History: Fiction or Science? Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs. Chronology Vol.I

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.


A Pretty Wild Theory   February 22, 2005
Timothy Horrigan (Durham, NH United States)
116 out of 142 found this review helpful

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.)




History and Astronomy are not compatible   April 29, 2005
Dr. PhD Bela Lukacs (Budapest, Hungary)
60 out of 72 found this review helpful

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



Crackpots. Conspiracies. History. Science.   June 12, 2004
Peter A. Cunningham (Oxford, UK)
56 out of 67 found this review helpful

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.