History: Fiction or Science by Anatoly Tomeuko... Delamere Resources

Reviews:

Who or what is at stake? Dr Prof Fomenko or World History? , 21 Jul 2007
By Susanne Dannenbauer (LEIPZIG, GERMANY) - See all my reviews

The conjectures in these books are so fantastic that only a very brave and well-credentialed person would dare to suggest them. The author has such credentials. Academician Dr Professor Anatoly Fomenko is well-known to mathematicians for having solved Plateau's problem, as well as for his many other achievements. He develops arguments that make chop suey out of the accepted chronology of world history. For the first time ever the textual analysis has been applied to the ancient documents in order to determine whether two documents are describing the same events with different names. One such technique is the correlation of maxima. To apply it, take two texts that may or may not describe the same period of history, and measure the amount of text devoted to each year. Plot these amounts on a graph, and, if the two texts are describing the same thing, the graphs correlate, especially the same maxima. Another method used by the authors is to compute the location and duration of solar eclipses and compare them with ancient texts that mention eclipses in order to date the texts, thereby ALL ancient eclipses turn out medieval or fake. The author's proprietary methods are clean, clear and valid. Otherwise one doesn't become full member of Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the chair of the differential geometry of Moscow State Unversity. The main claim is that the standard version of world history that goes back more than 700 years is almost entirely wrong, and the chronology we live with is a product of ecclesiastical machinations of xvi-xvii centuries. Inevitably as Russian, Dr Fomenko takes a special interest in Russian history, and argues that the Mongol rule of Russia, agreed by all historians to have lasted from 1243 to 1380, never occurred at all. According to him, the very word Mongol is merely a corruption of the Greek word Megalion, i.e. Great one. The legion of German historians imported by the Romanov dynasty is accused of inventing the whole history of Russia and forging the chronicles in order to legitimize its usurpation of power from Godunov's dynasty. Once applied Dr Fomenko's techniques show that the standard accounts of world history consist of four accounts of the same events patched together. Further daring conjectures follow: biblical Joshua identifies with Charlemagne (since both are alleged to have made the sun stand still during a battle), Jesus Christ born in AD 1153 and crucified in AD 1186 in Constantinople, Muhammed acted in the fourteenth century, and the Qaaba identifies with the lost Ark of the Covenant. Their thesis is that all the supposed earlier history, including the history of ancient Greece and Rome, is merely a phantom, reflecting current events occurring in Medieval Europe, reinterpreted, replicated and attributed to the distant past that never was. The flabbergasted readers may ask Dr Prof Fomenko what happened to the consensual methods of dating of artefacts and documents, to be answered that all consensual methods are declared null and void as disguised wishful thinking, viciously circular as ones built on consensual chronology inherited from Jesuits (sic!) who have concocted it in xvi-xvii centuries. Oh, Dr Fomenko does take special care of the touted radiocarbon C14 and dendrochronology dating method in their present state, and demonstrates their statistical implausibility (fallacy). These books are very fascinating to read, they have thousands of illustrations and graphs, mathematical techniques are accessible and verifiable.

Earth is flat, March 27, 2004

Reviewer: Alec "bugor_dc" (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

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

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

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

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

This book will turn your world upside down. Literally.

Deals with a very serious issue, July 17, 2004

Reviewer: Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)

History: Fiction Or Science? is a quite scholarly expose of the extreme limitations of our understanding of human history. So few physical records have survived hundreds, let alone thousands of years that it casts even the most conventional understanding of what really happened into doubt. Chapters address the problems of historical chronology in general, astronomical datings, astronomy in the Old Testament, methods of dating ancient events via mathematical statistics, the construction of a global chronological map, the Dark Ages, and much more. Black-and-white illustrations add a vivid touch to this scholarly work that may appear controversial yet deals with a very serious issue directly affecting humanity's comprehension of its own past.

Crackpots. Conspiracies. History. Science., June 12, 2004

Reviewer: Peter A. Cunningham (Oxford, UK)

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.

About the Author:

Anatoly T. Fomenko was born in 1945. He is a full member (Academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences, as well as a doctor of physics and mathematics, a professor, and head of the Moscow State University Department of Mathematics and Mechanics. He solved the classical Plateau’s Problem from the theory of minimal spectral surfaces. Fomenko is the author of the theory of invariants and topological classification of integrable Hamiltonian dynamic systems. he is also the author of 180 scientific publications, 26 monographs and textbooks on mathematics, a specialist in geometry and topology, variational calculus, symplectic topology, Hamiltonian geometry and mechanics, computer geometry.

Mr. Fomenko is also the author of a number of books on the development of new empirico-statistical methods and their application to the analysis of historical chronicles as well as the chronology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Excerpt: