Another group that I had come across in this exploration of ancient historical revisionism was the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. The website founded by that group has an online paper entitled, The Revision of Ancient History - A Perspective, which goes into a greater detail on the history of conflicts about the historical chronology. In that paper, it goes into the various biases and exaggerations that ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and Diodorus of Sicily) have made; that in which the mainstream chronology upholds still today. Here is a section from the paper that talks about this.As an example, we would like to discuss two dynasties, one the dynasty of the Holy Roman-German Empire (10th - 13th AD) and another one of the Jewish kings according the Bible (9th - 5th BC). On Figure 3, we represent the vertical time line with two graphs of reign durations on its opposite sides for comparison. On this chart, we start the dates for the dynasty of Jewish kings in the year zero, which is not a date according to some era but simply indicates the starting "zero" point for this dynasty. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the beginning of this dynasty is around 922 B.C. Figure 3 was taken from A.T. Fomenko monograph [2].
Figure 3
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There are many more examples of similar dynasty pairs in the conventional chronology. For instance, the parallel between the first period of the Roman episcopate in 141-314 A.D. and the second period of the Roman episcopate in 314-532 A.D. is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
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On Figure 5, we present another pair of graphs, this time without annotations. All these graphs were also taken from the monograph [2].
Figure 5
These parallels suggest that the traditional history of ancient times consist of multiple recounts of the same events scattered in many locations at various times. The first scientist who realized it was N.A. Morozov (see [1]). Further progress was made by A.T. Fomenko who succeeded to decipher the principle structure of these duplicates in Roman and Biblical history (see [2]). On Figure 6, we show a graphical representation of his result related to the Roman and European history. The chronological blocks annotated by the same letters (what we also emphasised by adding colours) represent duplicates in the conventional chronology.
Figure 6
Other stuff included were Christian chronologists, early Babylonian chronologists, a critique of the 'Dark Ages' narrative, and also revisionists such as Immanuel Velikovsky and others called 'catastrophists', which believe that there was a catastrophe that happened some point in history.2.2 The Early Greek and Alexandrian Historians. wrote:Revisionists have a long and distinguished pedigree. Concern about the true age of the earliest civilisations and major turning points in history has always been an integral part of history. Ever since men first learnt to write, they started to record historical events. These date right back to the ancient flood legends described in the literature of many of the world's earliest civilisations, and tales of golden ages, catastrophes and of a world threatened from time to time by an unstable solar system.
Among the first to bring ancient Egyptian history to the attention of the outside world was Herodotus c450BC. [5] As mentioned above he credited the Egyptians with a recorded history of grossly exaggerated length. By assuming three generations of kings for each one hundred years, he estimated it could be traced back some 11,000 years before his time. But he also reported a brief chronological outline of historical events under some more recent kings as told to him by Egyptian priests, much of which has subsequently been verified. His account cites Sesostris as perhaps the most famous of the warrior and empire-building pharaohs. He mentions that Helen of Troy, over whom the Trojan War was fought, was in Egypt during the reign of a king Proteus. However, the names of Egyptian kings, when translated into early Greek became in many cases hopelessly unrecognisable, and the name Proteus, meaning 'prince' in Greek, is not known from our translations of names in cartouches on the Egyptian monuments. Most controversially, however, his chronology implied that the great pyramids of Giza, built by pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (OK), were actually built after the era of the Middle Kingdom (MK) rulers of D12. He certainly failed to credit the pyramids with any great antiquity.
In the early 3C, a great compilation of ancient Jewish history was brought to Egypt under the first Ptolemys, and translated into Greek as the Septuagint. This early version of the Old Testament (OT) traced the history of the Israelites back to the very beginning of Earth itself. And here at Alexandria, probably for the first time, the priestly scholars from Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia were confronted with detailed evidence for the antiquity of the Jewish people. Other nations conquered by the Macedonians then felt compelled to compete in the antiquity stakes. Manetho, a priest and scribe of Heliopolis, and the Chaldean Berosus, a priest of Belus, both of whom flourished under Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247), composed accounts in Greek of the history of their respective nations. In the writings of the vanquished to the conquerors, both writers sought to demonstrate that the vanquished peoples were descendents of very ancient and noble civilisations. Berossus, in the Chaldaika to Antiothos I, claimed to base his history on Babylonian astronomical archives 473,000 years old. Manetho, in the Aegyptiaca to Ptolemeios Philadelphos, claimed an Egyptian history of 30 dynasties, with 113 generations, comprising 36,525 years, a pedigree which made the Greeks appear childlike and insignificant by contrast. In his history, he also contradicted Herodotus in many places. Professor Waddell, in his translation of the works of Manetho [6], said that the works of Berossus and Manetho should be seen principally as expressions of rivalry between Ptolemy and Antiochus, each seeking to proclaim their civilisation the most ancient. And as part of the historical studies, the Alexandrians will also certainly have tried to identify the Egyptian pharaohs mentioned in the OT.
Eratosthenes (c275-194), head of the great library of Alexandria some decades after Manetho, then joined in the antiquity game of behalf of Greece. He studied the works of Homer, Manetho, and other early Greek historians, and derived a date for the Trojan War of c1193-1183. This he did by identifying 17 Spartan kings who reigned in succession from the return of the Heraclidae to Thermopylae. He then assumed that three generations lasted 100 or 120 years, and arrived at a total of 622 years for their combined reigns. This early date was strongly disputed at the time by others, including some Greek ruling families who could trace their genealogies back to ancestors who had fought at Troy. They said this date was over 300 years too early, and that the war had ended not more than three generations before the start of the first Olympic Games in 776. Pausanias reports that the argument was partially settled by allowing both views to co-exist, with the Olympic Games first starting in 12C, then starting again in 8C after a lapse of some 400 years. Today the genealogical evidence from several Greek rulers is again ignored, and the CC has embraced Eratosthenes' early 12C date for Troy. The fact that he used those ridiculously long average reign lengths is conveniently ignored.
Diodorus of Sicily c80-20BC was a Greek historian who wrote 40 books of world history, called collectively a Library of History. For Egyptologists, his most valuable contribution was a description of the campaigns by the Persian kings against Egypt [7]. In the first of these, Artaxerxes II was defeated by an Egyptian king whom Diodorus called Nectanebos, who thus regained Egypt's independence for some 25 years before the second Persian conquest by Artaxerxes III. Astonishingly, no record of this great Egyptian victory appears on monuments of Nekhthorheb, the king most Egyptologists have now chosen, after much debate, to be identified as the Nectanebos of Diodorus. The absence of any records, new buildings, or even grateful offerings to the gods to honour such a glorious achievement must surely arouse our suspicions.
Along with the date of the Trojan War, the foundation dates for Rome and Carthage, and the history of the Jews were also subjects for heated debate. In defence of Apion's claim that the Jews were a young people, Josephus (c80AD) [8], a Jewish historian under the Roman Empire, wrote his famous historical essay 'Contra Apion', which referred extensively to the works of Manetho. He revealed many of Manetho's errors, and strove to disprove Manetho's claim that when the Hyksos had been driven out of Egypt, they had then gone to Judea, where they built Jerusalem.
Now, I do not completely adhere to either one of those groups; they may have their strengths and yet have their weaknesses. For example, I have com across an article entitled Who Lost the Middle Ages, has apparently pointed out the errors that Fomenko had made in creating his system of reconstructing his chronology.
In addition, Fomenko has been criticized for having a 'pro-Russian' bias in his research; his chronology work has been largely based around positing that Russia was the empire that dominated ancient history and not the various Western and Near Eastern nations. Along with Fomenko, Velikovsky also has errors as well, such as completely trusting the Bible chronology without questioning it, and there are also questions concerning his theory that there was a 'catastrophic' event that had occurred.Excerpt 1:
He counts Cenwalch of Wessex and Sussex (643-672 CE) as the first "English" king, and he says his reign is the British duplicate (or reinterpretation) of the Eastern Roman Theodosius the Great (378-395 CE), for no particular reason other than the 275 year shift in time that makes it match "New Chronology." But to make them equivalent, Fomenko can only use Cenwalch's reign over Wessex (647-672). Even then, his 25-year reign still does not match Theodosius' 16-year stay on the throne. Nevertheless, this error of more than 50% is still considered a parallel.
His other parallels, even after a double reordering of Byzantine monarchs (they were themselves duplicated twice, you see), are still not very accurate. Beorhtric (ruled 16 years) is equated to Justin I (ruled 9 years), an error of almost 78%. Fomenko links Aethelbert (6 years) to Justin II (13 years), an error of over 1013%. He has to combine Zeno's two reigns (over a period of, but not totaling, 17 years) to match the English Cuthread (17 years).
Fomenko does manage, however, a couple of good "hits." He links Egbert, the uniter of England (ruled 38 years), to Justinian the Great, restorer of the Roman Empire (ruled 38 years). But then he combines King Edgar (16 years) with King Edward the Martyr (3 years) and claims they both represent Leo III the Isaurian (24 years). He concludes that the names Edgar and Edward are "similar and consequently their union is natural." (5) Of course, the eleven Emperors Constantine (and the additional Emperors named Constans and Constantius) were apparently readily distinguished by the barbarians.
His entire theory depends on his idea that history is merely the chronicle of the reigns of monarchs, and that the mathematical relationships between their reigns is as sound as the mathematically relationship of two sides of an algebraic equation. This is nonsense of the worst kind, made worse by the fact that Fomenko had to actively rewrite Byzantine history to get his correlation to match the English history he so badly wants to appropriate (requiring tolerances, as we have shown, of up to 100%).
Excerpt 2:
Pushing his ideas still further, Fomenko argues that our confusion about the True Dates derives from the old English use of the term "Year of Grace" as a synonym for Anno Domini, A.D. He extrapolates: "Maybe the original (and now forgotten) meaning of a formula 'Years of Grace' differs from one which is accepted today. Maybe it was 'years in Greece.' 'Greek years' or something like this." (6) And of course, since he claims Greece was another name for the Byzantine Empire, ipso facto Christian years become Byzantine years and England becomes the Byzantine Empire, Q.E.D. To be fair, Fomenko concedes this argument is not strong, but he bases his thesis on sound-alike names, even claiming that the continent of Asia really means "Jesus-land." Grace derives from the Latin gratia, thanks or goodwill; Greece is from the Latin Graecia, their word for the Hellenes. Jesus was several centuries too late to get naming fights to Asia, already called that in ancient Greek times.
