Chronology

I've recently been absorbed in been Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and so perhaps have been more prepared to catch notice of really curious theories. Via Baris Karadogan's From Instabul to Sand Hill Road, I came across this argument: by Russian mathematician Anatoly T. Fomenko that

the timing of historical events, Chronology, as we know it is wrong (Sir Isaac Newton makes this claim in a paper too). Fomenko asserts that history is off by about 1000 years. Cultures we think to have existed say 200BC is actually 800 AD.

The initial idea comes from analyzing lunar eclipses. There are working laws of physics that allow astronomers to predict exactly when and where on the world an eclipse will happen. We get news of this all the time. They can go backwards in time as well, and match all the recorded eclipses to what the theory predicts. But Fomenko notices (in the works of astronomer Robert Newton) a serious mismatch. Eclipses that were recorded to have happened between 700-1300 AD show lunar behavior that vastly differs from theory and could only be explained by a mysterious non-gravitational force applied on the earth-moon system. However, this mysterious force completely disappears, and everything matches theory, if the dates of the eclipses were wrong and each one actually about 1000 years later than claimed. This surprises Fomenko and he gets obsessed with analyzing chronology.

But he’s a lot smarter than many of us, and devises a statistical method that can determine whether two pieces of text are written in the same time period. Now this is very important, and touches the crux of what I am talking about. Language changes over time. The words we use change. New words are added and some words disappear. The kinds of sentences we construct change over time, and all those changes can be quantified. In a way, the syntax of a document, not its semantics, can be used to determine when it is written. This sounds reasonable and acceptable mathematically. As a result, Fomenko takes a documents said to be written in the times of ancient Rome, and compares it to a documents many years later and concludes that they are statistically from the same time period. There are chapters and chapters comparing kings of ancient Rome to kings of Germany, saying that these two kings were actually the same person.

Fomenko claims,

Unbelievable as it may seem, there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artefact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century. Classical history is firmly based on copies made in the XV-XVII centuries of 'unfortunately lost' originals.

Our theory simply returns the Chronology of World History to the realm of applied mathematics from which it was sequestrated by the clergy in the XVI-XVII centuries. We have developed a valid and verifiable method of historical research based on statistics, astronomy and logic.

For example, computer assisted recalculation of eclipses with detailed descriptions allegedly belonging to Antiquity shows that they either occurred in the Middle Ages or didn't occur at all. A simple application of computational astronomy to the rules of calculation of Easter according to the Easter Book introduced by the Nicean council of alleged 325 AD shows that it definitely could not have taken place before 784 AD.

As an historian, I'm hardly about to buy into the theory; on the other hand, it's an interesting argument.

Technorati Tags: history

Comments

[Baris]

Thanks for the mention.
Like I said in my original post, I would really like to see somebody like Google, scan all the historic documents, and turn history into a branch of applied math.

The results they'd find would be illuminating.