was responsible for helping popularize Fomenko's new chronology. Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream
scientists,
historians, and scholars, who brand them as
pseudohistory,
pseudoarchaeology, and
pseudoscience, but were popularized by former world chess champion
Garry Kasparov. Billington writes that the theory "might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia" if not for Kasparov's writing in support of it in the magazine
Ogoniok. Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko's conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own regarding the popular view (which is not the view of academics) that
art and culture died during the Dark Ages and were not revived until the Renaissance. Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of
Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left to them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the new chronology. According to Sheiko, "Fomenko and his allies are unrepentant, noting that the Mongolian, Turkic, and Ukrainian peoples are sadly mistaken in the delusion that they were ever anything other than elements of the Russian Horde", and remarks that for Russian critics, Fomenko represents both an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk amid the diverse societal misfortunes heaped upon Russia since the fall of Communism. Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia". In 2004 at the Moscow International Book Fair, Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor
Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "new chronology" the anti-prize called
"Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a Russian slang word meaning 'disaster' or 'fiasco') in the category "Pochotnaya bezgramota" (the term is a pun upon "Pochotnaya gramota" (
Certificate of Honor) and may be translated as either "Certificate of Dishonor" or literally, "Respectable Illiteracy") for the worst book published in Russia. Critics have accused Fomenko of altering the data to improve the fit with his ideas and have noted that he
violates a key rule of statistics by selecting matches from the historical record which support his chronology, while ignoring those which do not, creating artificial, better-than-chance correlations, and that these practices undermine Fomenko's statistical arguments. One of the participants in that round table, the distinguished Russian archaeologist,
Valentin Yanin, compared Fomenko's work to "the sleight of hand trickery of a
David Copperfield". Russian linguist
Andrey Zaliznyak has extensively criticised Fomenko's arbitrary approach to historical language data and pointed out various linguistic implausibilities arising from his alternative history.
James Billington, formerly professor of Russian history at
Harvard and
Princeton and the
Librarian of Congress from 1987 to 2015 placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of
Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington describes Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire." In the specific case of
dendrochronology, Fomenko claims that this fails as an absolute dating method because of gaps in the record. Independent dendrochronological sequences beginning with living trees from various parts of
North America and Europe extend back 12,400 years into the past. Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. These and other data have provided a calibration curve for radiocarbon dating whose internal error does not exceed ±163 years over the entire 26,000 years of the curve. In fact, archaeologists have developed a
fully anchored dendrochronology series going back past 10,000 BCE. They also note that his method of statistically correlating of texts is inexact, as it does not take into account the many possible sources of variation in length outside of "importance". They maintain that differences in language, style, and scope, as well as the frequently differing views and focuses of historians, which are manifested in a different notion of "important events", make quantifying historical writings a dubious proposition at best. Further, Fomenko's critics allege that the parallelisms he reports are often derived by alleged forcing by Fomenko of the data – rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern. For example, on the one hand Fomenko asserts that the majority of ancient sources are either irreparably distorted duplicate accounts of the same events or later forgeries. In his identification of
Jesus with
Pope Gregory VII he ignores the otherwise vast dissimilarities between their reported lives and focuses on the similarity of their appointment to religious office by baptism. (The evangelical Jesus is traditionally believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his encounter with
John the Baptist. In contrast, according to the available primary sources, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years and was born 8 years after the death of Fomenko's John-the-Baptist equivalent
John Crescentius.) Critics allege that many of the supposed correlations of regnal durations are the product of the selective parsing and blending of the dates, events, and individuals mentioned in the original text. Another point raised by critics is that Fomenko does not explain his altering the data (changing the order of rulers, dropping rulers, combining rulers, treating interregna as rulers, switching between theologians and emperors, etc.) preventing a duplication of the effort and effectively making this whole theory an
ad hoc hypothesis. Statistical analysis using the same method for all "fast" stars points to the antiquity of the Almagest star catalog.
Dennis Rawlins further points out that Fomenko's statistical analysis got the wrong date for the
Almagest, because Fomenko considered Earth's
obliquity to be a constant when it is actually a variable that changes at a very slow, but known, rate. Fomenko's studies ignore the abundance of dated astronomical records in
cuneiform texts from
Mesopotamia. Among these texts is a series of
Babylonian astronomical diaries, which records precise astronomical observations of the Moon and planets, often dated in terms of the reigns of known historical figures extending back to the 6th century BCE. Astronomical retrocalculations for all these moving objects allow dating these observations, and consequently the rulers' reigns, to within a single day. The observations are sufficiently redundant that only a small portion of them are sufficient to date a text to a unique year in the period 750 BCE to 100 CE. The dates obtained agree with the accepted chronology. In addition,
F. R. Stephenson has demonstrated through a systematic study of a large number of
Babylonian, Ancient and Medieval European, and
Chinese records of eclipse observations that they can be dated consistently with conventional chronology at least as far back as 600 BCE. In contrast to Fomenko's missing centuries, Stephenson's studies of eclipse observations find an accumulated uncertainty in the timing of the rotation of the earth of 420 seconds at 400 BCE, and only 80 seconds at 1000 CE.
Magnitude and consistency of conspiracy theory Fomenko states that world history prior to 1600 was deliberately falsified for political reasons. The consequences of this conspiracy theory are twofold. Documents that conflict with new chronology are said to have been edited or fabricated by conspirators; the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire and pro-German
Romanov dynasty. Thousands of pages have been written about it and authors address a wide range of objections. His critics have suggested that Fomenko's version of history appealed to the Russian reading public by keeping alive an imperial consciousness to replace their disillusionment with the failures of Communism and
post-Communist corporate oligarchies. Another off-shoot on online forums has been the
Tartaria conspiracy theory, which draws inspiration from historic architectural photography of demolished buildings as evidence of a long-lost civilization. ==See also==