Is history totally fake?

Mouthwash

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Must be, a scholar says so!

Highlights of the "New Chronology:"
1. Historians and translators "assign" different dates and locations to different accounts of the same historical events, creating multiple "phantom copies" of these events. These "phantom copies" are often misdated by centuries or even millennia and end up incorporated into conventional chronology.

2. This chronology was largely manufactured by Joseph Justus Scaliger in Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360. The Jesuit Dionysius Petavius completed this chronology in De Doctrina Temporum, 1627 (v.1) and 1632 (v.2).

3. Archaeological dating, dendrochronological dating, paleographical dating, numismatic dating, carbon dating, and other methods of dating of ancient sources and artifacts known today are erroneous, non-exact or dependent on traditional chronology.

4. No single document in existence can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century. Most "ancient" artifacts may find other than consensual explanation.

5. Histories of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during the Renaissance by humanists and clergy - mostly on the basis of documents of their own making.

6. The Old Testament represents a rendition of events of the 14th to 16th centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, containing "prophecies" about "future" events related in the New Testament, a rendition of events of AD 1152 to 1185.

7. The history of religions runs as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the 11th century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (11th-12th century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (12th-16th century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.

8. The most probable prototype of historical Jesus was a Byzantine emperor, Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in "biographies" of many real and imaginary persons.[16]

9. The Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy, traditionally dated to around AD 150 and considered the cornerstone of classical history, was compiled in 16th and 17th centuries from astronomical data of the 9th to 16th centuries.

10. 37 complete Egyptian horoscopes found in Denderah, Esna, and other temples have unique valid astronomical solutions with dates ranging from AD 1000 and up to as late as AD 1700.

11. The Book of Revelation, as we know it, contains a horoscope, dated to 25 September - 10 October 1486, compiled by cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin.

12. The horoscopes found in Sumerian/Babylonian tablets do not contain sufficient astronomical data; consequently, they have solutions every 30–50 years on the time axis and are therefore useless for purposes of dating.

13. The Chinese tables of eclipses are useless for dating, as they contain too many eclipses that did not take place astronomically. Chinese tables of comets, even if true, cannot be used for dating.

14. All major inventions like powder and guns, paper and print occurred in Europe in the period between the 10th and the 16th centuries.

15. Ancient Roman and Greek statues, showing perfect command of the human anatomy, are fakes crafted in the Renaissance, when artists attained such command for the first time.

16. There was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by over two centuries of yoke and slavery, because the so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Turkic spoken as freely as Russian. So, Russia and Turkey once formed parts of the same empire. This ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities and the hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). The Mongol "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions of the empire that attempted tax evasion. Tamerlane was probably a Russian warlord.

17. Official Russian history is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scholars brought to Russia to legitimize the usurping Romanov dynasty (1613-1917).

18. Moscow was founded as late as the mid-14th century. The battle of Kulikovo took place in Moscow.

19. The tsar Ivan the Terrible represents a collation of no fewer than four rulers, representing two rival dynasties: the legitimate Godunov rulers and the ambitious Romanov upstarts.

20. English history of AD 640–1040 and Byzantine history of AD 378–830 are reflections of the same late-medieval original.
 
Seems arbitrary, or if true only in a small circle (eg your article's mentioned Jewish reading of history, OT/Kabalistic etc).

FWIW the Byzantine histories and encyclopedias (eg the Suida, or the one by Patriarch Photios) predate the 11th century, and i haven't read any claim that they are manipulated.

edit: then again, there is VALIS.

Spoiler :

According to which we are still run by the Roman Empire.
 
4. No single document in existence can be reliably dated earlier than the 11th century. Most "ancient" artifacts may find other than consensual explanation.

Out of a list of tripe that one strikes me as particular egregious. Even excluding inscriptions on stone, there are plenty of Egyptian papyri, wax tablets from Hadrian's Wall and other places, clay tablets from Greece and the Near East, ostraka from Classical Greece, and so on. Perhaps some of these things can't be dated entirely from internal evidence, but you can date them when you dig them up by the law of stratigraphy, amongst other things.

EDIT: On closer reading, the rest is so ridiculous that I feel silly for even dignifying that with an answer.
 
I think this sums it about up:

a fringe theory regarded by the majority of the academic community as pseudohistory

So not history, but this interpretation of history appears to be fake.
 
ITT: Mouthwash struggles with the revelation that history is not objective.

Also some Assassin's Creed-level conspiracy theory bull[feces]
 
Totally fake? No. An accurate reflection of what 'really' happened? Probably not. As the saying goes, history is written by the winners.

More to the point...pick any current conflict in progress. We have world spanning communications capabilities, and visual and audio recording equipment beyond the wildest dreams of historians from the last century, much less prior millennia. And even with all of that who can say what's actually happening in the Ukraine conflict? What started the Iraq war? Who's at fault in Palestine? What caused the financial crisis of 2008? If we can't answer those questions, how much stock should we really put in a papyrus?
 
People usually post here about how ridiculous Fomenko's theories are once in two years or so. Well, what can anyone else say? They're indeed ridiculous.

They are believed by some people in Russia. Fomenko believers usually consider themselves to be contrarian, edgy, independent thinkers.
 
Totally fake? No. An accurate reflection of what 'really' happened? Probably not. As the saying goes, history is written by the winners.

No, history is written by those who write history. Sometimes that coincides with the "winners", sometimes it does not.
 
I like the idea that Europe is literally all of history. We can't have any Asiatics conquering Russia, no, that's impossible, Russia is too stronk. They were actually Russians! Conundrum solved!
 
No, history is written by those who write history. Sometimes that coincides with the "winners", sometimes it does not.

Winners or not, it's still written by people who have no great likelihood of actually knowing what's going on, much less what went on.
 
I prefer "history is written by the survivors". That often means that the winners write it, but quite often, the reverse also can happen.
 
Even that doesn't happen - for sure, not many people who don't survive write history books, but they still leave sources. If you want to know what the First World War was like, you could do worse than reading Wilfred Owen.
 
I think it is more accurate to say, everyone leaves behind a history, but the history that people accept is the history they can live with and that generally varies with geographic location/political boundaries.
 
To resume it so people not knowing about the topic get advised: that Fomenko basically does is to negate any history no related to Russia claiming it never existed, erasing any historical age previous to Russia and claiming that any relevant piece of history from Roman Empire, Jesuchrist or Mongols were Russian, happened in Russia or was somehow Russian related, moving them in time or space so it can be "russified".

So it is some sort of totally disparated russian crazy nationalist chronology which seems to sell well there. Wiki article says it all:

Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scholars, who brand them as pseudoscience.[38] Russian critics tended to see Fomenko's New Chronology as "an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk ... since the fall of Communism".[39] Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia".
 
Also some Assassin's Creed-level conspiracy theory bull[feces]

Honestly, Fromenko makes Assassin's Creed look like respectable scholarship.
 
One question - why?? What possible goal is served by conflating Jesus, the Roman Empire and the fall of Byzantium all into a space of 400 or so years, let alone all the other guff about how history was invented in the 15th Century?
 
It allows you to feel yourself an independent and edgy thinker that laughs at that so-called "historical tradition" of pompous fat academics who think they know everything.

Plus Russian nationalism, although I know some Russian nationalists who are not sympathetic towards Fomenko's theories at all.
 
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