Was Ancient History a hoax invented during the Renaissance?

[NinjaPuppy]

Also, check your 'drafts' box. I had a few posts go there, rather than on to the forum.

[Craig Browning]

[Scepcop]

Here is a Wikipedia entry about Anatoly Fomenko's New Chronology of History. It describes his theories, methodology and arguments. His critics' counterarguments are summarized as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

Here's the entry on Anatoly Fomenko himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Fomenko

[SydneyPSIder]

The New Chronology is a , which argues that the conventional chronology of Middle Eastern and European history is fundamentally flawed, and that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854-1946),[1] although work by French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) can be viewed as an earlier predecessor.[2] However, the New Chronology is most commonly associated with Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945), although published works on the subject are actually a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians. The concept is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science? which was written in Russian but has been translated into English.

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

While some researchers have developed revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical periods that shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages", none of these is as radical as that of the New Chronology. The New Chronology is rejected by mainstream historians and is inconsistent with absolute and relative dating techniques used in the wider scholarly community. .[3][4][5][6][7][8]

Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as pseudoscience.[37]

In 2004 Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "New Chronology" the anti-prize of the Moscow International Book Fair called "Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a euphemism for a vulgar Russian word meaning disaster or fiasco) in the category "Esteemed nonsense" ("Pochotnaya bezgramota") awarded 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.[5] The new chronology was given a comprehensive critical analysis in a round table on "The 'Myths' of New Chronology" chaired by the dean of the department of history of Moscow State University in December 1999.[41][42][43] 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".[44]