Anatoly Fomenko and Garry Kasparov #conspiracy blackbag.gawker.com

Since 1980, Fomenko, mathematician at Moscow State University and full member of Russia's prestigious Academy of Sciences, has been the leading proponent of a radical revision of human history—"an improved version of the global chronology of the Ancient Time," as he and collaborator Gleb Nosovsky put it—based on statistical and astronomical analyses.

Fomenko believes there is no reliable written record of human events before the 11th century. Most of our knowledge of earlier cultures is based on texts or copies of texts that date from after that era. From that point on, chroniclers—primarily learned religious scholars—used supposition and arbitrary consensus to fix the dates of key events in history. In doing so, they grafted recent occurrences onto earlier dates—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes perniciously—thus creating numerous "historical duplicates." History appears to repeat itself, Fomenko suggests, because it is thoroughly plagiarized.

In his chronology, the events of the New Testament precede those of the Old Testament—and in any case, most of the stories are concocted to reflect later incidents. Joan of Arc was a model for the biblical character Deborah. Jesus Christ was crucified in Constantinople in 1086. Ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece were fashioned by Renaissance writers and artists (the time of the Pharoahs, Fomenko suggests, may have lasted into the 1700s). Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great, who was a tsar, in Moscow in the 1400s. Early English history—from the accepted names and dates to the apocryphal legends of a post-Roman King Arthur—is actually a carbon copy of Fourth Century Byzantium, which is itself a fiction based on late Medieval events.

Speaking of carbon, don't bother relying on carbon dating or other "scientific" chronological methods, Fomenko says: They are premised on the "old" dating system, and hence thoroughly corrupted.

"Does this sound uncanny?" the author asks:

"This version of events is substantiated by hard facts and logic – validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources – to a greater extent than everything you may have read and heard about history before."

Ironically, no one has done more to popularize Fomenko's work than a hardened opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin: The famous world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

In a 2003 online essay, Mathematics of the Past (available now only in archived form), Kasparov says that as far back as childhood—the fount of all great ideas, obviously!—he "began to feel that there was something wrong with the dates of antiquity." Kasparov proceeds to recount how, reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he found countless contradictions: How could ancient Romans accomplish so much without good maps? If humans were growing in stature over time, how were ancient soldiers so much stronger and larger than those of Gibbon's day? And how could they have achieved such advances in math and architecture using only Roman numerals?

Fortunately, Kasparov found an answer, like manna from heaven:

"About five years ago, I came across several books written by two mathematicians from Moscow State University: academician A.T. Fomenko and G.V. Nosovskij. The books described the work of a group of professional mathematicians, led by Fomenko, who had considered the issues of ancient and medieval chronology for more than 20 years with fascinating results. Using modern mathematical and statistical methods, as well as precise astronomical computations, they discovered that ancient history was artificially extended by more than 1,000 years. For reasons beyond my understanding, historians are still ignoring their work."

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