New Chronology (Fomenko)

New Chronology (Fomenko)

The New Chronology is a fringe theory in pseudo-history, which argues that the conventional chronology is fundamentally flawed, that events attributed to antiquity such as the histories of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years after the time to which they have conventionally been assigned. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Nikolai Morozov, although Jean Hardouin can be viewed as an earlier predecessor. The New Chronology is commonly associated with Anatoly Fomenko, although it is a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians. History: Fiction or Science? which contains this New Chronology was written in Russian but has been translated into English.

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

While some researchers have developed revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical periods that shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages", none of these are as radical as that of the New Chronology. The New Chronology is rejected by mainstream historians and is inconsistent with absolute and relative dating techniques used in the wider scholarly community. The majority of scientific commentators consider The New Chronology to be pseudoscientific.