-Caveat Lector-
I am back again. I have a new email address (as you will notice) as the old one has
ceased to operate.
My website http://leviathan.weblogs.com is still updated daily, and should have
something of interest to researchers.
I have also discovered that history is a lie. No idea if this has been posted, but I
haven't seen the list for a couple of weeks.
http://www.saturdaynight.ca/
TIME WARP
By Timothy Taylor/Photographs by Mark Gilbert
You might think it's the year 2000, but a group of prominent Russian mathematicians is
arguing that history is all wrong, and it's actually 936AD. They've set off a battle
that's now come to Canada, and it's getting nasty
The man in the tweed jacket sitting ahead of me is growing visibly agitated. We're at
a mathematics conference at the University of Alberta just before the end of the
school year, and things have been predictably calm so far. But twice in the past
minute what's coming from the front of the room has made my tweedy neighbour twist
angrily in his seat.
Our speaker is Gleb Nosovskii, a mathematics professor from Moscow State University, a
man with a long black beard and dark eyes who is deeply serious about the matter at
hand. This is only appropriate, because his presentation is nothing short of a
mathematical case against history as we know it.
Nosovskii and his Russian colleagues, led by the famous Moscow State geometrician
Anatoly Fomen-ko, believe that our "global chronology" is profoundly flawed. They
argue that the conventional sequencing of historical events in the Mediterranean and
in Europe from 3000 BC to 1600 AD - a chronology they say was formalized in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the scientists Josephus Scaliger and Dionysius
Petavius, and has never been fundamentally challenged since - is shot through with
inexplicable duplications. These duplications, Nosovskii maintains, are revealed
through mathematical-pattern analysis.
In essence, it works like this: if you take the number of years ruled by each king in
a succession of fifteen kings, you get a series of fifteen numbers that's called a
"dynastic function." Now, if you compare one dynastic function from the biblical
kingdom of Judea to a dynastic function derived from a series of fifth-century popes,
you might be surprised to find these functions looking exactly the same.
Your surprise would be justified, because there is an infinitesimally small
statistical chance that two different series of fifteen rulers from completely
different parts of the global chronology will randomly be born, crowned, and die in
precisely the same pattern.
According to Nosovskii, however, there are several dozen examples of such duplication
through the ages, right up until reliable historical documentation begins, some time
around the sixteenth century. At that point the duplications abruptly stop.
This is so statistically improbable, Nosovskii argues, that one must conclude there
are serious errors in Scaliger and Petavius's chronology. Specifically, Nosovskii says
their version of history, drawn from accounts in different languages and from
different oral traditions, is greatly elongated. To explain the incredible statistical
anomalies, the Russian mathematicians are suggesting that early Renaissance historians
made mistakes. Some errors might have been honest (such as treating two accounts of
the same event as two distinct events) and others could have been intentional (whereby
historians, at the behest of their benefactors, might have altered history in their
favour). The effect of all this, Nosovskii, Fomenko, et al. believe, is that phantom
epochs were added to the global chronology. If they're right, the sweep of human
history is overstated by thousands of years and a great number of ancient events
happened much more recently than previously thought.
Here at the U of A conference, Nosovskii has spent the past hour using astronomical
data to bolster this case. He has redated half a dozen ancient eclipses centuries
later than conventionally understood; he has shown us depictions of planets and
constellations taken from Egyptian tombs and temples, and has resolved their dates
into the medieval era; now, he is approaching the summit of his argument with a
reworking of the astronomical data surrounding the first Noël. "And what new date for
the birth of Christ will we obtain if we use modern astronomy as our tool?" asks
Nosovskii as he prepares his final slide.
The overhead projector hums. The students, professors, and a few curious members of
the public wait as the next transparency slides into place. The man who has invited
Nosovskii here today, Professor Wieslaw Krawcewicz of the University of Alberta's
Department of Mathematical Sciences, is in the front row, craning his neck around,
gauging the reaction of the audience. Nosovskii's new date for the birth of Christ
fills the screen. The man in tweed in front of me squints and reads. A math student
eating an extraordinarily large sandwich stops chewing, his mouth full, and stares.
1064 AD
The man in tweed erupts. He comes an inch out of his chair, makes a noise, falls back.
"But that would mean . . . . " he stammers, incredulous. "That would mean that the
First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea preceded the birth of Christ! That's absurd!"
Krawcewicz registers this reaction without surprise. He knows that campus opinion on
Fomenko is already starkly divided, and that a number of professors, most of them
historians, think the whole thing is nonsense. Archaeologist Steven Hijmans thinks
Krawcewicz shouldn't even have asked Nosovskii here today. "Bluntly put," Hijmans
will later say, "can research be so bad that the U of A should not be associated with
it?"
In fact, Fomenko's research is built on, and supported by, leading Russian
mathematicians, as well as the legendary Russian world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Krawcewicz is one of the few academics in North America familiar with the Russian
theories and is also the man instrumental in bringing the battle across the Atlantic.
Late last year, Krawcewicz co-authored a paper that no doubt raised the ire of the
archaeological community by characterizing their dating methods as "highly subjective
and based on presumptive evidence."
Krawcewicz takes particular issue with carbon-14 dating. Since carbon-14 is absorbed
by living organisms and decays at a steady rate following death, carbon-14 levels are
measured in objects recovered at archaeological sites to determine their age.
Krawcewicz notes that the method must be calibrated using carbon-bearing samples of a
known age. He argues that since this "known age" is established according to the
conventional chronological tables, the dating power of carbon-14 relies on a circular
argument. Hijmans disagrees, saying that carbon-14 dating can be calibrated using
(among other things) long master sequences of tree rings, a process known as
dendochronology. One sees the positions being staked.
In person, Krawcewicz betrays no acrimony towards historians or
archaeologists. Neither does he show much concern about the
interdepartmental ice storm that his conference and his paper risk unleashing.
Instead, he's direct and good-humoured, a jeans-and-sneakers type of professor prone
to laugh
spontaneously at evidence of human absurdity. We talk in the dining room of his house,
the table stacked with math texts.
"Many people don't like the involvement of mathematicians in this particular area,"
Krawcewicz says. "But the work of Fomenko and his collaborators leads to a very strong
statement that there are serious problems with the traditional chronology."
Sinnott confirmed that eclipses did take place on the dates Fomenko has chosen. These
details aside, Sinnott does not buy the theory. Given that these events predate Julius
Caesar, there was no standard calendar in place. This results in all kinds of dating
confusion when we try to back-calculate using ancient chronicles. Sinnott concludes,
"Even though Fomenko has found valid eclipse dates that seem to fit the descriptions,
I think it is far-fetched in the extreme to conclude that the chronology of the
ancient world is 'off' by more than one thousand years."
Far-Fetched would be putting it mildly for historian Christopher Mackay. For starters,
he's not impressed by the credentials of Nicolai Morozov. "Morozov was a rich kid and
a thug," he says. "And apparently he must have been some kind of real Bolshevik
because he lasted under Stalin until 1946."
More fundamentally, Mackay thinks Morozov's data are suspect. He agrees with
archaeologist Stephen Hijmans on this point, who has identified a raft of what he
considers to be data irregularities from the Morozov chart that appears in
Krawcewicz's paper, now posted on a university web site. Two Holy Roman German
emperors are combined. Others are missing. Some dates of rule do not coincide with the
accepted record. The mathematicians respond by saying this arises when comparing all
available accounts of the dynasties in question, not just the conventional ones.
As for the credibility of Newton's work, Mackay just rolls his eyes. Scientists of
Newton's era didn't have the languages. No Egyptian, no Babylonian, no Summerian.
"Basically Newton was in no position to talk about this kind of thing," he says. "It
would be like talking about Euclid's interpretation of the theory of relativity."
Professor Mackay is even more dismissive of the new date for the birth of Christ. In
his lecture, Nosovskii used certain "facts" in his calculation. Christ was thirty-one
years old when he died. The resurrection took place on March 25, a Sunday. Passover
fell on March 24. And finally, the resurrection must occur on one of the designated
Easter dates, as defined in an old church text called the Easter Book. All these dates
were used by Nosovskii in his recalculation of Christ's birth date to 1064 AD (which,
by the way, means we are really living not in a new millennium, but in the year 936
AD).
"Which is simply absurd," says Mackay. He points out that the dates and the Easter
Book were medieval additions and so can't be taken as reliable. "None of that stuff
was in the Bible. It's not justified out of the New Testament. It has no evidentiary
value. It's irrelevant."
And Fomenko's other astronomical solutions are equally irrelevant, says Mackay. "I
mean, which are you going to believe? That all the Egyptologists are complete idiots
and don't know what they're talking about? And that this one horoscope is somehow so
accurate that you can get an absolute chronological date that is manifestly insane?"
He warms to this topic, reddening as the wind whips trees in the
courtyard outside. The real issue here, he says, is the fact that the conclusions of
Fomenko and his supporters are much more problematic than the duplications they set
out to explain.
Nothing highlights this more efficiently for Mackay than the chaos created by redating
the eclipses of Thucydides and Livy. This is because Fomenko's new dates not only
bring the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) and the rise of Rome (Livy) up over 1,000
years in absolute terms, but they reorder them. This, Mackay stresses, simply cannot
be.
"In the time of the Peloponnesian War," Mackay explains patiently, "mainland Greece
and western Asia Minor were the heartland of the Greek world. Eighty years after the
war's end, Alexander the Great conquers the Persian Empire, Greeks spread throughout
the Near East, and three big monarchies are set up: the Seleucid, the Antigonid, and
the Ptolemaic. The Antigonid dynasty is brought to an end when the Romans defeat them
at the Battle of Pydna. That presupposes the existence of Alexander the Great. No
Alexander the Great, no Antigonid dynasty."
And no Battle of Pydna. So in other words, putting the celestial events of Livy in
front of those of Thucydides flips the historical effect in front of its cause.
"It's just completely insane," Mackay concludes. "We have a historical tradition that
covers entirely, in great and vast and interlocking detail, the past two thousand
years."
In effect Mackay is saying that duplications and historical anomalies are irrelevant
given this veritable river of human record-keeping dropping sediment grain by grain,
year by year, epoch by epoch, silting out slowly into the delta of global chronology.
That delta accumulating beneath our feet is history. To misunderstand its origin, to
capriciously seek its revision is nothing less than an attempt to move the earth on
which we stand.
The wind has died down and the sun is dappling the courtyard again. Just before I
leave, there's a knock at the door. It's the associate professor of history Andrew
Gow, a full-bearded, thin-framed man with an immediate assessment of his own once he
finds out that Fomenko is on the table.
"This is all perfectly analogous," says Gow, "to us telling the math department that
it is a fraud for its use of zero, pointing out that there was no zero in antiquity,
that zero did not exist, that you invented it yourself to make things easier. And
thus, the entire understanding of mathematics, as you would have it, reposes on a
fallacy."
It's difficult to imagine how this debate will play out on the
University of Alberta campus in the fall when archaeologist Steven Hijmans publishes a
rebuttal paper in the campus newspaper. On the one hand, many academics think the
discussion is itself dangerous, not fit for academic consumption. "Nosovskii's visit
raises questions, not about world chronology, but about minimum levels of academic
quality," says Hijmans.
On the other hand, there are the mathematicians. Krawcewicz and
Nosovskii both express a great interest in and willingness to begin cross-disciplinary
discussions, to open up the matter to historians and archaeologists alike, to jointly
consider the issues. And even those who don't endorse Fomenko's conclusions agree that
valid mathematical questions have been raised. "It would be a massive irresponsibility
not to deal with it and either prove that it's wrong or, if there's something here,
find out what in the world is going on," says math professor Jack Macki. Jacques
Carrière concludes, "To have a definitive answer to the thing, the problem has to be
looked at by other research groups."
But an atmosphere of suspicion and challenge notwithstanding, there is some hope for
dialogue. History professor Mackay says he would like to see the mathematicians answer
some of the questions he has raised - issues surrounding Morozov's data or the chaos
created by redating eclipses. "Oh, they absolutely must reply," says Mackay, "because
it won't work."
Krawcewicz certainly seems hap-py to comply. "This is a monumental task," he says of
the multidisciplinary project that he imagines would be required to correct what he
sees as a chronological mess.
"Nevertheless such reversals happened before in astronomy, mechanics, chemistry,
physics, and even in mathematics. There were also reversals in economics and
psychology as well. This is history's turn."
Just before I leave, Krawcewicz takes a textbook from one of the stacks. He asks me,
with a mischievous smile, "Do you know this St. Augustine quote about mathematicians?"
I don't, so he reads it to me.
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty
prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with
the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of hell."
It provokes another delighted laugh from the professor.
"Complete and utter rubbish," answers Professor Christopher Mac-kay from the
Department of History and Classics. It has taken a week of e-mail juggling to get an
interview with anyone from the department. Professor Mackay breaks the silence after
several others decline. When I arrive at his book-lined, Persian-carpeted office,
Mackay turns out to be my man in the tweed coat from Nosovskii's lecture. A specialist
in Roman history, Mackay is courteous but deeply impatient with the matter at hand.
"I don't go around coming up with dumb theories about math," he tells me. "I certainly
don't have the effrontery to say that I can show them the way they've been doing math
is all wrong and that two and two makes five."
"The people who did this research are serious people," says University of Alberta
mathematician Jacques Carrière. While he does not agree with Fomenko's conclusions,
he's prepared to give the underlying math its due. "Russian mathematicians, it is well
known, are among the top mathematicians in the world. They wouldn't write something
like this just for the fun of it."
Anatoly Fomenko, a prolific mathematician as well as an artist who publishes tomes of
drawings illustrating advanced concepts in such areas as multi-dimensional geometry,
has been a chronology critic since the late 1970s, when he caught the bug from a
famous fellow Moscow State mathematician, M. M. Postnikov. And even Postnikov is far
from the beginning of it all.
Indeed, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) published a book titled The Chronology of Ancient
Kingdoms - Amended. In it, Newton disagreed with Scaliger and Petavius, concluding
that the ancient kingdom of Egypt lasted not two or three thousand years but something
closer to four hundred. With the book, Newton launched the dispute over global
chronology that is now bubbling over in Edmonton but has been percolating in Russia
for almost a century.
The movement in Russia began with Nicolai Morozov (1854-1946), the rebel son of a
nobleman. At the time of his epiphany about global chronology, Morozov was in prison
for his role in the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Morozov spent his hard time
poring over chronology texts and, in this process, invented the dynastic function. In
one case - cited in Krawcewicz's paper - Morozov drew up functions showing that the
pattern of the Old Testament Judaic kings from Rehoboam to Zedekiah matched almost
precisely the pattern of Roman Emperors from Alcinius to Justinian II, over 1,000
years later.
Fomenko took this analysis much further. Using geometric tools, he expressed the
similarity or dissimilarity of two dynastic functions in terms of mathematical
distance. The mathematical distance between two dynastic functions is expressed as a
"proximity coefficient." A large proximity coefficient means the functions are very
different, and a small coefficient, statistically speaking, means the functions are so
close that they are probably the same.
To illustrate, imagine you have two brothers who separately research and compile your
family tree. Both make minor mistakes. As a result, the two trees have different birth
and death dates for some people, they leave some people out (different people), and
they differ as to exactly how many times your Aunt Bessie was married. Even so,
analyzed by Fomenko's methods, the two trees would still be similar and their
mathematical proximity would reveal them to be describing the same thing. If you were
comparing a series of fifteen medieval popes with the last fifteen mayors of Swift
Current, Saskatchewan, on the other hand, the dynastic functions would be very
different and the mathematical proximity would reveal them to be describing different
events.
Fomenko used this model to compare historical dynasties across a
staggering range of data. He began by compiling a complete list of fifteen-ruler
successions from 4000 BC to 1800 AD, drawing from all the nations and empires of
Western and Eastern Europe, and stretching back into antiquity through Roman, Greek,
biblical, and Egyptian history. Comparing one to another in every possible way,
including differing accounts of the same dynasties, Fomenko found mathematically what
Morozov had sketched - that several dozen pairs of dynasties previously thought to be
utterly different had proximity coefficients that were very small. In other words,
they were as close as your two brothers' different versions of your family tree.
And Fomenko was just getting warmed up. Working with hundreds of
primary-source documents (ancient chronicles, annals, and other
records), he set out to confirm the similarity between dynastic
functions through the comparison of the documents themselves. In its simplest form,
this exercise involves converting the density and volume of words on a page into a
mathematical expression. In other words, just as a series of kings may be expressed as
a mathematical function for the purpose of comparison, so too may a series of words.
He found that wherever two dynastic functions had close proximity, so did the written
accounts of their history. This was so statistically improbable that Fomenko concluded
that the existing dates were wrong.
In this two-part process, Fomen-ko claims to have found and confirmed repeating
patterns between ancient and medieval Rome, and several instances where periods of the
Old Testament appear statistically identical to stretches of medieval Roman-German
history from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries.
But his most startling assertion emerges from efforts to map dozens of these
"discovered" duplications. Plotted across the full breadth of the conventional global
chronology, Fomenko's duplications combine to form a macro-duplication. Specifically,
there is a stretch from about 1600 BC
to 1600 AD that may be mathematically deconstructed to reveal a single large pattern
that repeats four times. Fomenko believes this is evidence that early historians spun
out a single historical pattern into a chronology that is much too long.
Mathematical dna evidence of chronological error? Or the product of pure chance and
thus irrelevant?
Garry kasparov doesn't think it's irrelevant. Before the world's
dominant chess player came across Fomenko's research a few years ago, he had his own
suspicions about the global chronology. Chess players, of course, are particularly
gifted at noticing patterns. And Kasparov, being a history buff, sensed problems
intuitively.
"I know a lot of history," Kasparov tells me. "I read a lot and I have a good memory.
But I also like to analyze, to figure out various opportunities and compare scenarios.
Little by little, I got the feeling that something is wrong with the dates in ancient
history."
Kasparov focused on what he feels are illogical fluctuations in the tempo of human
development, taking these as evidence of error in the official timeline. In each case,
he interpreted these anomalies as errors of elongation, whereby the historians of
Scaliger and Petavius's day placed events and accomplishments too far in the past.
The relatively blank period of the Dark Ages is a favourite example. "Conventional
wisdom is that with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, science died and took
one thousand years to recover," he says. But it is illogical to Kasparov that with the
decline of Rome, and the movement of many Roman citizens to the newly flourishing
Byzantine capital of Constantinople, they managed to leave all the scientific
knowledge of Rome behind them.
Arguments that the Byzantine Church suppressed scientific knowledge don't convince him
either. "I don't believe that such important things like the principles of mapping or
ballistics could disappear because the Church didn't like them. A science that has
military importance will continue in any generation, under any emperor, king, or
president."
And what about the strange pace of mathematical development, he says, where the
fundamental findings are attributed to the Greeks, who apparently lived centuries
before the development of Arabic numerals?
"Then we have a strange gap," Kasparov says. After the Greeks, the Romans did
complicated calculations in the areas of architecture, engineering, and ballistics.
But they apparently used clunky Roman numerals. "Just try to divide big numbers or
figure out the volume of a complicated geometrical figure with Roman numerals,"
Kasparov points out.
Fomenko's research provided a mathematical underpinning to the
discrepancies Kasparov already felt he had discovered. Yet taken
independently, how reliable is this math?
"I have no problems with the math," says Professor Carrière. "People might be
intimidated by it, but they should just accept the mathematical conclusions for what
they are and not really argue about that, but argue about the other issues, the
interpretation, the reasons why."
"I am persuaded that there is a case to be answered, at least," says Professor Jack
Macki, a specialist in differential equations. "It's sound mathematics and statistics,
and it can be used to indicate. It can't be used to prove, but it can indicate."
What is more persuasive, Macki and Carrière agree, is the astronomical data that
Fomenko uses to buttress his argument that history is too long and that many
historical events happened more recently than we thought. His work with Egyptian
horoscopes provides a colourful example. Adorning the temple walls and sarcophagi of
some Egyptian ruins are depictions of the sun, moon, and planets as observed in the
different zodiacal constellations. Assuming a given depiction is accurate - that the
celestial bodies were observed and placed correctly in the constellations - a
horoscope can be used for dating. Fomenko has interpreted over a dozen Egyptian
horoscopes. All of them, he claims, work out for dates that are hundreds of years
later than conventionally thought. Most well-documented ancient eclipses, Fomenko
likewise believes, actually took place in the medieval period.
I ran two of Fomenko's new eclipse solutions by Roger Sinnott, who studied astronomy
at Harvard and is an editor at the respected Sky & Telescope Magazine. The first is
the famous trio of eclipses from Thucydides's account of the Pelopponesian War. The
three eclipses date conventionally to 431, 424, and 413 BC. Fomenko finds what he
feels are better solutions in 1133, 1140, and 1151 AD. The second example is the
eclipse of 190 BC described in Livy's history of Rome. Fomenko redates this event to
967 AD.
More important to Fomenko is the fact that his dates accommodate details from ancient
descriptions that the conventional dates do not. For example, Thucydides wrote that
the first of his three eclipses was solar and that the stars were visible, from which
an astronomer might deduce that the eclipse was total. The accepted solution of August
3, 431 BC involves an eclipse that was probably only partial in Greece. Similarly, the
Livy eclipse is supposed to have happened five days before the ides of July, which by
our conventional reckoning would date it July 10. Fomenko's 967 AD solution nails
that date, while the conventional 190 BC eclipse actually occurred on March 14. (An
alternative eclipse in 188 BC was on July 17, which is close.)
http://www.saturdaynight.ca/kasparov/index.html
Chess writers typically describe world chess champion grandmaster Garry Kasparov as
either the best player in the world or the best player in world history. He won the
title in 1985 at the age of 22. He has defeated all human challengers in tournament
play since. Last year, Kasparov won a match on MSN that pitted the champ against a
collective of 3 million chess players from 75 countries who logged in to vote on their
next move. Kasparov is, in short, a legendary chess brain.
Yet Kasparov is also a voracious student of history. He has read a library of books
and memorised most significant dates in the human chronology. To him, there always
seemed to be discrepancies in the human chronology. Then in 1996, Kasparov came across
the famous Moscow State University mathematician Anatoly Fomenko who had published a
textbook outlining his mathematical theory that history contained statistically
improbable pattern duplications. The two men met and in 1998 Kasparov wrote a
supportive Preface to Fomenko’s radical book "Introduction to New Chronology."
Earlier this year, I interviewed colleagues of Fomenko’s for a story in Saturday
Night. During these conversations I found out about Kasparov’s fascination. It took a
few weeks to track him down -- Kasparov constantly travels the world playing chess --
but when I did, he spoke freely about several of the major problems in the chronology;
including discrepancies in mapping, military technology, mathematics, and how
historians are reacting.
-Timothy Taylor
Timothy Taylor: Let’s talk about maps. You're saying the Romans couldn’t have had
them, is that correct?
Garry Kasparov: There is no single original of the Roman time. So we assume that the
maps never existed. Because, if you look at the first maps of the fourteenth and
fifteenth century, you’ll see the quality of these maps is a joke.
TT: In terms of accuracy?
GK: It’s not even accuracy. It’s like children’s drawings. It’s not even a map. They
didn’t have the concept of geographical maps at all at that time.
TT: And if maps of the 14th and 15th century looked like that, by extension, you have
difficulty with the prowess in roadwork and communications attributed to the Romans.
GK: Absolutely. What I am trying to figure out in my preface is how they could operate
without the simple items - maps - that are necessary for running such a huge empire.
TT: Staying on the Romans, there are other discrepancies. You write that according to
the conventional chronology, the Romans didn’t innovate in terms of military tactics
or learn from their enemies even over 400 years, which you take as evidence that the
Roman era is exaggerated in duration. We have these two battles, for example, Carrhae
and Adrianople, 400 years apart, and yet in both cases, a Roman army using the same
armaments is defeated the same way, by cavalry.
GK: Absolutely. And they never made any improvements on the cavalry. And amazingly,
when you read the sources, they couldn’t make it because stirrups were not known in
Europe. For hundreds of years, the Romans couldn’t make a cavalry which proved to be
extremely effective.
TT: In your preface to Fomenko’s Introduction to New Chronology you write about
inconsistencies in various growth rates throughout human history, including those for
the development of human physical size and strength. We first look at the great
physical accomplishments attributed to Greeks and Romans. Then we look at the
relatively small size of medieval suits of armour. Finally, we look at our size today
and this seems to describe a strange developmental pattern.
GK: Correct. We know that for the last 300 or 400 years, the size of human bodies is
growing. Now what happened is that we suddenly, in history, have the backward process.
We have these great Greek athletes, we have ultra-powerful Roman soldiers. You look at
the size of the Roman soldier who has to carry all this ammunition. You’re talking
about 300,000 Arnold Schwartzeneggers. And even well-known historians like Edward
Gibbon are talking about how the soldiers of the 18th century were not able to do the
same type of exercise.
TT: Isn’t it possible that we have an over-romanticized view of the Romans and so we
grossed up their abilities a bit? No harm done, the duration of the empire remains the
same, but they simply weren’t as fast, they didn’t jump as high, they didn’t carry as
much iron.
GK: But then we have to devaluate all the sources. And that’s very important. We’re
talking about very reliable quote-unquote historical sources. And they describe it in
great detail . . . it’s not just fifteen kilos of iron. He’s talking about all sorts
of ammunition: a sword, a shield, a long pike. It’s a precise description.
TT: So this is about credibility of source material.
GK: Oh, this is a big credibility issue! If these things, if all these things never
existed, then we have to devaluate as a credible source the entire literature that is
attributed to the ancient authors, because how could they make such mistakes
describing the ammunition of their contemporary soldiers? This suggests that those
sources do not belong to the contemporary writers, and they were made up much later.
TT: I want to talk about numbers. If I understand correctly, the Greeks are credited
with the foundation discoveries of mathematics and physics. But they would have had to
do so without Arabic numerals, a feat no one can duplicate.
GK: Correct. The Greeks according to official history used letters for hundreds, for
tens, and ones. It was extremely complicated. If you talk about Archimedes, you should
use Greek letters. But according to Fomenko and his associates, modern science cannot
deal with these problems without [modern] tools of calculation.
TT: So, Fomenko is saying in effect that we've been unsuccessful in going back and
doing any of these ancient calculations using what are supposed to have been the
contemporary numbering systems of the day. Which raises the follow-up question: How
were these texts preserved over subsequent centuries if nobody would have had any idea
what the texts were talking about?
GK: Exactly. And we have again a strange gap. We have the big scientific discoveries
around the second, third century BC. Then we have an invention of the so-called Arab
system, the positional system of counting with zero dated to the eighth or ninth
century AD. Then we have another gap of 600 to 700 years before the positional system
of counting was used for logarithms and for decimals. But it doesn’t take 600 years.
It takes two generations maximum. Which takes me to the conclusion that probably the
positional system of counting was an
invention of the fifteenth century. And then we have a very very good, gradual
development from the invention of this system of counting, then we have decimals, we
have logarithms, then we have great scientific works of people like Archimedes and
Apolloni on one side and you have Kepler, Descartes, Fermat . . . because the
complexity of the tasks they were solving is identical. So if we don’t know anything
about
history, we should assume that all these great scientists from the second and third
century BC have to be contemporaries of
Kepler, Descartes, and Fermat.
Talking about scientific knowledge . . . the general conventional wisdom is that with
the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, science died and took another 1,000 years to
revive. The simple point of refutation is that according to the same official history,
the Byzantine Empire was still thriving. It was flourishing. So how come that one
empire with the success of the Roman Empire - and many people just moved to
Constantinople from Rome - how come this empire was not able to preserve this
scientific knowledge. Somebody will tell you that, oh, it’s because the Church was
dominating. I don’t believe that such important things like maps or the principles of
mapping and the mathematics, ballistics could disappear because the Church didn’t like
it. A science that has military importance should continue at any generation, under
any emperor, any king, any president.
TT: What kind of reactions have you had to these ideas?
GK: Mostly people are very arrogant. And they get very defensive, or very insulting,
because they don’t want to hear about it. It’s like you are destroying their family
branch.
TT: How have historians reacted to your ideas?
GK: Once I spoke about this subject among a group of English
intellectuals. One of them was a professor on Roman Law at one of the leading British
universities (without giving the name for him not to be embarrassed). And I asked him
one question. I asked him, I don’t want to go into mathematics, or armour, or
ammunition, or military inventory because those are not your subjects. Let’s talk
about something that is entirely your field. What was the official language of the
Byzantine Empire? According to official history, Emperor Constantine moved the capital
from Rome to Constantinople. So, at that time, he moved his court and most of the
bureaucrats to the new capital. They couldn’t start speaking another language, it
means they came with the Latin language. So, at what time - according to historians
the official language of the Byzantine Empire was Greek - when did the official
transfer actually happen?
He said, maybe sometime in the sixth or the seventh century.
And I said, but the Justinian Codex, the rule of law in the Byzantine Empire which was
produced by Emperor Justinian, it was written in Latin.
And he looked at me . . . he knew that I knew already that the only original copy was
found in the beginning of the sixteenth century - amazing the sixteenth century - in
Italy, in Latin. So there is no original text in Greek.
And he said, yes it was in Latin.
So I said, excuse me, can you explain to me and to other people, how come that the
entire - while the official language was Greek and everybody presumably spoke Greek, I
mean ordinary people - how come they used Latin documents for jurisdiction, for the
court, for official documents, because you can’t use an unknown language in the
courtroom where you solve the problems of all the people.
Now he said . . . it’s a mystery we haven’t solved yet.
TT: So what is the true history?
GK: I’m not trying to give any definite answer. What I’m trying to prove is that we
have enough gaps, enough discrepancies, enough simple falsifications to conclude that
probably this history was an invention of a later time. I don’t have enough
information, and enough courage, to come up with a definite version of events. And I
think it is too dangerous for me to do so.
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