I’ve just had one of those “You what?” moments in reading some nonsense online. It came about from looking up something on YouTube and then happening on another link.
The link was to do with a historic theory called New Chronology from a pretty wacky Russian mathematician called Anatoly Fomenko. He reckons that the dark ages never happened, that Jesus was born around 1050 and that the smart cookies in the Renaissance actually invented the histories of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Sounds crazy, but you know what(?) it’s even crazier.
There’s some very, very warped logic at work and the guy completely ignores accepted chronologies. It’s almost as if he was bored one day and thought he’d come up with this by sitting in the library and looking at some old charts.
Fomenko can’t have actually been to see Ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt, but since he couldn’t comprehend the times involved he just made up his own view of history and then tried to use some historical data and science to back up his theory. That people are reading his work and taking it at all seriously is quite disturbing and more than a little annoying (architectural historian speaking here).
Taking a backward step – or three – it dissolves from being evidently crazy to being very, very funny.
From pseudohistory to pseudoparody – read Morten Monrad Pedersen’s account of his experiments with Fomenko’s techniques in his article on the way the Danish Royal chronology was falsified as recently as 1947 and how Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy were actually the same person . . .