Russia at the crossroads again. Is Russian history a science at all? The oeuvre offered for your consideration and appreciation is something greater than just another shot fired in the timeless battle between natural sciences and humanities; it takes everything you ever knew about history, turns it into a pile of smoking rubble, and then invites you to consider this pile to be the sum total of human knowledge about history. This high mathematical explosive is presented in a very level-headed and academic manner; the sheer amount of data that Anatoly Fomenko and his colleagues cite for evidence suffices for making one quite certain of their veracity before very long, no matter how sceptical the initial attitude. What is so specific about these theories, then, and what should make this book revolutionary? First and foremost, the reader should prepare to find documented human history to be a millennium old at best. The quotation of antediluvian datings of papyrus documents or cuneiform tablets as counter-argumentation has already been tried; the problem is that these datings are by no means irrefutable and self-sufficient. They are invariably linked to the consensual chronological scale, and it is this very scale that the authors deconstruct so artfully. Fomenko and team go far enough to prove that no dating methods are truly independent, be it radiocarbon analysis, dendrochronology, or anything else. What do they offer as an alternative? Facts, mostly. The main methods are empirico-statistical, and involve extensive calculations.
The data used are collected from a great variety of sources (chronicles, dynastic tables, etc.), and studied meticulously. Reign durations of various dynasties are compared with each other in search of duplicates. Every ancient eclipse is given a new precise dating that fits its astronomical parameters perfectly as opposed to the one offered by the consensual version. Nearly every event considered “ancient” nowadays proves mediaeval after careful examination. Jesus Christ, for instance, is supposed to have really been born in 1153 and crucified in 1186 AD. Basically, this is the first successful attempt to finally transform history into a science. This book is a must read for everyone who isn’t entirely indifferent to human history, and possibly also for those who are!
