear but presumably nefarious reasons.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
This reminds me of this book https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius-annotated https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertiu...
gojomo 4y ago
Eventually all these creeds will be vanquished, and the world will be united under Last Thursdayism. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism If you repent all other false beliefs & join now, you can be reborn with us all as soon as this coming Thursday.

bsedlm 4y ago

> later historians either accidentally or maliciously made so-called “phantom copies” of events and rulers, repeating them over and over again under different names. For example, he believes that the Peloponnesian Wars is just an earlier replication of the conflict between the Navarrese Company and the Duchies of Athens and Neopatras in the 14th century. All of our traditional history consists of mistakes such as this: the same events repeated multiple times under different names. I think there's a deeper metaphysical concept at play here. I think of it like echos (or "rhymes of history"); but it's also quite easy to grasp what it's being refered to by considering "fractals" from a rougher (layman) perspective. There are events that seem to reverberate throurough reality. Some "louder" events reverberate more, other more localized events do not get echoed (or similarly repeated as much). and many localized events are themselves echos of older "louder" past events (? or maybe just events with a historical vantage point) But this is not science, it's not even admissible in modern philosophy. it's at worse pseudo-something. at best a fictional artistic expression.

macrolocal 4y ago
Generously speaking, recurring motifs are a feature of many complicated dynamical systems.

mjreacher 4y ago

This is funny to me because as someone who has gone through some of his differential geometry & topology books, they're actually quite good. Another example of being excellent in one area yet lacking in others (perhaps overconfidence/ego too stemming from being excellent in one area?). I guess the type of nationalism he grew up under in the USSR also didn't help, I know a few other people who have very strange views on history and conspiracies relating to it.

gilleain 4y ago
His artwork is also amazing. Somehow only a topologist could make works like it (i feel). I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with different names seems quite mathematical.
- ncann 4y ago
  The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely detached from the real world.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    it is also very very liberal in interpretation of facts. so, 2 sequences of kings reigns, one is 10, 30, 7, 25 years, another is 8, 45, 9, 20. according to Fomenko's methodology, these are copies of the same event, because it is a short reign - long reign - short reign - long reign.
    - enriquto 4y ago
      It makes sense, in a way. His starting hypotheses is that all historical record has been falsified (names changed, dates changed or invented, etc). Yet, there is some information that can still be extracted from the historical corpus of falsified texts, by studying the statistically significant correlations between series of events. That is, correlations that would be nearly impossible to occur in purely invented events. As a working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding the enigma cypher! Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons that he must surely explain elsewhere. I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic. But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton also famously worked in stuff that we consider crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh), alchemy, occultism, etc.

zozbot234 4y ago

Not to be confused with the "New Chronology" of Rohl, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) for which there's actually some pretty solid evidence in an obscure and otherwise-unexplained nonlinearity of radiocarbon dating methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau

bigbillheck 4y ago
From your first link, the only mention of radiocarbon dating is: In 2010, a series of corroborated radiocarbon dates were published for dynastic Egypt which suggest some minor revisions to the conventional chronology, but do not support Rohl's proposed revisions.[42]
- zozbot234 4y ago
  But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt Plateau is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating, you recover Rohl's cronology pretty much exactly. This is significant because Rohl arrived at his chronology from unrelated observations about entirely different things, so the apparent plateau is strong additional evidence. One or the other alone would not be decisive in itself, but the overlap between them can be.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    > But if you posit that the generally-assumed Hallstatt Plateau is simply an artifact of incorrect relative dating I don't think that you can. By my reading of https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Geochronology/Radiocarbon_dating#%22Hallstatt_disaster%22 https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Geochronology/Radiocarbon_da... (and with help of straightedge lined up against the graph) the Halstatt plateau refers to a particular range of years that standard radiocarbon dating has trouble with. Before and after this range, however, radiocarbon works as expected. The only connection I can see between Hallstatt and Rohl is the former is 340-ish years of uncertainty, and the maximal revision in the latter is 350-ish. (I should also point out that this kind of approximate matching is Fomenko's bread and butter). If you try to combine them by saying Hallstatt is a single instant and then moving everything up 350 years, I see several problems with that. First, Rohl's divergence with standard chronology is at the agreed-upon point of 664BCE, which is right in the middle of the Hallstatt plateau (760-440BCE). Second, Hallstatt was an actual culture with its own internal timeline, and whatever the radiocarbon numbers say there was substantial evolution during that time.

trhway 4y ago

>Essentially, Fomenko believes that all of recorded history has occurred since 800 AD, with the vast majority happening since 1000 AD. The original Russian state of Kievan Rus was started at about that time. Before that there were no "Russian" anything. It just didn't exist. The Fomenko's timeline solves major fundamental problem of the Russian Greatest country on Earth Messianic mentality - how could the world's civilization had been developed for millennia without Russia? That would mean that the Russia is a latecomer who needs to study hard to try to get to the level instead of being the leader/driver that it feels like.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

I had a friend once, who really went nuts on this 20+ years ago, so I've dug pretty deeply in this nonsense. However, no arguments were able to convince my friend that this 'chronology' is crap. He believed that all archeological evidence was forged, all starmap calculators were using incorrect formulas, etc. - so even taking direct page from Fomenko books where he claimed the stars conjunction took place and verifying it in starmap calculator proving that stars on that day were 1° apart didn't impress him. Eventually he also took to loving Putin, so our paths have naturally diverged. The most interesting thing is that he's an overall very clever guy, a physics scientist, I think, somewhere in Norway. But some brain defects just can't get fixed, I guess: even before that at 13yo he dropped out of school and joined the White Brotherhood, escaping home and making his way all the way to Kiev from Urals in Russia, for the announcement ascension of Maria Devi Christos [1] (of was it an apocalypse? I don't remember). [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvigun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvigun

ncmncm 4y ago

The stupid, it burns! All this is ... well, not ironic, but an odd reversal of recent discoveries that stuff we think of as historical development goes back much, much farther than we had ever imagined. Gobekli Tepe is the poster child, 11,000 ya, but what had been thought a very big hill in Java, Gunung Padang, turns out to have been constructed c. 22,000 ya. Nascent military fortification at Jericho 9000 ya. And we have a world-altering comet strike right about 10,818 BCE, about a thousand years before Gobekli Tepe, pretty close to one of the other Tepes. Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India, and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started to vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might have been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we know of started right upriver from some of it.

zozbot234 4y ago
> Millions of square miles of sea floor abutting Indonesian islands, between Australia and New Guinea, and under the South China Sea connecting Korea with Taiwan and Vietnam, off India, and the whole Persian Gulf were lush bottom land that started to vanish under the waves some 20,000 ya. No knowing what might have been constructed on all that, but the oldest cities we know of started right upriver from some of it. That was the land of Lemuria according to oral history of those peoples.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Anyway the Australians still have oral records of conflicts, and precise negotiated resolutions, as people had to move uphill to where other people had already been living for tens of thousands of years. They were not always welcome. The water rose continually from 20kya to 8kya, but about 12.8kya, after the comet strike, it rose very fast for a few years, maybe 3m in a decade.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

orthoxerox 4y ago

My favourite riff on New Chronology must be the "study", using the same methods, that "proves" Fomenko and Morozov are the same person, just duplicated in the official chronology.

lkrubner 4y ago

This feels like the heart of it: "Then the Romanov dynasty takes power and with the help of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation (??) writes a series of fake histories in the 17th and 18th centuries to hide the true magnificence of the Horde so that Russians don’t realize the magnificence of their past and remained alienated from their Central Asian cousins. In Fomenko’s history, Peter the Great‘s western reforms of the 18th century aren’t an attempt to leverage a backwards Russia to the status of a world power but rather the treacherous efforts a usurper dynasty to stamp out the legacy of their predecessors and subordinate Russia to Western interests." For 500 years, Russians have been arguing with themselves about whether they belong in the West or whether they belong in Asia. And this seems like a very roundabout, and yet powerful, way of saying "Asia." Sometimes lunatics have their hands on something very true, and I suspect that this lunatic history is in fact the best expression imaginable of that part of Russia that rejects the West. After all, you could use all of the techniques of modern science to build an accurate history, but then you'd just be playing the West's game. You could use all of the protocols and formalisms that Western historians have developed over the last few centuries, but that would be akin to letting the enemy win. It's better to engage in mysticism and pseudo-science and pseudo-math: that is the proper way to reject the West.

galaxyLogic 4y ago
> that is the proper way to reject the West. Maybe, but what about things like Q-Anon? They are just as crazy but don't have a geographical preference
- lkrubner 4y ago
  What about things like Q-Anon? I don't understand the question. How does that relate to Russian history?

andikleen2 4y ago

Back when Usenet was still functional, de.sci.history (German history group) had some dedicated proponents of a German conspiracy theory that the early middle ages (Carolingian dynasty in middle Europe) didn't exist. Basically their argument was that there are gaps in the respective documents and also a lot of forgeries, and the best explanation was that a few hundred years were missing. This of course ignored all the carbon dating, and as well as the parallel chronology of other cultures (including early Islam, which fell exactly into the "missing" period) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis At the beginning I found it amusing, but after some time it got just tiring.

6510 4y ago
Ah I [vaguely] remember something about a large gap in German history where no one got a diploma. The argument was that forging lists of names and attributing credentials to them without works or publications was very complicated. If I remember correctly, it was the same period for which Morozov demonstrated the astronomical records to be way off. Funny stuff.

bobthechef 4y ago

[dead]

kej 4y ago

My favorite fringe history is the "missing millennium" that supposedly realigns the Old Testament with secular archeology: http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/millennium.php http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/millennium.php

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Here's another, also amusing history retold: https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/149090 https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/149090

midislack 4y ago

Famously, Issac Newton also thought that the chronology was off even in his time, by at least 500-800 years. And like Fomenko, he had a mathematical basis for his theory which couldn't be refuted by any soft scientist. There are others, the Jesuit chief librarian to the King of France, Jean Hardouin, for example. I don't think I've ever seen anybody attempt to refute any of these works. Just lots of kvetching and "literally how could you believe this" type bloviation.

lmkg 4y ago

I'm reminded of some of Philip K Dick's later books, after he well and truly went off his rocker. He also believed in a false chronology, where around a thousand years were missing. Like Fomenko, this constructed history of his aligned with his political beliefs: in particular, Dick believed the fall of the Roman Empire was fiction, and that the world was ruled by an evil hegemony. Dick believed that the truth was revealed to him via laser beam from a satellite that was an agent of the true God, and his beliefs about chronology extended into a spiritual view based on Christian Gnosticism, where the visible world is an illusion perpetrated by an evil entity playing at being God. While that's clearly pants-on-head bonkers, I feel like it's better-motived and more self-consistent than New Chronology.

bigodbiel 4y ago

Conspiracy theories are all fun and games until some idiot decides to shoot a pizza parlor or even start a war. Like any country Russia has a handful of conspiracy theorists, sadly it also has a phenomenal domestic propaganda machine which feeds directly into mass psyche.

orbital-decay 4y ago

Anatoly Fomenko is not unique by any means. The boredom, forced bullshit, and strict conformance requirements of the developed socialism phase of USSR gave birth to the Soviet New Age of a sort. Some people invented spiritual practices and started their own cults, others turned to ufology, conspiracy theories and writing "new histories", like Fomenko or Yuri Petukhov, the rather infamous pulp fiction writer and self-described anthropologist who claimed that all people on Earth descended from Ruses and all languages are developed from Russian. It peaked in early 90s in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet republics, ending up in a massive wave of new-age cults and pulp fiction, but Fomenko has been particularly persistent.

etotolkoya 4y ago

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etotolkoya 4y ago

This is intetesting: I posted here a link to what S.P. Novikov writes about Fomenko's "history", which I think to be quite informative. It got quickly eliminated. My question to whoever edits yc comments sections: what were your considerations for eliminating this post?