| History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1) |  | Author: Anatoly Fomenko
Publisher: Mithec
Category: Book
Buy New: $19.95
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Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 540,915
Media: Paperback
Pages: 624
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 7 x 1.6
ISBN: 2913621058
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9782913621053
ASIN: 2913621058
Publication Date: March 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
`History: Fiction or Science?` is the most explosive tractate on history and chronology ever written. This book is not another conspiracy theory - every hypothesis it contains is backed by solid scientific data. The book is well-illustrated, contains 446 graphs and illustrations, copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts attesting to the falsity of the chronology used nowadays. You will be amazed to discover: - That the chronology universally taken for granted is indeed wrong; - That this chronology was essentially invented in the XVI-XVII century; - That archaeological, dendrochronological, paleographical and carbon methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts known today are erroneous or non-exact; - That there is not a single document that could be reliably dated earlier than the XIth century; - That Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy; - That Jesus Christ may have been born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD; - That the Old Testament is probably a rendition of Middle Ages events; - That the Old Europe is not as ancient as it claims. Henry Ford once said: "History is more or less bunk". Leading Mathematician Anatoly Fomenko proved it.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
 A Pretty Wild Theory February 22, 2005
Timothy Horrigan (Durham, NH United States)
115 out of 137 found this review helpful
This book presents a wildly radical restructuring of the timeline of world history. It is written by an outsider to the world of historical scholarship: Fomenko is a non-historian (a renowned mathematician) and an non-Westerner (from Russia.)
Fomenko's theory says, basically, that everything we are told about history pre-1600 is BS. Ancient history is, according to Fomenko, based on evidence quote-unquote "discovered" since the 15th century and arranged into a spurious standard timeline in the 18th century. (In some cases, the evidence was discovered much more recently: some Eastern religious texts were only uncovered in the 20th century.) Fomenko collates this evidence to argue that all those ancient chronicles are different versions of events which really happened roughly between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. The key event in Fomenko's timeline is the life of Christ (who was born in 1053 AD rather than 6BC, Fomenko believes.) After a relatively short-lived Eurasian empire disintegrated, each nation made up their own version of the empire's history, and generally each new version of the story was set farther back into the past than the previous one. (The newest version is the Hindu Krishna myth which is set about 10,000 years before the present day.)
This is an appealing theory, since it eliminates the various "dark ages" which blemish the conventional chronology. On the other hand, this is an appalling theory, since it creates one big dark age extending from the beginning of time till 900 AD or so.
The book is translated from the Russian. There is no index, and the bibliography is rather annoyingly arranged in the original Russian alphabetical order (so for example, B's and V's are mixed together.) But the translation is extremely readable, more readable than most historical works originally written in English.
This is the first book in a projected 7-volume set.
The online bookstore entries for this volume rather amusingly show easily history gets mixed up. The translator is someone named Michael Jagger who is almost certainly not the singer Mick Jagger (whose full name is Michael Phillip Jagger.) However, some online bookstores do list Mick Jagger as a coauthor. Amazon.com says the translator is someone named Mike Jagupov. This is hard enough to keep straight while the singer is still alive, and a few decades from now, I am sure that many sources will say that the legendary Rolling Stones frontman translated this book into English.
(I have no idea if Mick Jagger speaks Russian or not. Although he is an educated man--- an alumnus of the University of London--- one would assume that he doesn't. Certainly, in all the millions of words which have been written about him, no one has commented on his knowledge of the Russian language. And, if he actually was the person who translated this controversial text into English, the book's publishers would presumably be aggressively advertising that fact.)
Don't review if you haven't read February 4, 2005
LordMord
117 out of 140 found this review helpful
You learned history when you were a young lad from someone who learned it from someone who..... but who started it all?
What's wrong with asking this question? Some people would burn Mr. Fomenko at the stake for saying the Earth isn't flat.
I bought this book as a novelty but I ended up being quite impressed with it. I wouldn't say I'm totally sold on all the crazy ideas Mr. fomenko puts out but they certainly are more plausable than you might think. He does a thorough job of showing how early "historians" were really working for the pope. Most were monks with limited resources, personal and religious agendas, and a willingness to fudge it whenever they didn't know (or like) the truth. You'll be amazed at how meticulously he presents his evidence that the dark ages were so dark because they never happened. Your head will probably start to ache when you get to the section where he analyzes historical timelines statistically (at least mine did). However, the parallels truly are startling.
The first four chapters alone are worth the price of the book. Even if you don't believe any of it I'm sure you will at least question why we take the foundations of historical knowledge so seriously without solid justification. There's more to this book than you could know without actually reading it!
A better written explanation December 29, 2004
M. Woodward (Vermont USA)
51 out of 59 found this review helpful
About 10 years ago, I ploughed through Fomenko's two-volume Kluver set of independent papers that, taken together, form the outline of the current volume. It was tough going (non-idiomatic translations, lots of repetition, often written like a mathematical proof). I became instantly disoriented, thought about it long and hard for years, reviewed the volumes on Amazon, and spent bunches of hours in a local university library following odd leads and trying to see if there was any possibility that any of Fomenko's theorizing could be grounded in reality.
I read Robert Newton's condemnation of Ptolemy; Anthony Grafton's dissertation on Scaliger (and other writings about Medieval forgeries); F.F. Arbuthnott's peculiar disquisition (ca. 1900) on English history and the probability that the further back from Henry VIII you go the less you know (and why the Irish monks who "saved civilization" may have had other agendas); about Isaac Newton's chronological explorations; about the inconsistencies in radio-carbon dating; about an odd series of parallel "dark ages" in circum-Mediterranean cultures ca. 1200-to-800 BCE that can best be explained by positing that the period in question didn't exist; and a volume about the relatively late evolution of the concept of "absolute time." Taken together with the astronomical and mathematical data presented by Fomenko that, to this educated non-scientist, seems eminently plausible, I have pretty much concluded that there is a lot of room for irregularity in the received chronology of history.
This first (of seven!) volumes of Fomenko's work explains in far better English and more detail what his earlier papers explicated. It should be approached critically, will be derided and dismissed everywhere (and is not aided by Fomenko citing Velikovsky as one of the early "fellow travellers" along this path), but lays out a fascinating possibility that will take more than one reading and a lot of deep thought to assimilate and form any judgment about.
But it gives new lives to the common aphorism "History is written by the winners," Henry Ford's offhand dictum "History is more or less bunk," and Napoleon's prescient (?) "History is fable of fiction agreed upon."
I suddenly don't look at anything that happened before the Renaissance with anything like the certitude I once did.
 Interesting theories that deserve to be explored March 5, 2005
A. Audette
55 out of 64 found this review helpful
I do not agree with everything written in this book. For example, I do not agree with the idea that ankhs are supposed to be Christian crosses. I also disagree with the observations that different objects look like crescents and symbolize Islam. But there are a great number of valid observations contained in the book. Radiocarbon dating is not the science most of us think it is, as put forth in the book. I also have to agree with the author's idea that many pieces of evidence taken from old books and used to date people or events were either false and inserted by later editors, or otherwise erroneous. Let's face facts: the majority of ancient history is conjecture, or "educated guessing". It's about time an author came along and, in the author's own words, "called a spade a spade". Is this book 100% correct? Who knows? Do many of the theses contained within deserve further study? Yes, if history is to be a record of events and not propaganda or fuel for dogma. The more accurate we can make our history books, the better off other sciences will be, especially the humanities and any sciences concerned with gauging human progress in different areas throughout the ages. I give the book three stars mainly because I find some of the ideas put forth to be less than credible (the author shoud enlist other researchers with expertise in those areas besides math and physics), the translation to be not quite perfectly clear in some areas, and I dislike the organization of the book. The three stars are for the rest of the ideas and theories in the book that do make sense and deserve further exploration, or a reasoned rebuttal, especially the mathematical analysis of ancient texts. To the academics who summarily dismiss the book as rubbish...please point us to reasoned explanations. Us grown-ups who can read big words and read a book longer than a paperback novel deserve that much. Also, as an adult in this day and age, I will never just "take someone's word for it". How's that song go.."won't get fooled again!" I am especially waiting for someone to convince me that radiocarbon dating is worth using on objects less than many thousands of years old. I doubt it's going to happen!
Earth is flat March 27, 2004
Alec (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
50 out of 58 found this review helpful
Earth was flat. Humans saw that it was flat, books were telling scholars that it was flat, teachers were teaching students it was flat; scientists knew it was flat. There was some disagreement about the way it was kept afloat, most common versions were elephants, whales and turtles, but that was subject for scientific discussion. Until Magellan sailed around the globe and proved all this science wrong. This book is precisely about same situation. Although it is written for casual reader, it still bears all the traits of scientific research. I was suspicious about credibility of this book, because of the scandalous 10,000.00 bet placed as advertisement here (you can beat math only by math, and guy who posted the ad knows this). I've studied math using Fomenko's textbooks as supplementary source at Fraser university (there are around 14 textbooks on math, at least known to me, written by Fomenko and translated to English, pretty expensive and rare as all advanced textbooks, but I'm pretty sure it is possible to fish something at your local university, here is the one for the start - ISBN: 0792326067).
I've run some of the statistical examples in SPSS (of course simplified and using data from the book) and results were similar. Math doesn't lie, but there is old saying "garbage in - garbage out", so take my results as is. Anyway, history as a science is based on books written by previous generation of historians, who based their works on works of previous generation of historians, supplemented by archeological digs (great deal of assumptions was made there too, as people didn't usually mark their belongings with dates), so it definitely needs some mathematical treatment. It is very difficult to digest the new version of history from Fomenko without getting allergic shock. Official timeline is accepted in the same way as gravity, and movement of the sun; many nations have developed their identity based on official history. Literally speaking chronology is in our culture, in our roots, personal identity. Someone said here that this book was written by Russian nationalist to reassure Russian national identity. May be so, but I think for Russians will be very difficult to swallow that they were actually Mongols and Tatars too.
This book will turn your world upside down. Literally.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
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