Casting Doubt on our Confidence in our Collective Chronology.
The Lost Millennium – History’s Timetables Under Siege by Florin Diacu
Introduction – Where Did the Time Go?
p2-3 quoting Tudor Ratiu in conversation. “[Anatoli Fomenko's] work in choronology has convinced him that the Middle Ages never happened. Apparently the authorities who fixed the dates misinterpreted the ancient documents, and their mistakes have been perpetuated ever since. Fomenko believes that the history of humankind is about a thousand years shorter than we think.”
p6 “I read once about a star catalogue attributed to Ptolemy of Alexandria,” Ernesto [Perez-Chavela] said. “The trouble is, the sky configuration recorded there appeared only a thousand years after him.”
[ref. article from Saturday Night Magazine "Time Warp" by Timothy Taylor]
p9-10 “[Wieslaw Krawcewicz] had invited a Russian mathematician, Gleb Nosovski, to his university to give a talk about chronology. Nosovski had been a student and long-time collaborator of Anotoli Fomenko…”
“…In the first part of his talk, Nosovski criticized the traditional chronology founded by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars Joseph Scalinger and Dionysius Petavius. He offered astronomical explanations for why the Peloponnesian War between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta couldn’t have taken place in the fifth century BC, but, rather, must have occurred in the eleventh or the twelfth century AD, and why the eclipse described in Livy‘s history of Rome must have happened in the tenth century AD instead of the second century BC. He compared the dynasties of kings considered to have lived more than a millennium apart and outlined statistical arguments why many of them had to be duplications. He mentioned a book by Isaac Newton which claimed that the chronology of ancient Greece was too long by about three centuries. He also analyzed several Egyptian horoscopes and concluded that they showed configurations of the sky which appeared much later than the dates attributed to them.”
[see Nicolai Morozov]
1. Catastrophe and Chaos
p35 “A perfect [elliptical planetary orbit] would appear only in a solar system with one star and one planet. When two or more planets exist, they affect each other’s motion through gravitation.”
2. A New Science
“Time is the proper dimension of history” — Elias Joseph Bickerman
p48 “Astronomy played an important role for understanding the structure of and the relationship between various calendars. it also proved essential for determining when the total eclipses or the passage of teh comets described in chronicles had taken place.”
“[Scalinger's] colossal work [De emendatione temporum] treats in detail the astronomical bases of more than fifty calendars.”
p57 “The dating of the Peloponnesian War was particularly important because it relied on the occurrence of three eclipses with well-known relative dates. Descriptions of such phenomena are rare in history…”
p61-2 “It is astonishing to see Morozov shortening Chinese history by almost four millennia. After all, Chinese documents exist that record daily events for hundreds of years.But other Western sources appear to support Morozov’s view. For instance, the respected British historian Sir Herbert Butterfield wrote in his book The Origins of History: ‘The cataclysm of Chinese history seem to have spared little of the historical writings of the pre-Confucian days [before 550 BC]; and from early times there seems to have been controversy about the genuineness or the textual accuracy of the thing that did survive.’”
p64 “Also connected to astronomy was the Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar, which Fomenko and his assistant Gleb Nosovski analyzed in detail. They challenged the accuracy of the ten-day correction made by Pope Gregory XIII in the sixteenth century. the reform relied on the date of the Nicaean Council, which Crusius had fixed to AD 322 and Scalinger to AD 325. But the Russian mathematicians caculated that the council had met some five and half centuries later.”
p65 “The long lists of kings and queens in various parts of the world seem to contradict a shorter chronology…. In addressing this problem, Isaac Newton identified two parallel kings who had been made consecutive, and Morozov indicated several monarchs who had been duplicated but under different names. Fomenko went further by pointing out fourteen pairs of overlapping dynasties.”
4. Historical Eclipses
“Chronology is nothing but the computation of celestial motions.” — Sethus Calvisius
p98 “…astronomical results are among the most reliable data to be found in the field of chronology…”
“A landmark document for the classical age of ancient Greece is Thucydides‘ History of the Peloponnesian War.”
p99 “[The war] between…Athens and Sparta lasted for twenty-seven years.”
“…Paulus Crusius…calculated that the conflict started in 431 BC. …he based his dating on two solar eclipses and a lunar one, all of them described in Thucydides’ book… The first event took place soon after the outbreak of the war…”
“The second eclipse occurred seven years later… Then eleven more years passed until the third event…”
p104 “…Morozov pointed out a sequence of eclipses that agreed with the observations: AD August 2, 1133; March 20, 1140; and August 28, 1151. In the 1970s Fomenko found another sequence: AD August 22, 1039; April 9, 1046; and September 15, 1057… These solutions are the only ones that agreed with Thucydides’ descriptions.”
p109 “From…contextual information given by Livy and Plutarch, researchers concluded that a lengthy total lunar eclipse occurred on the night of September 4 to 5 (Roman Calendar) of an unknown year, after the summer solstice. Traditional chronology computed the Julian date of June 21, 168 BC, but this day fell before the summer solstice, in violation of the historical text.”
“Fomenko found three candidates, one in each of the years AD 415, 955, and 1020.”
5. the Moon and the Almagest
“When I follow the windings of heavenly bodies, I no longer touch the earth with my feet, but stand in the presence of Zeus and take my fill of ambrosia – food of the gods” — Claudius Ptolemy
p126 “Ptolemy wrote the Almagest during the reign of roman emperor Antoninus Pius, which is traditionally set from 138 to 161. .. Divided into thirteen books, the work touches on the main problems of astronomy, from the nature of the universe to lunar and planetary motion. It also contains detailed star catalogues and records of eclipses, occultations, and equinoxes.”
p136 “Fomenko’s statistical analysis showed that the only time interval in which Ptolemy’s errors are smaller than 10 minutes of arc is between AD 600 and 1300.”
p137 “the Almagest mentions four occultations…”
p139-40 “Fomenko didn’t object to the identification of the stars, but he disagreed with the dating of the events… [The Russians] found two solutions. the better one had a four-year precision, which was within the margin of error they expected from Ptolemy…”
- on AD September 9, 887, at midnight, Venus came within 1 arc minute of η Virgo
- on AD January 27, 959, at 6:50 AM, the angular distance between Mars and β Scorpio did not exceed 3 arc minutes.
- on AD August 13, 994, at 5:15 AM, Jupiter and δ Cancer were separated by no more than 20 arc minutes, this value being close to the absolute minimum of teh angular distance between the two celestial bodies in the time interval from 500 BC to AD 1600.
- on AD September 30, 1009, at 4:50 AM, Saturn was at an angular distance of 50 arc minutes below γ Virgo.
p141 “There was a third independent verification to do, and Fomenko, Nosovski, and Kalashnikov were eager to learn what this approach would offer. The Almagest describes twenty-one lunar eclipses in an interval of 855 years…”
p143 “[Their] chronology shifts the traditional dates forward in time by more than a millennium. It may solve some problems, but it certainly raises others.”
6. Ancient Kingdoms
p145 “…horoscopes are helpful in determining chronology.”
“At its most basic level, a horoscope merely depicts the positions of the Sun and Moon and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn among the constellations at any given time. ..there are 3,732,480 possible configurations of these heavenly bodies.”
p146 “In the 1990s Anatoli Fomenko decided to check several Egyptian horoscopes.”
“To Gleb Nosovski, it was a dream come true. For years he had deciphered zodiacs and horoscopes, but only from published drawings. Now, in June 2002, he would finally see the original work.”
p160 “From his study of Egyptian at, Fomenko concluded that the dates arrived at by his team support his shift theory. Their conclusion is that the history of Egypt is much shorter than anyone else had acknowledged and that, as a result, Egyptian culture flourished between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD.”
“The horoscopes that have been decoded by Egyptologists offer more confidence; still, even those readings are not absolutely certain Morozov, and then Fomenko, added various elements to the interpretation, not all of which are consistent.”
p162 “Even if all of Fomenko’s solutions were correct, the number of cases he has studied is too small to justify drawing any conclusions.”
7. Overlapping Dynasties
p163 “If Fomenko had, in fact, identified a dozen or so parallel dynastic pairs in the distant past, then he had a strong case for his dating system. He considered these results the backbone of his theory.”
p166 “After composing thousands of dynastic sequences, he found thirteen pairs that seemed to overlap.”
p167-8 “Using the same method, Fomenko compared the events and medieval Greece, 10th to 3rd centuries BC and AD 10th to 16th centuries, and noticed that their sequences were very similar. He finally found statistical duplicates within different periods of the Trojan War. In his view, these results indicate that time frames with similar chronologies are identical, and therefore history is much shorter than has been assumed.”
p171 “theologians and historians alike have recognized the importance of the papacy as the only European institution connecting the present to the ancient past.”
“[A key document written by Eusebius of Caesarea and Liber Pontificalis] often contradict each other, and researchers are still struggling to compile an accurate history of the first pontiffs. Nevertheless, theologians and historians agree upon a significant amount of information.”
p178 “the first overlap Fomenko noted is the one between Carolingian kings (681-888) and the emperors of the third Roman Empire (324-527).”
p183-4 “Fomenko regards ancient and medieval history as a puzzle in which many pieces are missing. Most documents that have survived this period are vague and incomplete, and therefore open to interpretation. To solve the puzzle, historians need a backbone, a basic structure, which is provided by the landmarks of chronology. Once these generally accepted landmarks are in place, historians can arrange the existing pieces and fill in the missing ones with more or less good guesses.”
9. Scientific Dating
p219 “Perhaps the most influential dating method after radiocarbon is dendrochronology…”
“A cross-section of a tree trunk shows that the rings vary significantly in thickness. In general, each ring corresponds to one year’s growth. Size depends on several factors: age, seasonal temperature and humidity, and what part of the trunk is sampled.”
p220-1 “to avoid mistaking thin tree rings corresponding to volcanic activity for those due to drought, researchers also examine the ice-core of Greenland and Antarctica.”
p222 “One [other way of verifying results] is to look at coral deposits. .. When [coral] die, their skeletons form limestone sediments, which grow into reefs, atolls, and islands. Researchers find the age of a deposit by analyzing its layers.”
“An alternative dating technique is based on light emitted, in addition to the usual glow, when a crystalline material reaches a temperature of about 500 C. This energy, called thermoluminescence, is stored in crystals long after exposure to nuclear radiation. Pottery contains minerals with high emissions – feldspars, calcite, quartz. When pottery breaks and shards are buried, the process of building up energy starts again. The quantity of thermoluminescence found in these fragments indicates their age.”
p224 “If the atoms of an element such as uranium, which is prone to the spontaneous nuclear degeneration called fission, are trapped inside the crystal structure, the released radiation ‘scratches’ the inside of the rock. An electron microscope can detect the marks, whose number provides the age.”
p225 “Another method used for the range of history is archaeomagnetic dating. Its goal is to establish the age of objects by comparing their magnetic information with changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.”
p230 “The accelerator mass spectroscopy technique has many advantages over the classical way of measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12. This method needs only tiny samples of between 1 and 3 milligrams, rather than…30 grams.”
10. Finding a Consensus
[see Arnold Toynbee A Study of History]
304 Days to Dec 21st 2012
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