The new chronology is a pseudohistorical theory which argues that events generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, among others, actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The theory, which further proposes that world history prior to 1600 AD was centered around a global empire called Great Tartaria, has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators, including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov. The theory was first widely disseminated in the 1990s by Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and later by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. Reception from mainstream scholars has been universally negative.
Central concepts The concepts that constitute the new chronology has its origins in the work of Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946), although the earlier work of Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) can be seen as an intellectual progenitor. The new chronology per se is most commonly associated with Anatoly Fomenko, though he has collaborated extensively in his writing on the subject. The theory is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science?, originally published in Russian. The new chronology features a totally reconstructed timeline, portraying a history that is radically shorter than what is universally accepted, based on a thesis that in effect compresses all of recorded history from the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages into a period less than a millennium long. According to Fomenko's claims, the practice of written history only emerged c. 800 AD, with there being almost no real information about events that occurred between 800 and 1000 AD, and most recorded historical events actually having taken place between 1000 and 1500 AD. The new chronology is universally rejected by the scientific and historiographical communities, being totally inconsistent with the accepted methodology used in the relevant fields, including absolute and relative dating techniques. It is considered to be pseudoarchaeological, pseudohistorical, and pseudoscientific. Interest in the theory from historians and scientists has primarily stemmed from its popularity among laypeople: in addition to formulating refutations of its methods and conclusions, academics have also tried to understand the social forces underlying its resonance: Halperin (2011) estimates that as many as 30% of Russians may have sympathy for the new chronology. However, it is not known what levels of veracity or salience are generally ascribed to new chronology texts by readers, whether the texts are generally regarded as history or as fiction, or what the demographics of their readership tend to be. The theory emerged alongside numerous other pseudohistorical and conspiracy-minded literature in a period of heightened nationalism and more lax restrictions on freedom of the press following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While other authors have written on the new chronology theory, such as Russian Gleb Nosovsky and Bulgarian Yordan Tabov (who expanded the theory relating to the Balkans), the theory is mostly understood in terms of Fomenko's writings.
History of the new chronology The idea of chronologies that differ from the conventional chronology can be traced back to the second half of the 17th century or earlier. Jean Hardouin suggested that many ancient historical documents were younger than commonly believed. In 1685, he published a version of Pliny the Elder's Natural History in which he claimed that most Greek and Roman texts had been forged by Benedictine monks. When later questioned on these results, Hardouin stated that he would reveal the monks' reasons in a letter to be revealed only after his death. The executors of his estate were unable to find such a document among his posthumous papers. In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton, examining the current chronology of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East, expressed discontent with prevailing theories and in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended proposed one of his own, which, basing its study on Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, changed the traditional dating of the Argonautic Expedition, the Trojan War, and the Founding of Rome. In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed the opinion that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. In 1909, Otto Rank made note of duplications in literary history of a variety of cultures:
almost all important civilized peoples have early woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities—in short, their national heroes. Especially the history of their birth and of their early years is furnished with phantastic traits; the amazing similarity, nay literal identity, of those tales, even if they refer to different, completely independent peoples, sometimes geographically far removed from one another, is well known and has struck many an investigator. Fomenko became interested in Morozov's theories in 1973. In 1980, together with a few colleagues from the mathematics department of Moscow State University, he published several articles on "new mathematical methods in history" in peer-reviewed journals. The articles stirred a lot of controversy, but ultimately Fomenko failed to win any respected historians to his side. By the early 1990s, Fomenko shifted his focus from trying to convince the scientific community via peer-reviewed publications to publishing books. Alex Beam writes that Fomenko and his colleagues were discovered by the Soviet scientific press in the early 1980s, leading to "a brief period of renown"; a contemporary review from the Soviet journal Questions of History complained that "their constructions have nothing in common with Marxist historical science." By 1996, Fomenko's theory encompassed Russia, Turkey, China, Europe, and Egypt.
Fomenko's claims
Central to Fomenko's new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, called "the Russian Horde" (Great Tartaria), which played a dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polans, Dulebes, Drevlians and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.
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