Anatolij Timofeevič Fomenko was born in 1945, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and the International Academy of Higher Education, a professor with a doctorate in physics and mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Mathematical Section of Moscow State University. He solved the plateau problem from the theory of minimal spectral surfaces. Author of 200 scientific publications, 28 monographs and textbooks on methematics, specialising in geometry and topology, calculus and variations, symplectic topology and more. Professor Dr Fomenko aims to rewrite much of the chronology of history. Originating from a work by American astrophysicist Rober Newton that relies on mathematical proofs of the lunar precess and its eclipses, it only finds precise matches in a specific arc of history. At first it assumed some kind of gravitational interference, but this option was eventually dismissed and the dates of manuscripts and texts that have survived to this day were considered to be corrupted.

The idea that history as we know it today is incorrect is not original to Fomenko, many other scholars before him have proposed it. Just to name a few: Sir Isaac Newton was a mathematician, mechanic, physicist and atronomist, the creator of classical mechanics, a member of the Royal Society of London until 1672 and its president until 1703, he wrote two important works on chronology, the first "A Brief Chronicle from the First Memory of the Kings of Europe to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great" and the second "The Chronology of the Ancient Modified Kingdoms". Jean Hardoin (1646-1724), a Jesuit historian and archaeologist, considered Classical literature to have been written in monasteries during the previous 16th century. Robert Baldauf wrote 'History and its Critics' in 1903, proving that not only ancient history but also the principle of medieval history was incorrect. Edwin Jhonson (1842-1901) was an English scientist, author of many remarkable critical studies of ancient and medieval history, who went so far as to say that "we are much closer to the times of the Greeks and Romans than the chronological tables show us". Peter Nikiforovich Krekshin (1684-1763), personal secretary to Peter the Great, wrote a book criticising the contemporary version of Roman history, pointing to it as 'still fresh' at that time. Wilhelm Kammeyer, a German scientist and lawyer, developed a system to identify the authenticity of an ancient document. Wilhelm discovered that almost all ancient and early medieval documents were actually copies or artefacts created in recent times and concluded that ancient and early medieval history had been falsified, writing many books. Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), an esteemed psychoanalyst of Russian origin who lived in Germany, Palestine, Great Britain and the United States. He wrote countless books on ancient history concerning its peculiar contradictions. Nikolaj Aleksandrovič Morozov, a Russian encyclopaedist, pointed out the existence of a correlation between the dynasties of the Old Testament kings and the Roman emperors and suggested that the entire chronology before the first century was wrong. Many more could be mentioned but let us move on.

Fomenko examines astronomical events found in ancient texts and suggests that the chronology is medieval. For example:

• He associates the Star of Bethlehem with the supernova of 1140 AD (± 20) and the solar eclipse that occurred during the crucifixion of Jesus with the total solar eclipse of 1170 AD (± 20). Both pairs of events have the same basic sequence (first the appearance of the star, then the eclipse), and the temporal distance in both cases is the same (32 years, the approximate age of Jesus at the time of his death): this is quite rare, and for Fomenko it is not a coincidence, but a proof of the veracity of his theory.

• He claims that the star catalogue in the Almagest, attributed to the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, was actually drawn up between 600 and 1300 AD.

• He retouches and completes some of Nikolaj Morozov's analyses of ancient horoscopes, especially the so-called Zodiac of Dendera, two horoscopes traced on the floor of the temple of Hathor, and concludes that they refer to the 11th and 13th centuries AD Traditional history interprets them as referring to the 1st century BC or suggests that they are not to be related to any particular date.

• In his final analysis of a triad of eclipses described by Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War, Fomenko dates the eclipses to 1039, 1046 and 1057. Due to the layered structure of the manuscript he concludes that Thucydides lived in the medieval period.

 

One of the simplest methods used by Fomenko is the statistical correlation of texts. His starting point is that a text describing a sequence of events will devote more space to important events (e.g. a period of war or revolt more space than a period of peace, or years with no particular events), and that this irregularity will remain visible in other descriptions of the event. For each text analysed, a mathematical function is performed that maps each year mentioned in the text with the number of pages (or lines, or letters) devoted in the text to its description, which could also be zero, if for example in the comparison between two texts the event is described in one text and not in the other. The functions of two texts are then compared with each other.

For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary history of Rome written by Titus Livius with the modern History of Rome written by the Russian historian Vladimir Sergeyevič Sergeyev, calculating that both have a high correlation, since they describe the same period of history, creating no dispute. It also compares modern texts describing different periods, and calculates a low correlation as expected. However, when he compares, for example, the ancient history of Rome and the medieval history of Rome, he calculates a high correlation and concludes that the ancient history of Rome is only a copy of the medieval history of Rome, which clashes with the common historical conception.

Fomenko also mentions a number of cases of carbon-14 dating (now obsolete) that led to false dating of objects from periods that had been established before calibration with the chronological scale. He also mentions the strange cooperation between physicists and archaeologists in obtaining dates, as most data laboratories only accept samples with a date already estimated by historians or archaeologists. Fomenko also asserts that the Carbon 14 date over a range from year 0 to 2000 AD lacks accuracy because it has too many possible errors and that the calibration is done with a statistically insignificant number of samples. Consequently, Fomenko concludes that carbon 14 dating is not accurate enough to be used with a high margin of precision.

He agrees with absolute dating methods for clay tablets or coins, such as thermo-luminescence, optical luminescence and archaeomagnetic or metallographic methods, but stresses that their accuracy is insufficient to trace fixed points in time.

Fomenko generally condemns the common archaeological practice of dating specimens accompanied by age estimates, arguing that concordance between dating methods that are inherently uncertain proves nothing, but is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy: even if the sum of the probability of veracity of an event produced by N dating methods is greater than 1, this does not mean that the event occurred with 100% probability.