New Chronology

Years ago I came across this new chronology theory,

en.wikipedia.org...

The New Chronology is a fringe theory regarded by the majority of the academic community as pseudohistory, which argues that the conventional chronology of Middle Eastern and European history is fundamentally flawed, and that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854-1946),[1] although work by French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) can be viewed as an earlier predecessor.[2] However, the New Chronology is most commonly associated with Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945), although published works on the subject are actually a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians. The concept is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science? which 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.

Looks like today there is some truth to it , twice this week I find that things need to be reconsidered,



Archeologists' findings may prove Rome a century older than thought
As Italian capital approaches 2,767th birthday, excavation reveals wall built long before official founding year of 783BC
www.theguardian.com...

New timeline for origin of ancient Egypt
www.bbc.com...

The Expulsion of the Hyksos
Tel Habuwa excavations reveal the conquest of Tjaru by Ahmose I
www.biblicalarchaeology.org...

reply to post by Stormdancer777

I have been looking and waiting for something new to me to research for a few days now... It looks like this is it. It has been an exciting week or so for archeoligy. Thanks for the heads up on this OP! I look forward to learning about this theory today.

snypwsd
reply to post by Stormdancer777

 

I have been looking and waiting for something new to me to research for a few days now... It looks like this is it. It has been an exciting week or so for archeoligy. Thanks for the heads up on this OP! I look forward to learning about this theory today.

interested to hear what you find.

reply to post by Stormdancer777


Some years ago I owned a copy of David Rohl's 'A test of time'. It was also a documentary so will probably be kicking around Youtube.
In it the author identifies various biblical characters and places them in Egypt etc, I think Rohl is a clever academic that knows his stuff and is probably right about everything.
However that book became for me the best cure for insomnia. If I ever had trouble sleeping then the the first couple of chapters would send me off. Trying to juxtapose
Egyptian and biblical chronologies...also tying them in with the various dynasties and characters would fry my brain.

The New Chronology is very interesting, I had not heard of it previously, nice find. However, I'm not sure the links you have provided add to the theory itself. For instance that first link from Italy says the date of the ancient wall was earlier, not later, that the founding of Rome was older, not newer. The second link regarding Egypt, was only to round up a date that was known to be a rough estimate by a few hundred years. It would be hard pressed to characterize the fine tuning of an ancient date by such a small amount as support for the New Chronology. The third link was about the theory of the mixing of two ancient stories, one newer than the other, not really updating an older date to a newer one.

Not to rain on your parade, it's very interesting to see something I had not heard of before. But with so many recent archaeological discoveries pushing dates earlier and earlier, I had thought from the title the "New Chronology" theory would be about culture and civilization being much older than we have previously believed. The 40,000 year old Sphinx known as the Lion Man found in Germany is an example.

Looking into the New Chronology makes for some interesting reading. For instance, Anatoly Fomenko was a mathematician quoted as blaming the church for elongating the dates in history, which is ironic given that we seem to have quite the opposite effect today!

One quote of Anatoly Fomenko struck me as interesting:

And only today, using some statistical and other methods we start to discover some strange regularities inside the “history textbook” and start to realize that the real history was possibly sufficiently shorter and that today we need to remove from the “old English history” its “Byzantine part” and return this piece to its right place (in time and in the geographical sense). This procedure is very painful. We realize this because we discovered the same problem in the old Russian history, when we also found several chronological duplicates.

It seems Fomenko and his other associates who were also mathematicians were basing their theory on some kind of statistical analysis that showed that similar stories from different cultures are the really same story but with the names of the characters changed. When these "duplicates" in history are removed, the timeline is thus shortened. It's not hard to see why he might follow such line of thinking since there were others at around that time that were extolling similar ideas. Gerald Massey comes to mind with his theory that the story of Jesus was copied from the ancient story of Horus the Sun God.

Personally I don't believe any of these types of theories, but I do wonder what mathematical analysis Fomenko was using to support the New Chronology theory. There is some scientific support for history being cyclical and time repeating itself. It would certainly make for some ironic science (or science fiction) if Formenko and Massey had inadvertently stumbled on a scientific method of proving a cyclical model of time.

reply to post by Stormdancer777



Regarding one of the articles you posted a link to...

While Josephus cites Manetho’s history associating the Israelites with the Hyksos, many modern scholars see problems with Manetho’s conflation of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the Biblical narrative. Manetho lived many centuries after these events took place, and he may have combined two different narratives, wittingly or unwittingly, when associating the Hyksos and Israelites. Ahmose’s defeat of the Hyksos occurred centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus. In addition, the basic premise of the Hyksos and Exodus histories differ: the Hyksos were expelled rulers of Egypt, not slaves, and they were forced out, not pursued.

The expulsion of the Hyksos may not have been a single event, and many still read Manetho’s texts on the Hyksos expulsion as a record of the Israelites’ Exodus. After the Hyksos were defeated by Ahmose, some Hyksos people likely remained in Egypt, perhaps as a subjugated class. The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1489–1469 B.C.E.) recorded the banishment of a group of Asiatics from Avaris, the former Hyksos capital. While this second expulsion would still have been centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, there may exist parallels between these events and the Exodus narrative, or the earlier Biblical accounts of Abraham, Sarah and Lot’s own expulsion from Egypt in Genesis 12:19.

Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org...

I've got a copy of 'A History of Ancient Egypt' by Nicolas Grimal, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Paris. (It's good information, but rather dry and boring…) He writes:

"At the time of Rahotep's reign, the Hyksos king was Yaqub-Har (or Yacub-Baal), Salitis' successor. Yaqub-Har reigned for eighteen years and seals bearing his name have been found from Gaza to Kerma. He remained on good terms with the three Theban kings who succeeded Rahotep."

I'd have to say the name 'Yacub' had very clear implications that this Hyksos king was an Israelite related to the family of the Hebrew patriarch, Jacob.

I read a book a while back that spoke of this very subject. My memory of it is a little hazy, but one of the key points I remember is that some Roman cathedrals and constructions of the like were built in styles that would not be popularized until a few centuries later. Very interesting, I'll be following this thread and I'm excited to see what information will come to the light.

The two links you posted as supporting this "new chronology" theory would seem to refute the theory, not support - as they both show finds that indicate the ages of Rome and Egypt were older or earlier (by a century or so) than previously theorized. That hardly supports a theory that claims Rome or Egypt didn't get their starts until somewhere in the middle ages.

There's a term for the study of history based on the writings of historians, called "Historiography." Historiography is not necessarily "history", in that it can contain all the foibles and biases and mistakes made by the philosopher/historian/writer, like Manetho. You have to take much of what they wrote with a grain of salt, interpret it with an eye towards their biases, and correlate it with other historians/writers and with known facts.

If you create a theory based solely on the writings of writers or philosophers like Manetho, or Plato, you're bound to get some very peculiar theories, and not particularly correct theories. It's one of the reasons why Historiography is treated as a separate subject from History. What this Russian theorist behind the "New Chronology" theory did was create a theory based only on the writings of ancient and medieval philosophers.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


Yes I realize that, it just reminded me of the fact we are not sure of these timelines.

i remember a program regarding the exodus and how it seems to coincide with a volcanic eruption at Thera in Greece. From the very onset of the exodus story tells of dark clouds coming from the north and ends with the parting of the red sea which turns out to be a tsunami(water retreats far back and then comes back rushing in). I have no doubt that the chronology is wrong and i think the problem lies with the assumption that rulers are replaced straight after the old one. It may have taken years before a new ruler was put in place

It seems to me that up until fairly recently, most timelines were based upon people's interpretations of biblical data.

Even today, whenever there is a new archaeological find in the Middle East, there's a whole group of people who rush in to make sure that all new data in the find is interpreted as proof of the bibles' historical value. So the data gets interpreted to fit beliefs, rather than interpreted on its own merit.

In today's world, there are a whole lot of new theories, and almost every new theory comes with its own suggested timeline. Those timelines all seem to come with sited proof, but the proof really is subject to the author's attempt to justify his own beliefs or verify his own accepted findings.

I personally doubt if we're ever going to come up with a 'one size fits all' timeline.

Stormdancer777
reply to post by Blackmarketeer

 

Yes I realize that, it just reminded me of the fact we are not sure of these timelines.

Actually, we are.
Because Nikolai Morozov says they are wrong does not really put doubt on the facts.

Rome being 100 years older than what the story of Romulus and Remus says; so what?

The pre-dynastic (prehistoric) Egypt being 300 years more recent than previously thought? Big deal. A 5% difference. Not quite the 40% difference in (written) Roman history that Morozov claims.

The Expulsion of the Hyksos? Not sure what the point is with mentioning that. It seems to be an archeological confirmation of a story about a battle.

reply to post by Stormdancer777

ROME, ITALY—Excavations in the Lapis Niger, a black stone shrine in the Roman Forum, have uncovered ceramics, grains, and a wall made of a type of limestone known as tufa. “Examination of the recovered ceramic material has enabled us to chronologically date the wall structure to between the ninth century B.C. and the beginning of the eighth century B.C. So it precedes what is traditionally considered the foundation of Rome,” archaeologist Patrizia Fortuni of Rome’s cultural superintendency told The Telegraph.

Phage if I could find the link I have been looking for I was going to try and tie it all together but that didn't happen, meanwhile
Wall Suggests Rome Is 200 Years Older Than Previously Thought

archaeology.org...

Evidence from Tempest Stela may shift Pharaoh chronology

Article created on Wednesday, April 2, 2014


www.pasthorizonspr.com...

Altering the dates of Pharaoh Ahmose

If the stela does indeed describe the aftermath of the Thera eruption, the correct dating of the stela itself and Ahmose’s reign, currently thought to be about 1550 BC, could actually be up to 50 years earlier.

“This is important to scholars of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, generally because the chronology that archaeologists use is based on the lists of Egyptian Pharaohs, and this new information could adjust those dates,” said Moeller, assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute, who specializes in research on ancient urbanism and chronology.

In 2006, radiocarbon testing of an olive tree buried under volcanic residue placed the date of the Thera eruption at 1621-1605 BC. Until now, the archaeological evidence for the date of the Thera eruption seemed at odds with the radiocarbon dating, explained Oriental Institute postdoctoral scholar Felix Hoeflmayer, who has studied the chronological implications related to the eruption. However, if the date of Ahmose’s reign is earlier than previously believed, the resulting shift in chronology “might solve the whole problem,” Hoeflmayer said.

The revised dating of Ahmose’s reign could mean the dates of other events in the ancient Near East fit together more logically. It would realigns the dates of important events such as the fall of the power of the Canaanites and the collapse of the Babylonian Empire, said David Schloen, associate professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations on ancient cultures in the Middle East.

“This new information would provide a better understanding of the role of the environment in the development and destruction of empires in the ancient Middle East,” he said. For example, the new chronology helps to explain how Ahmose rose to power and supplanted the Canaanite rulers of Egypt—the Hyksos—according to Schloen. The Thera eruption and resulting tsunami would have destroyed the Hyksos’ ports and significantly weakened their sea power.

In addition, the disruption to trade and agriculture would have undermined the power of the Babylonian Empire and could explain why the Babylonians were unable to fend off an invasion of the Hittites, another ancient culture that flourished in what is now Turkey.

The Expulsion of the Hyksos
Tel Habuwa excavations reveal the conquest of Tjaru by Ahmose I
www.biblicalarchaeology.org... -

when associating the Hyksos and Israelites. Ahmose’s defeat of the Hyksos occurred centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus. In addition, the basic premise of the Hyksos and Exodus histories differ: the Hyksos were expelled rulers of Egypt, not slaves, and they were forced out, not pursued.

Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus is also important as a historical document, since the copyist noted that he was writing in year 33 of the reign of Apophis, the penultimate king of the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty (about 1650-1550 BC) and was copied after an original of the Twelfth Dynasty (about 1985-1795 BC).

On the other side of the papyrus 'year 11' is mentioned, with a reference to the taking of some Egyptian towns. This probably refers to the fighting between the Egyptians and the Hyksos before the beginning of the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC). However, it is not certain to which king 'year 11' refers.

The papyrus was acquired by the Scottish lawyer A.H. Rhind during his stay in Thebes in the 1850s.

reply to post by Stormdancer777


Hi stormdancer,
Have you read Mike Baillies "Exodus to Arthur"?
If you haven't and aren't familiar with Baillie's work, he is a dendochronologist, tree ring dating expert. He and other researchers have built a very robust climate chronology.
Their work and the work of several independent groups, working on various Greenland ice cores, have pinned down the date window for the eruption of thera and the exodus to 1628bc + or - 20 years.
One thing I learned from his book, is that Egyptian chronology isn't as robust as lay persons assume. The farther back you go the more ephermal the dating is,
Since there were no immediately adjacent cultures who kept as good a record that the AE did, there are no independent accounts to verify AE records.

reply to post by punkinworks10


No I haven't read his book but have been paying attention to the tree ring data, although not recently, need to check back with that.

Stormdancer777
reply to post by punkinworks10

 

No I haven't read his book but have been paying attention to the tree ring data, although not recently, need to check back with that.

I highly reccomend it, and there is new corroborating evidence supporting the AD 530s events(Arthur).

archaeology.about.com...] punkinworks10

Stormdancer777
reply to post by punkinworks10

 

No I haven't read his book but have been paying attention to the tree ring data, although not recently, need to check back with that.

I highly reccomend it, and there is new corroborating evidence supporting the AD 530s events(Arthur).


I will check that out, I remember now, the tree ring can signify events like volcanic eruption and weather patterns, looking into ice cores too, been a while since I played around with this.

punkinworks10
reply to post by Stormdancer777

 

Hi stormdancer,
Have you read Mike Baillies "Exodus to Arthur"?
If you haven't and aren't familiar with Baillie's work, he is a dendochronologist, tree ring dating expert. He and other researchers have built a very robust climate chronology.
Their work and the work of several independent groups, working on various Greenland ice cores, have pinned down the date window for the eruption of thera and the exodus to 1628bc + or - 20 years.

That's only a corroboration of a previously known date.
Link

Harte