The history of the new chronology and its development can be divided into three periods, albeit arbitrarily.
The first stage – the XVI-XX century, when various researchers periodically discovered major inconsistencies in the edifice of the Scaligerian chronology. We shall quote the names of some familiar scientists that dissented with the chronology of Scaliger-Petavius and reckoned that the real ancient and mediaeval chronology differed significantly.
De Arcilla – the XVI century, Professor of the Salamanca University, see Chron1, Chapter 1. The information on his chronological research is of a rather volatile nature, and it was only by accident that N. A. Morozov managed to learn of it. It is known merely that De Arcilla claimed "ancient" history to have been forged in the Middle Ages. However, we regrettably failed to have found any of his works. The Salamanca University could not give us any information about them, either.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – the great English scientist, physicist, and mathematician devoted a large part of his life to chronology and published a large volume entitled The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. To which is Prefix'd, A Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. See [1298]; more details in Chron1, Chapter 1.
Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) – eminent French scientist and author of a large number of works on philology, theology, history, archaeology, and numismatics. He was also Director of the French Royal Library, and wrote a few chronological works with sharp criticisms of the entire edifice of the Scaligerian chronology. He was of the opinion that most of the so-called "ancient artefacts" were either counterfeit, or belonged to a much more recent age. See details in Chron7, Appendix 3.
Peter Nikiforovich Krekshin (1684-1763) – the personal secretary of Peter the Great wrote a book criticizing the contemporary version of Roman history. It was "still fresh" in his day and age, and wasn't taken for granted the way it is today. See details in Chron4, Chapter 14:30.
Robert Baldauf – the German philologist of the late XIX – early XX century. Assistant professor at the Basel University and author of the four volumes entitled History and Criticisms ([1025:1]). He came to the conclusion that the "ancient" literary works were a lot more recent than one was accustomed to think, guided by philological considerations. Baldauf proved that those works were all mediaeval in their origins. See details in Chron7, Appendix 3.
Edwin Johnson (1842-1901) – English historian of the XIX century, criticized the Scaligerian chronology severely in his works ([1214] and [1215]), claiming that they needed to be truncated drastically. See details in Chron1, Chapter 1.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (1854-1946) – a prominent Russian scientist and encyclopedist, made a breakthrough in chronological studies. He criticized the Scaligerian version of chronology and history extensively. He offered the concepts of several new natural scientific methods of analyzing chronology and introduced scientific approaches to chronology making the latter a science de facto. See details in Chron1, Chapter 1.
Wilhelm Kammeyer (late XIX century – 1959) – a German scientist and lawyer, developed a method of verifying the authenticity of ancient documents. He discovered nearly all of the ancient and early mediaeval Western European documents to have been either copied or forged in a more recent age. He came to the conclusion that both ancient and mediaeval history were falsified, and wrote several books on the topic.
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) – a prominent psychoanalyst of Russian origin lived and worked in Russia, the UK, Palestine, Germany, and the USA. He wrote a number of books on ancient history that concerned several contradictions and peculiarities of ancient history. He also made an attempt of explaining them in relation to the Catastrophism Theory. He is considered to be the founder of the "critical school" in chronology, but what he really did was try to protect the Scaligerian chronology from drastic changes, so his inclusion in the list of the founding fathers of the new chronology is rather arbitrary. We reckon that the fact of Velikovsky's works are much better known than the earlier and more detailed ones by N. A. Morozov, inhibited the development of the new chronology in the Western Europe of the XX century considerably. See details in Chron7, Appendix 3.
All in all, one has to state that the precariousness of the Scaligerian chronology was mentioned rather explicitly in the scientific works of the XVII-XIX century. The Scaligerian version of history was subject to extended criticisms, and the thesis of the global fabrication of ancient texts and artifacts was formulated. Nevertheless it came to pass that no one with the exception of N. A. Morozov managed to find a way of constructing a proven version of the correct chronology; even his version was hardly based on any substantial evidence, being incomplete and having inherited a number of substantial flaws from the chronology of Scaliger and Petavius.
The second stage – during the first half of the XX century. This stage should doubtlessly be linked to the name of N. A. Morozov. He was the first to have understood and formulated the fundamental idea that the Scaligerian chronology needed a complete revision, not just the "ante-mundane" part, but also its entire edifice up to the VI century a.d. N. A. Morozov had used a number of innovative natural scientific methods for chronological analysis and quoted a number of indisputable arguments for proving his brilliant idea. The publication of his main works on the revision of ancient history occurred in 1907-1932 ([542]-[544]). However, he held the erroneous opinion that post-VI century chronology was basically correct. See details in Chron1, Chapter 1:3.
The third stage – being the period of 1945-1973, can be characterized as one of "deliberate muting". The historical science tries to cast the chronological research of N. A. Morozov and his predecessors into oblivion. The chronological discussions in Russia cease altogether, and an "alienation zone" of sorts is created around N. A. Morozov's works on chronology, whereas in the West, the debate becomes circular and doesn't venture outside I. Velikovsky's hypothesis of "Catastrophism".
The fourth stage – which was the period of 1973-1980, commenced in 1973, when A. T. Fomenko, faculty member of the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Moscow State University, was researching several problems related to celestial mechanics. He had noticed the 1972 article of the American astrophysicist Robert Newton ([1303]), where the latter described a strange leap in lunar acceleration, and the so-called parameter D". The leap occurred around the X century a.d. Using
the Scaligerian datings of the writings that make reference to lunar and solar eclipses, R. Newton computed lunar acceleration as a time function on the interval of the I-XX century a.d. The leap in question comprises an entire mathematical order (!), and cannot be explained by the gravitational theory in any way. It was the issue of the discussion organized by the Royal Society of London and the British Academy of Sciences in 1972, and one that had spawned major controversy ([1453]). The discussion failed to elucidate the situation in any way, and so R. Newton suggested attributing the leap to certain mysterious extra-gravitational forces in the Earth-Moon system.
A. T. Fomenko noted that all the attempts of explaining the gap in the behaviour of D" failed to raise the issue of the veracity of the eclipse datings that were the actual basis for R. Newton's calculations. However, despite the fact that A. T. Fomenko was well outside the paradigm of historical research back in the day, he had heard that N. A. Morozov offered some new datings of the "ancient" eclipses in his work entitled Christ, published in 1924-1932. It has to be said that A. T. Fomenko's initial attitude towards N. A. Morozov's works was rather sceptical and based on whatever random information he had received on the subjects during informal discussions with fellow faculty members. Nevertheless, having overcome his scepticism, A. T. Fomenko unearthed an astronomical table by N. A. Morozov that contained the new datings and performed a new calculation of the parameter D" using the same algorithm offered by R. Newton. He was amazed to have discovered the disappearance of the mysterious leap and the transformation of the D" diagram into an even, practically horizontal line. A. T. Fomenko's work on the topic was published in 1980 ([883]).
However, the elimination of the enigma from celestial mechanics led to another question of paramount importance: what was one supposed to do with the chronology of the ancient times in this case? The eclipse dates were supposed to be evidentially linked to a vast array of historical materials. Since N. A. Morozov's works helped to solve a complex celestial mechanics problem, A. T. Fomenko decided to study them in more detail. The only professor from the MSU Department of Mathematics and Mechanics to have had Morozov's Christ, already a bibliographical curiosity by that time, in his possession, was M. M. Postnikov. He was interested in N. A. Morozov's research and occasionally told his colleagues about it. In 1974, A. T. Fomenko approached M. M. Postnikov with the suggestion of reading a series of introductory lectures on N. A. Morozov's works. M. M. Postnikov had acquiesced after a brief hesitation, and read five lectures for a group of mathematicians that worked in the MSU Department of Mathematics and Mechanics later the same year.
As a result, a group of mathematicians developed an interest in chronological problems, regarding them from the point of view of applied mathematics. It became obvious that the complexity of this issue demanded the development of new independent methods of dating. Hence the main focus in 1973-1980 was on developing methods of analyzing historical texts that were based on mathematical statistics, a number of which was proposed and formulated by A. T. Fomenko in 1975-1979. They allowed for the elucidation of the global picture of chronological misdatings in Scaliger's version and elimination. More specifically, A. T. Fomenko had discovered three important chronological shifts, of roughly 333 years, 1053, and 1800 years respectively. These shifts are only inherent to the erroneous chronology of Scaliger-Petavius, and have nothing to do with the correct one. It turned out that "the Scaligerian textbook" was compiled from four copies of one and the same brief chronicle.
The first scientific publications on this topic were composed and prepared for publishing in 1973-1980.
The fifth stage – 1980-1990 can be characterized by the publication of articles on the new methods of dating and achieved chronological results in specialized periodicals dedicated to pure and applied mathematics. The first publications on the topic were the two articles by A. T. Fomenko ([883] and [884]) published in 1980, as well as the preprint by A. T. Fomenko and M. M. Postnikov ([681]), published the same year. In 1981 a young mathematician by the name of G. V. Nosovskiy, specializing in probability theory and mathematical statistics, actively joined the new chronology research. This period saw the publication of several dozens of scientific articles on independent empirico-statistical and astronomical methods in chronology. They were written by A. T. Fomenko, either alone or in collaboration with the mathematicians G. V. Nosovskiy, V. V. Kalashnikov, S. T. Rachev, V. V. Fyodorov, and N. S. Kellin (see bibliography).
It has to be mentioned that the research was supported by Academician E. P. Velikhov, the physicist that proposed two of A. T. Fomenko's articles with the description of methods and a global picture of chronological misdatings to be submitted to the Doklady AN SSSR (a periodical of the USSR Academy of Sciences), and Academician Y. V. Prokhorov, the mathematician that had done the same for
two articles by A. T. Fomenko, V. V. Kalashnikov,
and G. V. Nosovskiy on the issue of dating Ptolemy's Almagest.
A. T. Fomenko made reports concerning the new dating methods at scientific seminars on mathematics conducted by Academician V. S. Vladimirov, Academician A. A. Samarsky, Academician O. A. Oleynik, and Corresponding Member S. V. Yablonsky, as well as a scientific seminar on history conducted by Academician I. D. Kovalchenko, a specialist on applying mathematical methods to history, who was genuinely interested in those methods and claimed that historians needed to delve deeper into chronology issues.
Over the period of 1980-1990, A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy, and V. V. Kalashnikov presented their reports on the new methods of independent dating at a number of scientific conferences on mathematics.
The position of Academician A. N. Kolmogorov in this respect is most interesting. When A. T. Fomenko was presenting a scientific report on the new methods of dating at the Third International Conference on Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics in Vilnius, 1981, A. N. Kolmogorov came to the presentation and spent the entire forty-plus minutes that it took standing in the back of the hall, having strategically chosen a spot where he wouldn't be seen from the hall, retaining the ability to see and hear everything that was going on at the blackboard. A. N. Kolmogorov departed immediately after the presentation and did not approach the person at the blackboard. It has to be said that A. N. Kolmogorov's health was already quite frail by that time, and having to stand for forty minutes must have taken a considerable effort on his part.
Later on, in Moscow, A. N. Kolmogorov invited A. T. Fomenko over to his residence and inquired whether he could borrow any of his publications on chronology. He was given a brief 100-page essay written by A. T. Fomenko in 1979 that had circulated around as a manuscript prior to its publication as a preprint in 1981 ([888]). Apart from that, A. T. Fomenko had given A. N. Kolmogorov a more exhaustive 500-page typewritten text on the topic. In two weeks' time, A. N. Kolmogorov invited A. T. Fomenko to converse with him once again. During the two-hour discussion it became clear that A. N. Kolmogorov had made a thorough study of the materials. He had asked a large number of questions, and his primary concern had been about the dynastical parallelisms between the ancient dynasties, including the biblical ones, and those of the Middle Ages. He said he was frightened by the possibility of a radical reconstruction of a number of modern concepts based on ancient history. He had no objections to the legitimacy of the methods. Finally, A. N. Kolmogorov gave the 500-page text back to A. T. Fomenko and asked whether he could keep the 100-page essay as a present. The request was complied with.
One has to add the following report that A. T. Fomenko received orally from one of the partakers of the conversation that is to be described below. A while ago, Professor M. M. Postnikov had submitted an article with an overview of N. A. Morozov's chronological research in a journal titled Uspekhi Matematicheskih Nauk (The Successes of Mathematical Sciences). The following dispute among members of the journal's editing board, among them Academicians P. S. Alexandrov and A. N. Kolmogorov, ensued. A. N. Kolmogorov refused so much as to touch the article, saying something along the lines of "This article is to be rejected. I spent enough time and effort fighting Morozov in the days of yore". However, he had added the following: "And yet we shall all look perfectly idiotic if it turns out that Morozov had been right". The article was rejected.
This conversation sheds some light on the events of the days when N. A. Morozov's research was practically vetoed. Today we are being convinced that everything had happened "automatically" and that N. A. Morozov's research was of little enough interest to have been forgotten by everyone in a short time. We are now beginning to understand that the forces opposing N. A. Morozov were all the more formidable to have needed the participation of A. N. Kolmogorov. It is also noteworthy that A. N. Kolmogorov considered it possible for N. A. Morozov to have been correct.
Apparently, during the time N. A. Morozov's research was cast into oblivion, historians have been constantly bothered by the possibility of someone resuming it. It is hard to find another explanation for the peculiar fact that as early as 1977, when the research conducted by the Moscow State University mathematicians was in its earliest stages and no publications had been issued on the topic, the Communist magazine had published an article by Doctor of Historical Sciences A. Manfred with a severe criticism of "the new mathematical methods" in history. The names of the methods' authors weren't mentioned, but the implications were perfectly clear. A. Manfred wrote the following: "If these 'young' scientists are given any degree of liberty at all, they will drown the book market in summaries of numeric data. The 'new' tendencies need to be overcome as a result of scrupulous critical analysis, since they are holding back the progress of global historical science…" (Communist, July 1977, 10th issue, pages 106-114).
In 1981, immediately after our first publications on chronology appeared, the History Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences gathered for a special session on June 29, 1981, that had the criticism of our work as its main objective. The Learned Secretary of the History Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Cand. Hist. Sci. V. V. Volkov and the Learned Secretary of the Principal Tendencies of Human Society Development Council of the History Department of the Academy N. D. Loutzkov sent A. T. Fomenko an official note saying, among other things, that: "The Department's session took place on 29 June, 1981, conducted by the Vice Academician Secretary of the Department, the Academician Y. V. Bromley… Your conclusions were sharply criticized by the specialists of six humanities institutes as well as the staff members of the Sternberg Institute of Astronomy" (8 May 1984).
The most vehement criticisms of the 1981 session belonged to the Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Z. V. Udaltsova, and the chairwoman of the commission, Y. S. Goloubtsova, both of them historians. Y. S. Goloubtsova was in charge of a special commission of historians that had been assembled to analyze our works. The materials of this discussion had provided the basis for a series of articles with harsh criticisms of our research in various historical periodicals.
A similar "discussion" recurred in 1998-1999, as shall be mentioned below.
The sixth stage – is the post-1990 period. It can be characterized as "the stage of publishing books on new chronology." This is when the books that covered our chronological research, as well as those containing derived hypotheses about what pre-XVII century history really looked like, started to appear. The first book on this topic was A. T. Fomenko's Methods of Statistical Analysis of Narrative Texts and their Application to Chronology, MSU Publishing, 1990. The foreword was written by A. N. Shiryaev, President of the International Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability Theory in 1989-1991, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Head of the Probability Theory Studies Section of the Moscow State University Department of Mathematics and Mechanics, Head of the Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics Department of the V. A. Steklov Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
It has to be mentioned that this book was supposed to have been published much earlier. It was already typeset by the Publishing House of the Saratov University in 1983-1984 and edited by Cand. Hist. Sci. S. A. Poustovoyt (Moscow). However, the publishing house received a sudden missive from the historians of Leningrad, Head of the Universal History Sector, the Leningrad division of the USSR History Institute, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, V. I. Routenburg, Learned Secretary T. N. Tatsenko, Cand. Hist. Sci., Head of the History of Ancient States Formerly on USSR Territory and the Ancient World Group, I. A. Shishova, Cand. Hist. Sci., Learned Secretary I. V. Kouklina, Cand. Hist. Sci. Among other things, they wrote that our research was "obviously contradicting the founding principles of the Marxist historical science… the Universal History Sector as well as the history of Ancient States Formerly on USSR Territory and the Ancient World Group considering the publication of A. T. Fomenko's "Methods of Statistical Analysis of Narrative Texts and their Applications to Chronology" an absolute impossibility". The historians demanded the publication of the book to be stopped in the most categorical way, and thus the typesetting of the book was recycled.
The Nauka Publishing House planned to publish our book titled The Geometrical and Statistical Analysis of Star Configurations. The Dating of the Star Catalogue of Almagest authored by A. T. Fomenko, V. V. Kalashnikov and G. V. Nosovskiy in 1991. It was reviewed and submitted for publishing. However, when a significant part of work had already been done, the Nauka publishing house all but ceased its publishing activity due to the change of the political and economical climate in the country. The book was published later, in 1995, by the Faktorial Publishing House that had received the prepared materials from Nauka, which had subsequently resumed work and published two more of our books on chronology in 1996 and 1997.
As we can see, the release of A. T. Fomenko's Methods in 1990 was followed by a break of sorts. After that, starting in 1993, a number of books covering the current stages of our research eventually got published. This was when the term New Chronology had been coined in reference to the chronology that was beginning to emerge due to the application of our new dating methods. It was new in the sense of differing from the one still deemed official today, that of Scaliger-Petavius, and should have really been called the Correct Chronology due to its freedom from the errors of the Scaligerian school.
The publication of books on the new chronology was undertaken by a number of Muscovite publishing houses: MSU Publishing, the MSU Educational Centre of Pre-University Education Publishing, as well the publishing houses Nauka, Faktorial, Kraft, Olimp, Anvik, and Delovoi Express. Outside Russia our books on chronology were published in both English and Russian by Kluwer Academic Press (the Netherlands), CRC Press (USA), and Edwin Mellen Press (USA). In 2000-2003 the entire material was collected, processed and arranged as the seven volumes of Chronology. What you are now holding in your hands now is the first volume of seven.
Starting in 1995-1996, a large number of articles discussing our books on the new chronology began to appear in various newspapers and magazines. Most of them expressed two polar points of view. One camp enjoyed our books a great deal, whilst the other was positively infuriated by them. About a hundred of such articles appeared every year; their numbers surged dramatically in 1999-2000.
In 1998, the Free Russia radio station had been broadcasting a series of radio programmes for over six months, where Y. S. Chernyshov brilliantly related the contents of our books. Namely, he had read the nearly complete text of the two of our books on the radio – The Empire and The New Chronology of Russia, England, and Rome. In addition to that,
the first couple of chapters of The Biblical Russia also received a reading. The programmes were resumed in 2001, but ceased shortly after that, despite Y. S. Chernyshov being ready to continue with them.
In 1998, seven series of the Night Flight programme on TVC (produced by ATV Studios aka Author Television, hosted by A. M. Maksimov) featured A. V. Podoinitsyn, a Muscovite economist and a member of the informal "New Chronology" organization as their special guest. A. V. Podoinitsyn had related the main points of our research and answered a great many of the viewers' questions live. The programmes had caused a great resonance.
In 2001 and 2002 G. K. Kasparov, the World Chess Champion, voiced his support of the critical part of the New Chronology publicly.
In 1999, the prominent writer, sociologist, logician, and philosopher A. A. Zinoviev, who had just returned to Russia after many years spent in emigration, got in touch with us. Having read some of our publications, he had decided that our concept was generally a correct one, concurring well with his own research in the field of history and historical falsifications. He offers some of ideas in the preface to the new edition of our Introduction to the New Chronology, 2001, Kraft Publishing.
In 1996, our materials on the new chronology started to appear online. The number of related web sites keeps on growing and at the moment there are about ten of them in Russia and at least one in Germany, which is the brainchild of Professor E. Y. Gabovitsch (Karlsruhe and Potsdam, Germany), the founder of the new German Salon of History –
the institution where the new chronology has been discussed very actively over the last couple of years. E. Y. Gabovitsch has also helped us immensely with archive research he had conducted in Germany.
A number of valuable ideas and considerations of his has helped reconstruct the true history.
The web site that is currently becoming increasingly popular in Russia, offering constant discussion opportunities for both proponents and opponents of the new chronology can be found at chronologia.org (see also history.mithec.com).
The reaction of historians during the period of 1990-1998 had been rather lukewarm, and didn't go beyond the odd occasional article whose authors didn't even bother to give scientific counter-arguments but merely expressed their disapprobation. The radical change came about in 1998. One of the Presidium sessions of the Russian Academy of Sciences gathered with the sole purpose of discussing our research.
Later on, the History Department Bureau of the Academy was called for a special session, and the issue was also discussed during a subsequent session of the Mathematics Department Bureau. The History Department Bureau proposed an entire combat plan for opposing the new chronology, which had been implemented most visibly in December 1999, when the History Department of the MSU organized a large conference suggestively enough named "The Myths of the New Chronology". The main point of the conference agenda was that of a categorical deprecation of our research, and the conclusion was made that the new research is to be pronounced perfectly unacceptable, as well as that all research concerning the New Chronology was to be banned, and its authors reprimanded severely. (See details in Chron7, Appendix 4). A rather amusing process commenced shortly afterwards. The materials of this conference were published several times under different titles and covers, with minute variations. Our opponents went so far as to publish a whole series of book under the title of "Anti-Fomenko". There are seven such books to date, and all of them duplicate each other; it looks like their number might grow in near future. We familiarized ourselves with the criticisms offered most thoroughly, and learned that the historians hadn't managed to have found any original counter-arguments. The material had been presented in a more "scientific" and "advanced" manner, and considerable progress had been made in the fine art of attaching labels. We had written a detailed reply, see Chron7, Appendix 4.
Starting with 1996, a number of books proving the falsity of Western European mediaeval chronology were published by German scientists (see Chron7, Appendix 3). However, the authors of works appear to misperceive the entire scale of the problem, thinking that several minor local corrections of the Scaligerian chronology should suffice. This is a mistake that they need to become aware of, prior to succeeding in any of their endeavours. At the same time, the critical part of those works is carried out thoroughly enough. The first book that has to be mentioned in this respect is Uve Topper's The Great Campaign on the falsification of history, as well as C-14 Crash by Blöss and Nimitz that conveys to us the knowledge of radiocarbon analysis (see bibliography).
The years 2000-2001 have been marked by the publication of such books as The True History of Russia and Multi-optional History by Alexander Goutz, a mathematician from Omsk, and N. I. Khodakovsky's The Temporal Spiral. A. Boushkov's The Russia That Never Was is also visibly influenced by our works. This list can be continued. Despite the fact that the key chronological issues are not related in these books, they unravel several new and interesting facts that confirm our general concept.
However, we must firmly disagree with a number of ideas voiced in these works and ones similar to them. Being in favour of such activity in general, we beg to differ between these works and our scientific research of chronology. We regard ascribing what we clearly did not say, or speaking on behalf of the New Chronology without our consent as perfectly unacceptable. All that we deem worth relating is either already published in our books, or will be formulated in the upcoming ones. They remain the original source for the entire concept of the New Chronology. It is also unacceptable to ascribe our ideas and results, leave alone the basic postulates of our concept to others. We thoroughly deprecate the use of the term that we coined along with the entire concept of New Chronology for the propaganda of views that we do not share.
Let us mention another interesting effect. The recent publication of certain authors is clearly derivative, spawned by the "echoes" of the New Chronology. Such "informational reverberations" are doubtlessly of use; nevertheless, one has to bear in mind that they neither constitute the essence of the New Chronology, nor its foundations, namely, natural scientific dating methods and the new concept of history that evolved from those as our hypothesis. All attempts to replace the foundations of the New Chronology with derivative observations of linguistical or historical nature may create the illusion of being essential or evidential to the New Chronology. This is untrue. The concept is based on statistical and astronomical dating methods first and foremost.
A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovskiy,
April 2001
