Monday, June 11, 2018

The Unknown Kasparov

     At this point Festus interrupted Paul's defense. "You are out of your mind, Paul!" he shouted. "Your great learning is driving you insane." - Acts 26:24 

     A theory, known as the New Chronology, is closely associated with Russian theorist Anatoly Fomenko. Fomenko holds that history is many centuries shorter than is widely believed and that numerous historical documents have been fabricated and legitimate documents destroyed for political reasons. Adherents have included Garry Kasparov. 

    In a 2003 online essay, Mathematics of the Past, Kasparov said that as far back as childhood he "began to feel that there was something wrong with the dates of antiquity." Kasparov recounted how after reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he found countless contradictions: How could ancient Romans accomplish so much without good maps? If humans were growing in stature over time, how were ancient soldiers so much stronger and larger than those of Gibbon's day? And how could they have achieved such advances in math and architecture using only Roman numerals? 
     Kasparov found his answer to those questions when he came across several books written by two mathematicians from Moscow State University: A.T. Fomenko and G.V. Nosovskij. Using modern mathematical and statistical methods, as well as astronomical computations, they discovered that ancient history was artificially extended by more than 1,000 years. 
     For his part, Kasparov could not understand why historians have ignored their work. Kasparov collaborated with the New Chronologists by writing an introduction to one of their books and giving them a gift...a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1771. In a 2001 interview, when asked what was the true history of the world, Kasparov said, “I'm not trying to give any definite answer. What I'm trying to prove is that we have enough gaps, enough discrepancies, enough simple falsifications to conclude that probably this history was an invention of a later time.” 
     Adherants argue that conventional chronology of Middle Eastern and European history is flawed and that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages. 
     The concepts are derived from the ideas of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946), although work by French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) can be viewed as an earlier predecessor. However, the New Chronology is most commonly associated with Fomenko, although published works on the subject are actually a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians. The concept is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science?, originally published in Russian. 
     According to Fomenko's claims, written history goes only as far back as AD 800 and there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000 and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500. 
     The majority of scientific commentators consider New Chronology to be pseudoscientific. The theory emerged alongside other alternate histories and conspiracy literature in the period of increased freedom of speech that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. 
     According to New Chronology much of human history is a fiction assembled to serve the powerful. Things like Mesopotamians with cuneiform scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greeks and Romans are all faked. 
     Since 1980 Fomenko has been the leading proponent of this revision of human history. He believes there is no reliable written record of human events before the 11th century. Most of our knowledge of earlier cultures is based on texts or copies of texts that date from after that era. 
     From that point on, historians, primarily religious scholars, fixed the dates of key events in history. In doing so, they grafted recent occurrences onto earlier dates thus creating numerous "historical duplicates." 
     According to Fomenko, the events in the New Testament precede those of the Old Testament and most of the stories are concocted. For example, Joan of Arc was a model for the biblical character Deborah and Jesus was crucified in Constantinople in 1086. Ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece were fashioned by Renaissance writers and artists and the ancient Pharoahs of Egypt lasted into the 1700s. Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great, who was a Tsar of Russia in the 1400s. Early English history is a fiction based on late Medieval events.  Carbon dating and other scientific chronological methods are thoroughly corrupted. 
     According to Fromenko this is all substantiated by hard facts and logic validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources. 
     Fomenko's uses statistical analysis to correlate old texts and timelines, seeking convergences and similarities that have escaped the notice of others. He harmonizes celestial data and finds that astronomical events attributed to antiquity seem to correspond to more recent recorded occurrences. 

New Chronology Site
A Conversation With Garry Kasparov…on politics
Remarks by Garry Kasparov at the 2017 Goldwater Institute Annual Dinner
Edward Winter Article

1 comment:

  1. You seem like you aren’t sold on new chronology but let me tell you as a lifetime history buff: kasparov and fomenko’s suppositions are laughably foolish and consist of picking out slight exaggerations or mistakes in pop history works then deciding that those mistakes prove a giant conspiracy against them personally. In fact, most of Kasparov’s points could be explained through a simple discussion of military history and organization; topics that Gary clearly has little to no knowledge of. Anyone with an iq over 90 should be able to see through this hysterical claptrap without even having a background in history.

    ReplyDelete