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The New Chronology of Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is an attempt to rewrite world chronology, based on his conclusion that world chronology as we know it today is fundamentally flawed. The ideas of Fomenko are a direct continuation of earlier theories of Nikolai Morozov.
It is known that most known historical chronicles are no more than a few hundred years long, and they usually describe events in a single country or even in a single city. Different chronicles may be written in different languages, use different dating systems, even use different spellings of names for the same characters.
In the absence of any reliable methods for dating of historical documents, it is a challenging and error-prone task to join different chronicles together and to create a continuous picture of the history.
Modern view of the history goes back to just such a work of one man - Joseph Scaliger, who lived in the second half of 16th century. According to Fomenko's theory, Scaliger did several mistakes in establishing the order of events. Scaliger's first and foremost mistake was mis-dating of birth of Christ ( which happened around 1000 AD, not in 1 AD ), and there were some others. As a result, in many cases the accounts of the same events by different observers were separated in time or in space.
Fomenko's theory claims that the traditional chronology consists of at least four overlapping copies of the "true" chronology, shifted back in time by significant intervals ( 1000 or more years ), with some further revisions.
For example, Fomenko claims that Plato, Plotinus and Gemistus Pletho are one same person - according to him, some texts by or about Pletho were misdated and today believed to be texts by or about Plotinus or Plato. As another example, Jesus is the same person as Pope Gregory VII and Old-Testament prophet Elisha.
"New Chronology" is considerably more compact than conventional history, because all of the ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages, and Dark Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, history of human kind goes only as far as 800 AD, we have almost no information about events between 800-1000 AD, and most historical events we know ( building of pyramids, Trojan war, birth of Christ, crusades, etc ) took place in 1000-1500 AD.
Fomenko is a well-respected mathematician, but does not have any formal education in history. He is an outspoken opponent of radiocarbon dating and tends to use math, particularly statistics, in his historical research. Besides, he has habits of using references to his own former books or to the books that are practically impossible for a casual reader to find, and to choose only the facts that he finds convenient for his theory and ignore the rest. Unsurprisingly, his views on history are not shared by any respected historians, and his theory is commonly regarded as pseudoscience.
While Fomenko's theories are not very well known in the West, he's published and sold millions of copies of his books in Russia. List of his supporters even includes such famous figures as Garry Kasparov.
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