i : The \ Lost \

Millennium

History's Timetables under Siege

SECOND EDITION

Florin Diacu

The Lost Millennium

Florin Diacu

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE

Copyright © 2005, 2012 Florin Diacu Published by arrangement with Knopf Canada, an imprint of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 24689 75 3 2

The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diacu, Florin, 1959- The lost millennium : history’s timetables under siege / Florin Diacu. — 2nd ed. p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0287-1 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0288-8 (pbk.)

ISBN-1O: I-4214-0287-4 (hardback) ISBN-10: I-42.14-0288-2 (pbk.) x1. Chronology, Historical. 2. Calendar—History. I. Title. DII.§.D53 2011 902'.02—dc23. 2011016270

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To my son, Raz,

and to his love for history

People believe in the truth of all that seems to be strongly believed in.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

We should try to love the questions themselves, » like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Contents

SRSA Soe AN

Introduction. Where Did the Time Go? 1

PART ONE

The Challenges of Historical Chronology CHAPTER 1 Catastrophes and Chaos 17

CHAPTER 2 A New Science 33

CHAPTER 3

Swan Song 53

PART TWO Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

CHAPTER 4 Historical Eclipses 77

CHAPTER 5 The Moon and the Almagest 95

CHAPTER 6 Ancient Kingdoms 115

CHAPTER 7 Overlapping Dynasties 129

CHAPTER 8 Secrets and Lies 147

PART THREE

Science Fights Back

CHAPTER 9 Scientific Dating 169

CHAPTER 10 Finding a Consensus 186

Afterword 205

Notes 207 References 221 Index 231

viii Contents

The Lost Millennium

Introduction

Where Did the Time Go?

RA sesame

Those whose chronology is confused cannot give a true account of history.

TATIAN

exicans call Cuernavaca “the city of eternal spring.” In the Tepozteco Valley, where the city rests, the mornings are clear, the afternoons turn hazy, and the evenings are blessed with a tropical rain.

I spent a week in September 1994 a few miles from the city, in the hacienda-style resort of Cocoyoc. The place would have resembled the Garden of Eden, were it not for Popocatépetl, which—though too far away to pose an imminent threat—loomed in the distance, rings of smoke hang- ing above its icy cone. A conference there had brought together mathe- maticians from three continents. All week we had listened to lectures, solved problems, discussed ideas, and learned new techniques to keep up with the developments in our field.

On the last day of the conference I was having lunch with fellow mathematicians Tudor Ratiu and Ernesto Pérez-Chavela. Like me, Tudor had been born and raised in Romania. Nine years my senior, he now taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Ernesto, a young professor at the Universidad Auténoma Metropolitana—Iztapalapa in Mexico City, was a co-organizer of the Cocoyoc meeting.

During lunch, Ernesto told us the story of Cocoyoc. In the local di- alect cocoyoc means “coyote,” an animal often seen in the area centuries ago. The resort, endowed with swimming pools, tennis courts, and a golf

course, had once been a hacienda and apparently had been founded al- most five centuries ago by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. Ernesto’s account of Cocoyoc’s origin sounded like a legend. It might have been true, but it made us wonder about how much fiction finds its way into history books.

“It’s a fascinating subject,” Tudor said. “It reminds me of a Russian colleague, Anatoli Fomenko, who thinks that a lot of the ‘historical rec- ord’ is fiction. So he’s researching history with mathematical tools.”

Ernesto looked surprised and I must have, too, for Tudor asked if we knew about Fomenko. We hadn’t heard of him before, but the idea of applying mathematics to the study of history seemed interesting enough. My knowledge of such applications didn’t go beyond understanding the simple differential equation that explains carbon dating.

“He’s from the University of Moscow,” Tudor explained, “and is quite active in several fields of mathematics. Something of a polymath. I met him in Berkeley a few years ago. His work in chronology has convinced him that the Middle Ages never happened. Apparently the authorities who fixed the dates misinterpreted the ancient documents, and their mistakes

‘have been perpetuated ever since. Fomenko believes that the history of humankind is about a thousand years shorter than we think.”

“He can’t be serious,” J said.

History has been an interest of mine since I was eleven. In my early teenage years I wanted to become an archaeologist, to discover and explore ancient ruins and unravel the mystery of lost kingdoms. I was fascinated with the idea of digging in the earth and finding traces of dead civilizations. The curiosity I felt for antiquity was fueled by the books I had read about Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Hittites of Asia Minor, the Hebrew and the Minoan-Mycenian civilizations, early India, China and Eurasia, the As- syrian Empire, Dacia, Thrace, and the Greek and Roman worlds.

But my gift for the exact sciences and success in mathematics competi- tions steered me in a different direction. Nevertheless, my interest in antiq- uity survived, and I kept up my reading in ancient history, watched docu- mentaries, and continued to learn new things about the distant past of humankind. So, not surprisingly, my first reaction to Fomenko’s claim was total disbelief.

“He’s very serious,” Tudor said, “but don’t ask me why. If I remember well, it’s not only the Middle Ages. He thinks that several shorter periods,

2 The Lost Millennium

which add up to a thousand years, have been created by mistake in the dating process.”

“A millennium that lost its way in i Ernesto replied.

“Something like that.”

“Has he published anything about this?” I asked.

“Plenty. I got a paper from him last week, a day or two before leaving Santa Cruz.”

“What about?” I replied.

“It’s an examination of ancient and medieval dynasties. He argues that many of them overlap instead of being successive.”

“That’s hard to believe,” I said. “Real historians must have thought about those things.”

“I’d give him the benefit of the doubt,” Ernesto said. “Think of Ein- stein or Newton or Darwin. They were unknown in their fields once, but they proved everyone wrong. That’s how scientific revolutions happen.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “I have no experience with chronology. Still, this sounds incredible.” Then, turning to Tudor, I asked, “Is Fomenko trustworthy?”

“J: don’t know him well, but he’s a brilliant mathematician. He has written a dozen books and more than a hundred papers—excellent, as far as my field is concerned. I’ve also heard that he’s just been elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. It’s a highly respected institution.”

Tudor and I had spent hours talking together that week in Cocoyoc, and I got the chance to know him better. I was already familiar with his work. He’s a skilled mathematician, and I trusted his judgment. If he didn’t dismiss Fomenko’s claims from the outset, it meant I had to keep an open mind. But I would have liked to see the arguments.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Is he right?”

“He’s not bluffing, but I have no idea if he’s right. Other people must agree with him, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to publish this stuff in serious journals.”

“Has he written any books on chronology?” Ernesto asked.

“Yes, in Russian. But—if I remember correctly—an English transla- tion is either about to come out or is in print already.”

I made a mental note to track it down once I returned home.

“From what I remember of the history I learned in school,” Ernesto said, “the Middle Ages are not too well documented.”

Introduction 3

“This is definitely true for the history of Romania,” I said. “The Ro- mans conquered Dacia in AD 106, then mixed with the Dacians and imposed their language and culture. But in 271 they withdrew their le- gions, moving them south of the Danube, which was a good shield against barbarian attacks. From then until the twelfth century, we know only about the kings Gelu, Glad, and Menumorut, who reigned over some parts of Transylvania and whom the Hungarian rulers fought when invad- ing the region. But aside from these details, more than eight hundred years of Romanian history are unaccounted for.”

“What do the historians say?” Ernesto said.

“Tt depends on who you ask. Romanians claim it took a thousand years of mixing between the Slavic invaders and the local Dacian-Roman people before the Romanian nation was born. Hungarians argue that nobody lived there.”

“There is no forest without beasts,” Ernesto said. “Why would people stay away from fertile land? Somebody must have been there. But where are the signs of their occupation?”

Ernesto was right. Such a gap didn’t make sense. The people who lived in Transylvania were civilized enough to leave traces. Why hadn’t Ithought of that? Perhaps because, like everyone else, I had learned those things in childhood and never doubted my teachers. I reflected for a moment on how hard it is to break free from the “truths” acquired at an early age.

“Fomenko’s theory might explain this information gap, and perhaps more,” Tudor said. “One thing I always found hard to accept is that there was no progress in the Middle Ages for almost a thousand years. To me, this contradicts the questing of the human spirit. Can you believe that nobody wrote books, created art, or developed science in Europe from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance?

“J read once about a star catalog attributed to Ptolemy of Alexan- dria,” Ernesto said. “The trouble is, the sky configuration recorded there appeared only a thousand years after him.”

“So, another point for Fomenko,” I said. “But let’s think of arguments against him. What about carbon dating?”

“J think it can give large errors,” Tudor said. “Moreover, it was cali- brated to fit what historians believe is correct data.”

“What about the Shroud of Turin?” I said. “Three independent tests

4 The Lost Millennium

placed it in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Those experts can’t be all wrong.”

“T think those tests are fine,” Tudor said. “The method seems to be unsuitable for much older objects. But again, I don’t speak as an expert.”

“So for the period we’re interested in,” I said, “we could rely on carbon dating. This would be an argument against Fomenko.”

“Not necessarily,” Ernesto replied. “What if the Shroud still belonged to Jesus, and he was born less than a thousand years ago?”

“But there must be other objects that were dated correctly,” I said. “Tt’s just that they don’t make the news.”

“That’s probably true,” Ernesto said. “In fact, I’m thinking of another argument against Fomenko: the time span between the introduction of the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. Since, in the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar by deleting the ten days that had accumulated because of the mismatch between the astronomical and the calendrical year, we can date the Roman period pretty accurately.”

“Only if you assume that Pope Gregory’s astronomers were correct,” Tudor said. “Fomenko thinks they were not. The problems of chronology are far from easy. Perhaps only a multidisciplinary group can understand them. We’ve mentioned astronomy, carbon dating, and calendars, and I’m sure other disciplines can get involved. Linguistics might be a candidate. By comparing, say, Dutch and German—looking at how much the vocab- ulary has changed, for example—you can tell when these languages began to split.”

We continued to chat about chronology, but none of us was an expert in any of the subjects related to it. The best we could do was to ask questions that came to mind and guess the answers. Still, we knew we could be wrong. Science and mathematics have so many examples of intuitive “truths” that are later shown to be false. Earth’s “flatness” is a typical “truth” of earlier times.

Our discussion ended with that lunch. We went to the last talks of the conference, and our minds turned back to mathematics. But the idea of a lost millennium made a strong impression on me. I stored every detail of our chat in my memory. For my two friends, our conversation had been small talk: years later, Tudor would remember it vaguely and Ernesto not at all. They never took the issue very seriously.

Introduction 5

Back home in Canada, I tried to find Fomenko’s book. I had only two easy choices: the University of Victoria’s library and the campus book- store, and neither had it on their shelves. Years later, I learned that while I was making my first attempt to find that book, the English edition was published.!

In 1994, disappointed with my search after discovering that Fomen- ko’s papers were written in Russian—a language I wish I knew more about—and swept up with my academic duties, I postponed my attempts to find an English translation. I focused on my research in celestial me- chanics, wrote a book about chaos theory, secured tenure, and got pro- moted. I enjoyed my work and knew I should not allow myself to be distracted from it.

Time passed. In 2000 I became a full professor. From then on I could diversify my research interests without worrying about my list of publica- tions. Chronology again came intermittently to mind. Then, on September 16, six years after hearing Tudor talk about Fomenko’s theory, I found a copy of Saturday Night magazine in the morning newspaper. As I leafed through its pages, the picture of a middle-aged man standing in an eleva- tor caught my attention. He had a large forehead and an unkempt beard, was dressed in a dark shirt and a pair of jeans held up by suspenders, and had two books in his hand. Thoughtful, unconcerned with his appear- ance, he looked like a typical North American professor. Then I read the article’s title, “Time Warp,” and the first sentence: “You might think it’s the year 2000, but a group of prominent Russian mathematicians is argu- ing that history is all wrong, and it’s actually AD 936.”2

Breakfast had to wait until I finished reading the article. Timothy Taylor, its author, had clearly done his homework. The biggest surprise, however, was the man in the picture: Wieslaw Krawcewicz, a mathematics professor at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, with whom I served as an editor of a high school magazine sponsored by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). Only a few months before, I had participated in a meeting of the PIMS board and executive committee, which approved the funding for Pi in the Sky—as we decided to call the new publication. Wieslaw and I had corresponded for some time, but we had not yet met.

Krawcewicz was at the center of the controversy discussed in the article. He had invited a Russian mathematician, Gleb Nosovski, to his

6 The Lost Millennium

university to give a talk about chronology. Nosovski, who worked as a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Computer Methods in Natural and Human Sciences at the University of Moscow, had been a long-time col- laborator of Anatoli Fomenko. When Timothy Taylor—who lived in Van- couver—learned about this event, he went to Edmonton to attend it. He found a room packed with faculty and students, as well as many members of the public. .

Though he was busy taking notes and trying to understand Nosov- ski’s English, Taylor noticed that various listeners reacted in different ways. The man in a tweed jacket sitting in front of him was growing restless, shaking his head from time to time, obviously irritated with No- sovski’s claims, while Krawcewicz, who sat at the end of the front row, was surveying the audience, obviously enjoying what he saw.

In the first part of his talk, Nosovski criticized the traditional chronol- ogy founded by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars. Joseph Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius. He offered astronomical explanations for why the Peloponnesian War between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta couldn’t have taken place in the fifth century BC but, rather, must have occurred in the eleventh or twelfth century AD; and why the eclipse described in Livy’s history of Rome must have happened in the tenth cen- tury AD instead of the second century BC. He compared the dynasties of kings considered to have lived more than a millennium apart and outlined statistical arguments for why many of them had to be duplications. He mentioned a book in which Isaac Newton claimed that the chronology of ancient Greece was too long by about three centuries. He also analyzed several Egyptian horoscopes and concluded that they showed configura- tions of the sky that appeared much later than the dates attributed to them.

In the second part of his talk, Nosovski presented a new chronology in which the succession of the main historical dates agreed with his mathe- matical evidence. He placed most ancient events between seven to ten centuries closer to our time than tradition did, but he admitted that this new system was still under construction.

Some people in the audience grew impatient. The man sitting in front of Taylor was described in the article as being visibly agitated. Another listener tried to interrupt the speaker a couple of times.

Nosovski closed his talk with a slide that revealed the iets of his computations regarding Jesus’s year of birth. One man in the audience

Introduction 7

said this couldn’t possibly be true, but the applause at the lecture’s end silenced him. While some listeners raised their hands to ask questions and ° others used the break to leave the room, Taylor noticed how deeply di- vided the audience had grown.

For him, this lecture was just the beginning. Like any good journalist, Taylor didn’t content himself with only one point of view. He needed to hear what historians had to say. Christopher Mackay, an associate pro- fessor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, agreed to speak with him. Mackay held a degree from Harvard in classical philology, and he was an expert on Greek and Latin literature, Roman history and law, and Latin epigraphy (the science that deals with deciphering and interpreting inscriptions). In his third-year course on early Roman history, he taught a section about the chronology of Rome.

Mackay considered the claim about Jesus to be absurd. In his opinion it would mean that the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea preceded the birth of Jesus by about six centuries. This gathering, which had taken place in the ancient town of Nicaea (now Iznik, in northwestern Turkey), is best known for having established the earliest dogmatic statement of the early Christian church. The Roman emperor Constantine the Great con- vened the council in AD 325 in an attempt to settle the controversy raised by Arianism over the nature of the Christian Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The council formalized the Nicaean Creed, according to which God the Father and God the Son are eternal, and declared heretic the Arian belief in a Christ inferior to the Father. Arius, the Christian leader who had spread the belief in a lesser Christ, was excommunicated. The council also imposed a code of ethics, discipline, status, and jurisdiction for the clergy and established the dates for Easter.

In Mackay’s reasoning, the Russian mathematician used certain frag- ments of information, among them the fact that Jesus died when he was thirty-one years old, that the resurrection took place on March 25 (which was a Sunday), that Passover—an annual Jewish holiday in memory of the Hebrew slaves’ escape from Egypt—fell on March 24, and that the Easter dates are calculated using an old church text called the Easter Book. Mackay said the dates and the Easter Book were medieval additions, and therefore unreliable. Since Nosovski’s calculations were not based on the Bible, they did not have the value of proof.

8 The Lost Millennium

Then Taylor asked about Isaac Newton. Just before his death in 1727, the English scientist had completed a book entitled The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, which was published a year later. Newton had been interested in history and chronology since his student years, as his unpublished manuscripts show, and always felt that historical chronology ‘was flawed—particularly in relation to the history of Greece. His main argument rested on the incorrect dating of the Argonautic Expedition.

Mackay dismissed Newton’s work in this area as he had Nosovski’s, explaining that scientists in Newton’s time had no knowledge of the an- cient Egyptian, Babylonian, or Sumerian languages. He said Newton’s conclusion was as absurd as Euclid’s interpretation of Einstein would be. This analogy had some force, but it didn’t convince me.

If Newton were not to be trusted because of his era, why would his near contemporaries have more credibility? As perhaps the most respected of all scientists, Newton couldn’t be dismissed in a sentence. I knew I had to read his book carefully and find out what other people thought about it, for I couldn’t imagine that it had passed unnoticed for almost three centuries.

Taylor also mentioned the work of the Russian polymath Nicolai Morozov, who, between 1924 and 1932, had published a seven-volume work entitled Christ: The History of Human Culture from the Standpoint of Natural Sciences, in which he examined chronology using mathemati- cal, astronomical, linguistic, philological, and geological arguments. He was the first to suspect that ancient history, as we know it, is about a millennium too long. In his Edmonton talk, Nosovski had often referred to Morozov.

But Mackay was not impressed with Morozov, either. He told Taylor that Steven Hijmans, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta, had found some data irregularities in Morozov’s work, at least as Krawcewicz had presented them in one of his papers on chronology. Besides, Mackay raised doubts about Morozov’s character, claiming that the Russian had been a rich kid, a thug, and possibly a Bolshevik, because he survived under Stalin until 1946. If his character was that flawed, could his conclu- sions be trusted?

I was surprised to hear this argument coming from someone who studies people in the context of their society. Mackay seemed to know little about the Soviet Union. As one who had lived for three decades in a similar society, I saw how those who confronted the authorities perished.

Introduction 9

Still, its totalitarian regime had not stopped the Soviet Union from making developments in the areas of science and technology. Many top research- ers were members of the Communist Party, yet this didn’t mean they believed in Communism. Dismissing Morozov as a rich kid, a thug, and possibly a Bolshevik was unconvincing. Morozov’s work was another subject I had to look into.

Taylor also wanted to hear Mackay’s opinion on the chronology. of Egypt. Nosovski had mentioned that some horoscopes found in tombs showed configurations of the sky that appeared more than a millennium after the pharaohs’ deaths. To this, Mackay answered that he preferred to stick with the Egyptologists, dismissing the possibility that a single horo- scope could contradict two centuries of research.

This response didn’t satisfy me, either. Invoking an authority is not a proof. I would have preferred to learn from Mackay whether those horo- scopes might be just artwork containing fictional planetary configura- tions. But Mackay brought forth some interesting arguments against the new dating of the Peloponnesian War to the eleventh or twelfth century AD and of Livy’s eclipse to the tenth century AD. His objection was not the shift of events in time, but the reversing of their order, which put the effect in front of the cause.

To explain this, Mackay started with the Battle of Pydna (168 BC) between Macedonia and Rome, named after a town near the shore of Thessaloniki’s gulf. Traditional chronology claims that the Peloponnesian War preceded the Battle of Pydna by more than two and a half centuries. Mackay objected not that Nosovski had put the battle a millennium later, but that he had placed it after the Peloponnesian War.

During that time, mainland Greece and western Asia Minor were the heartland of the Greek world. Eighty years after the war’s end, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, Greeks spread throughout the Near East, and three major Greek monarchies were established: the Seleu- cid, the Antigonid and the Ptolemaic. The Antigonid dynasty was brought to an end after a defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Pydna. That Roman victory assumes the existence of Alexander the Great. Without him, there would have been no Antigonid dynasty and no Battle of Pydna.

Of course, Taylor still had other interviews to conduct. He approached Krawcewicz, who proved to be on Nosovski’s side. In one of his papers, Krawcewicz had characterized the dating techniques used by historians

10 The Lost Millennium

and archaeologists—including the radiocarbon method—as “highly sub- jective and based on presumptive evidence.” Since these methods were a key factor for invalidating the Russians’ objections to traditional chronol- ogy, I had to learn more about them and form my own opinion on how precise they might be.

Taylor consulted two other mathematicians, Jacques Carriere and Jack Macki, both from the University of Alberta, as well as the astron- omer Roger Sinnott, who was an editor of Sky and Telescope magazine. Macki and Carriere agreed that Nosovski’s and Fomenko’s mathematics was sound, though they found it difficult to use for drawing drastic con- clusions about chronology. Sinnott also doubted the Russians’ historical interpretations, but he confirmed the correctness of the astronomical data they had employed.

One colorful presence in Taylor’s article was former world chess cham- pion Garry Kasparov, whose games against IBM’s Deep Blue supercompu- ter in the 1990s had made headlines all over the world. Though neither a research mathematician nor a professional historian, Kasparov counted ancient history among his hobbies. Taylor had a chance to interview Kas- parov and learn what the chess grand master thought about chronology.

Kasparov had met Fomenko a few years earlier and fully agreed with the Russian mathematician, whose conclusions removed many of his own concerns. Kasparov has an excellent memory, one trained to recognize patterns, and he had discovered a number of absurdities that historians couldn’t explain. His main problem period was the relatively blank era of the Dark Ages—an issue Tudor had also raised during our discussion in Cocoyoc. Kasparov could not accept the commonly held belief that, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, art and science had died and had then taken a thousand years to recover. For instance, it seemed illogi- cal that the many Roman citizens who moved to Constantinople had left all the scientific knowledge of Rome behind. How could the principles of mapping and the science of ballistics vanish, when anything that has mili- tary significance is protected and encouraged by any state, no matter who the leader is?

“Time Warp” was an objective and well-written article. Timothy Tay- lor had collected the opinions of several specialists from various fields and had done his best to make this interesting and controversial issue accessi- ble to the public. In the spring of 2002 I met him at the University of

Introduction 11

Victoria, where he read from his highly successful first novel, Staley Park. Talking to him after the reading, I learned that “Time Warp” had won a National Magazine Award.

My own experience as a researcher, however, made me understand that the only well-considered point of view presented there was that of Fomenko, Nosovski, and Krawcewicz. None of the others who were inter- viewed——though they had degrees in history, mathematics, or astronomy —had read the work of the Russians, let alone researched it. A talk has only informal value; it provides no insight into the arguments accumu- lated after years or decades of work. Only an expert who has spent weeks or months trying to understand the facts can form an opinion on whether claims are true or false. And no such opinion appeared in Taylor’s article.

But “Time Warp” revived my interest in chronology. It made me ask new questions and develop a research plan. That same day I started search- ing library and Internet resources, looked for Fomenko’s works, tried to find books that explained how traditional chronology came into being, and sent an email to Wieslaw Krawcewicz asking for more details. The seed sown six years earlier had finally sprouted.

The soil had been fertilized not only by my interest in antiquity but also by my teenage experience. While growing up in Romania, I had witnessed how Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime rewrote history. Convenient aspects were emphasized, inconvenient details omitted, and the past kept changing. This had made me reflect on the fragility of history, on how ideology and power can distort the truth. How far could this go? Though I doubted it had affected ancient chronology, I had to investigate.

I planned to do this work without neglecting my mathematics re- search and teaching. Chronology would just become part of my “history hobby,” nothing more. In the next few years I read the literature; got in touch with Nosovski, Fomenko, and Kasparov; talked to various astron- omers, archaeologists, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians; and had discussions with several historians who specialize in chronology, trying to grasp the many points of view in the field.

This fascinating experience led me in unexpected directions. I had to understand how Scaliger and Petavius thought, what Newton’s main ob- jections were, who Morozov was and why he took the risks he did, how the radiocarbon method works and whether it’s reliable enough for the purposes of ancient and medieval chronology, how far we can base our

12 The Lost Millennium

conclusions on astronomical computations and recorded data, and why statistics matters in historical research. When I started, it had never oc- curred to me that I would learn about so many achievements in such a multitude of human activities.

In September 2002 I received a visit from Donald Saari, a colleague and friend from the University of California at Irvine. Don is not only a renowned mathematician and economist but also a man with a wide cul- tural perspective. We had dinner together, and I told him what I had learned about chronology. After listening for half an hour, he said: “This sounds like a detective story. Share it with people, write a book about it.”

The idea didn’t appeal to me at first. I wanted to continue my adven- ture, not simply recount it. But Don’s suggestion stuck with me. Putting my conclusions on paper would help me focus my research and give me a better understanding of the facts. Soon I found myself outlining the chap- ters, and one day I started to write.

This book describes my journey in the field of historical chronology. The people who appear in the following pages—whom I met in person, over the phone or through their writing—belong to multiple cultures and gen- erations, speak different languages, and have varying backgrounds, re- search methods, and ways of attacking problems. They often disagree about the interpretation of historical documents, but all of them strive toward a common goal: to explain the distant past of humankind.

Perhaps Don was right; the issues treated here and the questions they pose might make the following pages read like a detective story. But be- yond mystery, this subject draws attention to itself because of the debate and the excitement it stirs. These ingredients have stimulated my curiosity and have pushed me further and further in search of the truth.

I hope you’ll enjoy this adventure as much as I did.

Introduction 13

CHAPTER1

Catastrophes and Chaos

secnurausnesnansnisisss ponent

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact it endeavours to establish.

DAVID HUME

n January 1950, Harper’s Magazine published an article that gen-

I erated an immediate storm of controversy. “The Day the Sun Stood Still,” by Eric Larrabee, marked the beginning of an unusual dispute. The article outlined the ideas of a fifty-four-year-old Russian physician, Im- manuel Velikovsky, who maintained that “the experts” had gotten the histories of ancient Israel and Egypt all wrong. He set out to prove it in two new books: Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos.

No reformer of chronology ever had such an impact on public opin- ion as Velikovsky. The Russian doctor captured the media’s attention for months, leading to debates that often turned nasty. This polarized attitude confused most observers. Fed up with the insults exchanged on TV or in the press, they wanted the answer to only one question: Is Velikovsky’s theory true?

Worlds in Collision

As a student, Velikovsky had excelled in languages and mathematics, graduating from high school with a gold medal—the equivalent of an A+ in all subjects. Receiving his degree from the University of Moscow in 1921, Velikovsky moved to Berlin to edit the scholarly journal Scripta

17

Universitatis, for which Albert Einstein took charge of the physics/math- ematics volume. After 1924, Velikovsky successively practiced general medicine in Jerusalem and psychoanalysis in Haifa and Tel Aviv. The outbreak of the Second World War found him in New York, where he began writing a book about Sigmund Freud.

In April 1940, while reading Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Veli- kovsky was struck by the question, Is it possible that the Exodus of the Israelites described in the Bible appears in Egyptian records, too?? An enormous dislocation of people had taken place during calamitous events: Mount Sinai had erupted, a “pillar of cloud and fire” had appeared in the sky, the plague had broken out, and a land passage had appeared mirac- ulously to part the Red Sea. If such a chronicle existed—and there were good reasons to think it did—Velikovsky might be able to link the histo- ries of Israel and Egypt and synchronize their chronologies.

He found the answer in an obscure papyrus stored at the Leiden Museum in the Netherlands. Discovered in the early nineteenth century, translated in 1909 by the British Egyptologist Sir Alan Henderson Gar- diner,? and dated to the end of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, this document recorded the lamentations of the sage Ipuwer, who chronicled the escape of slaves from Egypt during a period of chaos and upheaval.

This discovery started Velikovsky on a path of research and writing that would keep him busy all his life. Nine years later he submitted two manuscripts for publication, Ages in Chaos and Worlds in Collision. The first book, dealing with chronology and culture, attempted to prove that Egypt’s history was about five centuries ‘shorter than historians thought. In effect, Velikovsky maintained that Egyptian history was no older than the Hebraic. The second text was a documented description of a possible cataclysm related to the Exodus, After more than a dozen publishers had rejected both works, the venerable house of Macmillan in New York made Velikovsky an offer.

Macmillan decided that Worlds in Collision would appear first, though it had been written second. There were good reasons for this reversal: in the absence of a catastrophe simultaneously witnessed in Egypt and in the Mid- dle East, Ages in Chaos would have lacked any foundation.

Worlds in Collision described a scenario Velikovsky had imagined one afternoon in October 1940 while thinking about the Old Testament. He recalled how, fifty-two years after the Exodus, “the Lord cast down

18 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

great stones” (Joshua 10:11), then “the Sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day” (Joshua 10:13).

The image of an unmoving Sun made a strong impression on Velikov- sky, as it would make on his readers. He asked himself if this story could have any connection with the events that had taken place half a century earlier. A survey of other written sources from around the globe convinced him that a cosmic cataclysm, in which the planet Venus played a crucial role, had really happened.

Velikovsky’s scenario looked like a science-fiction script. A huge comet, which had originated from Jupiter, revolved for centuries on a stretched ellipse about the Sun. Around 1500 BC it came near Earth twice within a period of fifty-two years, halting our planet’s spin each time. During the eighth and seventh centuries BC, the comet approached Mars, forcing its passage close to Earth. Finally, it cooled and became the planet Venus.

Not content with relying only on the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the Ipuwer papyrus, Velikovsky cited an impressive range of literature in support of his theory, including texts and legends from Arabia, Babylonia, Persia, India, Tibet, Armenia, West Africa, Greece, Rome, Iceland, Fin- land, Siberia, China, Japan, Mexico, Peru, and the Pacific Islands. Some of these sources mentioned a doomsday when the Sun stood still in the morn- ing or at noon, depending on the geographical position of the reporter; others wondered why a particular night had been longer than usual. They referred to earthquakes, floods, and clouds of fire—similar to the ones described in the Bible and the Ipuwer papyrus—or to wars between gods.

To support his claims, Velikovsky corroborated the texts with physi- cal evidence. For example, he maintained that the last ice age gripped Europe and North America but not Asia, because the angle of Earth’s axis was different before the encounter with the comet. In addition, the comet must have become Venus in the seventh century BC, because previous documents mentioned only the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat- urn. Velikovsky had a simple answer for every question, and any educated person could follow his reasoning. The prepublication excerpts demon- strated his captivating and convincing prose. ©

Before the book appeared, the New York Times, This Week, the ne ald Tribune, Pathfinder, Collier’s, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, and several other magazines. and newspapers described Worlds in Colli- sion in glowing terms. They spared no words in praising Velikovsky and

Catastrophes and Chaos 19

his multidisciplinary work, which, the media said, reflected a deep knowl- edge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, classical literature, folklore, world history, and religion. His conclusions were deemed revolutionary in being opposed to the standard views held about chronology and the physi- cal sciences.

The scholars reacted very differently; they crushed and mocked the ideas of the not-yet-published book. The promotional campaign for Worlds in Collision, the impression Larrabee’s article made on the public, and the enormity of Velikovsky’s claims irritated many of them. Within days, the chief editor of Harper’s received more than three hundred letters condemning the publication of such trash. Other experts went public.

David Delo of the American Geological Institute said that the Russian doctor had disregarded well-founded research on Earth’s crust made during the past century. Carl Kraeling, the director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, pointed out how unscientific Velikovsky’s method was—to accept a statement first and then to look for evidence to support it— and how much ignorance the Russian displayed about ancient Eastern litera- ture. The archaeologist Nelson Glueck, who, before becoming president of the merged Hebrew Union College and Jewish Institute of Religion in Cin- cinnati, had uncovered more than one thousand sites in the Middle East, characterized Velikovsky’s interpretation of the Bible as ridiculous.

The astronomers were similarly dismissive. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

of the Harvard Observatory derided Velikovsky’s suggested motion of Venus and Mars, comparing it to “an extraordinary achievement in a very difficult type of marksmanship—four (or even five) hits in a couple of thousand years.”* Harlow Shapely, the director of the same institution, called the whole theory “rubbish and nonsense.” He went so far as to send a letter to Macmillan, expressing his hope that Worlds in Collision would never be published. - Macmillan’s president, George Brett, thereupon sent the galley proofs to three reviewers of his choice. Only one of them opposed publication, so Brett decided to stick with his plans. Worlds in Collision came out at the end of March and sold exceptionally well.

But soon Macmillan faced difficulties. More and more academics re- fused to meet its representatives or adopt its textbooks. Aware of the risk, Brett made a painful decision. He arranged for Doubleday, which was not in the textbook business, to take over the deal. James Putnam, the Mac-

i

20 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

millan editor who had acquired the two manuscripts, left the publishing house for undisclosed reasons.

Velikovsky made the best of these events. He began his long campaign of complaining in the media about the “science establishment” plot against him. In his view, this interest group, which claimed to seek the truth and fight for freedom of expression, was doing exactly the opposite: scientists criticized a theory before reading it and did their best to suppress its pub- lication. That was a scandal, and every North American intellectual of the 1950s heard about it.

Public sympathy went with the oppressed. Worlds in Collision be- came a top bestseller, and many of its readers sided with Velikovsky. In the arguments that followed, the emotional component prevailed. Some sci- entists blundered during the debate, and the Russian doctor used their every mistake to claim a new victory. For instance, John Q. Stewart, an astronomical physicist at Princeton University, derided the possibility that the rotation of Earth around its axis had stopped because of the comet’s gravitational interaction. In June 1951 he wrote: “The author perhaps does not fully appreciate what a sensitive indicator the oceans would be. Try it with a full dishpan in the back seat of your car.”> Velikovsky re- sponded that he did.* Accelerating at two miles per hour for one minute and then decelerating at the same slow pace, he didn’t spill any water. “I may be all wet,” he added, “but the car stayed dry.””

The controversy intensified, and Velikovsky won new fans. A few academics sided with him. Though highly respected public figures like Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, and Carl Sagan joined the scientists’ camp, they didn’t leave the scene unruffled. Velikovsky and those who had closed ranks with him seemed to have the last word. Even when their arguments were shaky or incorrect, their better rhetoric left the impression that they had won.

The circle of Velikovskian supporters continued to grow. They were intelligent, enthusiastic, and faithful. Apprenticeship was short—only as long as it took to read and understand Worlds in Collision. They believed in their cause and could contribute “scientific” ideas and articles within weeks or months after joining the club. No time and money needed to be spent in graduate school, in the hunt for academic jobs, or in climbing the academic ranks. And success was guaranteed within the group.

Funds in support of Velikovsky mounted. Three new publications—

Catastrophes and Chaos 24

Pensée, Kronos, and SIS Review, all dedicated to the studies of the mentor —soon appeared. If academic journals rarely accepted papers about cata- strophism, these new intellectual forums invited manuscripts both in favor of and against the concept. This raised the status of the Russian doctor, and more people gained confidence in him.

Velikovsky started thinking of himself as the only person who under- stood the issues. No idea in his books was ever altered in subsequent printings; not a line was ever changed. To him, this was the absolute proof of his correctness, and he stated it with pride. Not surprisingly, the chemist Henry Bauer, who made a thorough analysis of this phenomenon, com- pared Velikovsky to the leader of an emerging cult.8

If, in 1952, Velikovsky still showed a balanced spirit in the preface of Ages in Chaos—“I claim the right to fallibility in details and J eagerly wel- come constructive criticism”®’—by 1974 he was unapologetic. In his pre- sentation at the symposium “Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science,” held in San Francisco that year, he ended by saying: “None of my critics can erase the magnetosphere, nobody can stop the noises of Jupiter, nobody can cool off Venus, and nobody can change a single sentence in my books.”!°

The magnetosphere, the noises of Jupiter, and the elevated tempera- ture of Venus were predictions Velikovsky had made by assuming that a comet had nearly collided with Earth. Although his forecasts turned out to be true, he never questioned whether the causes of these events might have been different. To most scientists, Velikovsky still appeared to be guessing. He was not establishing a solid theory that could explain anything more than isolated facts. Isaac Asimov compared this process to finding intelli- gible sentences in a random sequence of words.

In the 1970s some academics gave Velikovsky more credit, and he was invited to give a few lectures that became popular with students and witha small number of professors. Still, he never convinced the heavyweights. In 1955, ina Scientific American article, Einstein confessed to an interviewer about Worlds in Collision: “You know, it is not a bad book. No, it really isn’t a bad book. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.”™

22 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Looking at the Arguments

A close look at Velikovsky’s arguments reveals how speculative they were. Take, for example, his presentation of a story from the third millennium BC:

“In the lifetime of Yao, the Sun did not set for ten full days and the en- tire land was flooded.” An immense wave “that reached the sky” fell down on the land of China. “The water was well up on the high moun- tains, and the foothills could not be seen at all.” (This recalls Psalm 104: “The waters stood above the mountains .. . they go up by the moun- tains” and Psalm 107: “The waves mount up to the heaven.”) “Destruc- tive in their overflow are the waters of the inundation,” said the emperor. “In their vast extent they embrace the hills and overtop the great heights, threatening the heavens with their flood.”

From these descriptions, Velikovsky concluded that China had witnessed a catastrophe similar to the one seen in Egypt and the Middle East: the Sun stood still and the ocean spilled over the land.

But the four Chinese quotes, taken from different sources, don’t men- tion a wave. Viewed separately, they might describe a big flood. Further- more, Velikovsky didn’t question whether these sources could be trusted, although their veracity isn’t obvious at all. How could somebody in the third, second, or first millennium BC decide that the Sun didn’t set for ten full days, when the only way of measuring time was the day itself? Or did Velikovsky assume that some kind of clock, no matter how primitive, existed at that time? If so, did he research this matter to provide an an- swer? Velikovsky presented no concrete evidence.

He also brushed aside the possibility of translation errors. Without checking the original language used in the text and weighing the meaning of words, phrases, and concepts, his conclusions lack any foundation.

Velikovsky often stated that Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Maxwell, Roentgen, and Einstein had initially been rebuffed. But he failed to say that thousands of other researchers had never succeeded, because their ideas were unfit to survive. One such case is worth mentioning.

In 1883 Ignatius Donnelly published the book Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which bears striking similarities with Worlds in Colli-

Catastrophes and Chaos 23

sion. Like Velikovsky, Donnelly claimed that.a close encounter with a comet had changed the angle of Earth’s axis and that earthquakes, huge winds, debris, and floods had occurred. He, too, backed up his statements with descriptions from all over the ancient world. And, like Velikovsky, he enjoyed great public success in his time. But nobody, except Velikovsky, re- membered him in 1950. In Worlds in Collision, Donnelly appears in a foot- note, with no mention of the similarities between the two men’s theories. An even more obvious example of how Velikovsky chose to “prove” his point is his mention of Herodotus.!4 The Greek historian of the fifth century BC recalled a visit to Egypt in which he was told a story about how the Sun had changed its usual position, twice rising where it normally sets and twice setting where it normally rises. This incident seemed to relate to the Ipuwer Papyrus and the Exodus passage about Earth’s abnor- mal motion followed by upheaval and catastrophes. But Herodotus’s ac- count ends with the following sentence: “Egypt was unaffected by this: the harvests and the produce of the river were the same as usual, and there was no change in the incidence of disease or death.”!5 Velikovsky, how- ever, omitted this detail.

Rhetoric versus Science

Iread Worlds in Collision more than half a century after its first publica- tion. Although I enjoyed Velikovsky’s prose, I found his theory of plane- tary motion far from credible. But I had to admit that in spite of having objections to his proposed scenario, I couldn’t rigorously refute it.

Other experts in celestial mechanics faced the same challenge long before I had. Recall Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s dismissal of Velikovsky’s solution as “an extraordinary achievement ina very difficult type of marks- manship” and Harlow Shapely’s verdict of “rubbish and nonsense.” But these astronomers offered no proofs for their statements, either.

Velikovsky gave seemingly valid responses to his detractors: because’ planets move roughly in the same plane, if Venus had initially revolved on a stretched ellipse, it would have met the other planets sooner or later. He gave figures: Earth has a 60 percent chance of going through the head. or tail of a comet, assuming the tail were one hundred million miles long: This made the “marksmanship” comment seem naive at best. Still, as I will

24 ‘The Challenges of Historical Chronology

BIGURE11 If planet A moves on an elongated orbit around the Sun and comes close to planet B, the two planets may eventually have very different orbits from their original ones, and neither of them will necessarily return close to the point of their initial encounter.

show later in this chapter, Payne-Gaposchkin’s claim can be mathemati- cally proved and Velikovsky’s rebuttal disproved.

A scientist who provided more detailed arguments against the cata- strophic planetary scenario was John Q. Stewart of Princeton University. The June 1951 issue of Harper’s Magazine published three articles related to this problem: Velikovsky’s “Answer to My Critics,” Stewart’s “Disci- plines in Collision,” and Velikovsky’s “Answer to Professor Stewart.” One of Stewart’s criticisms was that if Mars had diverted Venus from an elon- gated ellipse, then, for many millennia, both planets would have returned close to the point of their initial encounter.

Velikovsky answered that Stewart had ignored the influence of mag- netism and electricity, which change the laws of celestial mechanics. But this response wasn’t necessary. In Newton’s theory of gravitation alone, without taking other possible forces into consideration, Stewart’s state- ment was false. The orbits of three celestial bodies may become compli- cated if two of them pass too near to each other (figure 1.1). Should another planet approach the Earth-Moon system, the motion could be- come chaotic, because close encounters of three or more celestial bodies are as unpredictable as the outcome of a triple billiard ball collision. It could happen, for example, that Earth and the other planet would start revolving around each other, while the Moon was expelled at high speed. But since, in the 1950s, only a handful of mathematicians knew this, neither Velikovsky nor anyone else noticed the slip.

Catastrophes and Chaos 25

Another weak link in Stewart’s argument was related to the Titius- Bode law, a formula that predicts the distance from the Sun to every planet except Uranus.1* Stewart wondered how a close encounter between Mars and Venus could take place without violating this principle. Velikovsky’s answer was unassailable: the Titius-Bode law is empirical and hasn’t been proved to hold true on the basis of gravitation. Moreover, both Mars and Venus are only close to—but not right at—the distance predicted by the formula.

In the summer of 1974 Robert Bass—an expert in celestial mechanics at Brigham Young University—published in Pensée what he claimed to be a proof of the Titius-Bode law. He disagreed with Stewart, saying that this principle didn’t contradict Velikovsky. If some massive celestial object is trapped in the solar system, the other planets readjust their positions according to the law. Unable to disprove Velikovsky’s scenario, he cited the astronomer E. W. Brown, who, in 1931, during his speech as retiring president of the American Astronomical Society, said he saw no reasons why Mars, Earth, and Venus could not have nearly collided in the past.

But a careful check of Bass’s proof revealed errors. He worked hard to fix them, and thought he had. Still, no journal on celestial mechanics accepted his paper, and he began to circulate the manuscript among ex- perts. I happened to be on Bass’s email list, but, like many others, I did not read his paper because of its difficult style. One of those who did was Gordon Emslie, a physicist at the University of Alabama, who, in the summer of 2003, found a fatal mistake. Not so easily undone, Bass soon claimed to have corrected it. In the fall of the same year, I emailed Emslie, asking him what he thought. He was still far from convinced by Bass. In Emslie’s opinion, the proof couldn’t be fixed.

Many researchers today, such as the Princeton astronomer Scott Tre- maine and the Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg, remain skeptical about the Titius-Bode law being a consequence of gravitation. Other ex- perts, like Bass, are highly optimistic, hoping this law can be derived from gravitation. In any event, the Titius-Bode law alone would neither prove nor disprove Velikovsky’s theory. Therefore, some specialists attacked the planetary scenario in different ways.

Among them was Robert R. Newton at the Johns Hopkins University, who, in the first volume of his 1979 publication, The Moon’s Acceleration and its Physical Origin, referred to ancient astronomical observations.

26 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

The dates for these records, however, are based on traditional chronology, which Velikovsky had assumed to be faulty. So, unknowingly, Newton used a circular argument. Finding a rigorous proof was far from easy.

Planetary Motion

The secrets of planetary motion are hidden in the N-body problem of celestial mechanics, which seeks to determine the past and future positions of N celestial bodies on which the gravitational force acts. The case of two celestial bodies (N = 2), also called the Kepler problem, is relatively easy to solve, and Sir Isaac Newton dealt with it in Principia Mathematica. The orbit of one body relative to the other could be a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, a hyperbola, or a straight line (figure 1.2). For three or more bodies, however, the problem has not been solved in general.

Planets move on almost circular ellipses around the Sun. Scaled to the size of this page, these ellipses would be hard to tell apart from circles without taking some measurements. But in reality, planetary orbits are more complicated. A perfect ellipse would appear only in a solar system with one star and one planet. Where two or more planets exist, they affect each other’s motion through gravitation.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars revolve on precessional ellipses (fig- ure 1.3). A curve of this kind can be sketched by moving a pencil as if drawing an ellipse while at the same time rotating the sheet of paper very slowly in its own plane. When looked at closely, these precessional ellipses are finely zigzagged curves. This zigzagging is caused by the gravitational pull of satellites and other planets.

Determining the exact planetary orbits is very complicated, and show- ing that a certain motion cannot occur is often impossible. No wonder, then, that Velikovsky proved so hard to refute. Fortunately, I could evalu- ate the probability of Velikovsky’s collision scenario and found it to be extremely small—as unlikely as making a pencil stand on its sharp end— thus validating the correctness of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s marksman- ship remark and the unlikelihood of Velikovsky’s theory.”

This result provided strong evidence against catastrophism and all its consequences. But, sometimes, improbable things do happen. So, to com- pletely dispel the myth Velikovsky had nurtured, I had to prove that the

Catastrophes and Chaos 27

{ eee e ) A FIGURE1.2 In the two-body

& problem of celestial mechanics, if one ls ee, . . body is considered to be fixed, the - ve other can move only on ellipses (e), woe circles (c), parabolas (p), branches of ee L hyperbolas (h), or straight lines (I).

FIGURE1.3 This planar curve is a precessional ellipse. The inner planets of our solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) move along such orbits. The deviation (measured as the speed at which the curve moves away from the original ellipse) is the largest for Mercury. Compared with the astro- nomical reality, the deviation repre- sented in this drawing is greatly exaggerated.

quotations he took from ancient documents were misleading. To do this, I needed more than the unlikelihood of his planetary scenario—I had to show that it was impossible.

The Proof

ANNAN RNR NNTM OASIS TUONO ERA RANTS NA STN

The man who could help me disprove Velikovsky’s theory of planetary collision was Jacques Laskar, of the Institut de. Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Ephémérides in Paris. I first met him in 1998 during a con- ference on celestial mechanics at Centre Paul Langevin in Aussois, a vil- lage in the French Alps. Although my area of expertise is hard to apply to the Velikovsky problem, Laskar’s is ideal. He studies the practical aspects

28 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

of the solar system and uses the latest analytic tools to. provide accurate planetary positions for 20 million years, both in the future and in the past.

This mapping is no easy feat. Powerful computers can do the calcula- tions, but writing a good program for them is very difficult. One reason for this difficulty is the computation technique: although mathematicians have invented many numerical methods, all of them are approximations, and choosing a suitable one is a delicate issue. Round-off errors pose another challenge; since computers cannot write numbers with infinitely many decimal digits, each number is truncated. The methods used to determine planetary positions require billions of computations, and the round-off errors add up quickly, leading to spurious results. But the great- est barrier to accuracy is the chaotic character of the system: the motion of celestial bodies is as hard to predict as the weather. Nevertheless, Laskar has overcome these difficulties and made valid long-term predictions.

I sent him an email message asking if he had any evidence of planetary near collisions in the past few millennia. He responded the next day. His message began: “Is this related to Velikovsky’s book?” Mondes en Colli- sion had just been republished in France, and Jacques was asked to write a review for the October 2003 issue of La Recherche.'8 My question could- n’t have come at a better time.

According to Laskar, nothing of importance had happened in this area during the last 20 million years. Chaotic behavior has been negligible throughout this time. There is a small probability that Mercury and Venus will come close to each other in 3.5 billion years, assuming the Sun doesn’t significantly change its mass before then. But concerning the past 20 mil- lion years, research carried out by Laskar and many others confirms the impossibility of near collisions between Mars, Venus, and Earth,

Still, there is a final issue to consider. Velikovsky’s supporters continue to maintain that there may be other forces, such as magnetic and electro- magnetic ones, that have not been taken into account and that could influ- ence planetary motion. Their concern is legitimate; occasionally Newton’s gravitation law fails.

Problems of this sort had already been noticed by Urbain Le Verrier, one of the codiscoverers of Neptune, in 1859, and they received more attention at the end of the nineteenth century, when the American mathe- matician Simon Newcomb compared thousands of observations with the computations obtained in celestial mechanics. Most of them agreed within

Catastrophes and Chaos 29

1 arc second.”° This comparison provided an excellent confirmation of the theory of planetary motion, but a few of the results exceeded the acceptable limits between prediction and the record.

The largest discrepancy was the one concerning Mercury. As men- tioned earlier, Mercury’s orbit is a precessional ellipse, whose closest point to the Sun rotates in the plane of motion by about 500 arc seconds per century. The difference between observations and calculations is roughly 43 arc seconds in roo years. This gap is huge when compared with the 1~arc-second precision obtained in most cases, and it means either that unknown forces act on Mercury or that Newton’s theory must be revised.

Many experts tried to explain this phenomenon. Their attempts ranged from taking into account the influence of other forces, such as magnetism or solar wind, to changing the gravitational law. In 1898 a German schoolteacher, Paul Gerber, gave an explanation for Mercury’s motion within the framework of classical mechanics.?! His deduction, however, needed more justification. Gerber died shortly thereafter, and, unfortunately, nobody has continued his work.

Albert Einstein succeeded in filling the gap between prediction and observation with his general theory of relativity, which threw a new light on the problem. Whereas Newton had envisioned gravity as a force acting in a three-dimensional world, Einstein viewed it as a geometric property of a universe with three spatial dimensions as well as a fourth, a temporal one. Gerber’s approach proved to be an inspired approximation of Ein- stein’s results within the framework of classical mechanics.

While general relativity opened the way to research in cosmology and other branches of physics, it was of little help to celestial mechanics. In a relativistic context, even the two-body problem (see figure 1.2) becomes extremely difficult,?? and there is no hope of obtaining any significant results in the case of three or more bodies. Therefore the search for a suitable gravitational solution within a classical framework continued.

In the 1920s the Bulgarian physicist Georgi Manev suggested another model, which gave a reasonable explanation for the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars by altering the law of gravitation, but his contem- poraries overlooked his contribution.” The history of science, however, knows many revivals, and Manev’s was a happy one. I happened to come upon his papers in 1991 and found them mathematically challenging. This

30 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

led me to publish several results related to collision and near-collision orbits, which have been further developed by other colleagues. .

My research in this direction showed that Newton’s law fails to pro- vide good approximations for planetary motions only when large celestial bodies come close to each other. Then corrections become necessary. It turned out, however, that this changed nothing in Velikovsky’s case.

Laskar, in his model, had introduced all the observed nongravita- tional effects of the past few hundred years. To corroborate his computa- tions, he compared them with the geological record. Earth’s shape, which varies according to changes in the size of the ice caps and in its internal mass distribution, determines the inclination of Earth’s axis and Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Laskar’s latest solution was used to calibrate the entire Neocene period, namely the last 23 million years. The astronomical and the geological results agreed.

All these outcomes show that the hypothesis forming the basis of Velikovsky’s chronology is flawed, and, as a result, catastrophism col- lapses. Though some of his followers continue to try to justify his dating of ancient history with new arguments, the experts are no longer listening. Velikovsky’s name doesn’t inspire credibility.

In spite of its failure, Velikovsky’s attempt had some positive effects. It stimulated many people to think more about science and its relationship with the humanities and the social sciences. In the longer term, it provided a goldmine of research for those interested in how various domains of human activity interact and in how they regard each other. It raised ques- tions about the accountability of scientists and the media, about fame and publicity, and about our naiveté and wish to believe in miracles; and it revealed aspects of the world of scientific research that were little known before. It showed once again what a powerful tool the written word has become and how it can seduce the uninitiated reader.

More personally, the Velikovsky episode was a humbling experience for me. I learned to be cautious and careful about the application of scientific theories to humanistic study, and especially to look at chronol- ogy problems from different points of view. Though I had found a scien- tific proof in this case, history is not mathematics. In any investigation of chronology, one has to rely on weaker arguments, such as “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “a balance of probabilities.”

Catastrophes and Chaos 31

In fact, my encounter with the work-of professional chronologists reminded me of my first trip to China: the language was incomprehensible, the customs were alien, and J couldn’t grasp much about the new environ- ment. But I wanted to understand this arcane field. A few weeks of reading made it clear to me that I would have to take a new approach. I must not look at Fomenko’s work with a mathematician’s eye, but instead would have to regard it from the point of view of a historian who understands mathematics. Moreover, I would have to learn to think like a chronologist. The best way to acquire my new identity was to begin with Joseph Justus Scaliger; the man who had founded the science of historical dating.

32 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

CHAPTER 2

A New Science

enna _escereomegoa

Time is the proper dimension of history.

ELIAS JOSEPH BICKERMAN

ntil the sixteenth century, few people thought of dating the

| Opes described in ancient texts. The study of chronology was

in its infancy. It seemed to be waiting for someone to weave the many strands of historical timekeeping into a single narrative thread. There had been some attempts to do so, and the various accounts of the progress of time since the beginnings of the world made a certain kind of sense to the cultures that created them. But the world’s horizons were now expanding, and new ideas were being put forth to explain how all past events fit within a single stream of time. The new science of chronology was coming

- into being.

The Father of Chronology

The man who would become the founder of the new science had little formal education (figure 2.1). In 1552, at the age of twelve, Joseph Justus Scaliger entered the elite Collége de Guyenne at Bordeaux, which he aban- doned three years later due to an outbreak of plague in the area.! Back home in Agen, northwest of Toulouse, he began to study with his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger, a highly respected and prolific scholar, who recog- nized his son’s unusual intellectual abilities.

“Every day he required from me a short declamation,” Joseph later confessed in his autobiography. “This exercise, and the daily use of the

33

FIGURE 2.1 Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), the founder of the science of historical chronology, as portrayed in a painting at the Senate Hall in Leiden, Holland.

pen, accustomed me to write in Latin.” With a strong background in classics, he taught himself thirteen languages, Hebrew and Arabic among them, becoming one of the most respected philologists of his time. But it was his contribution to chronology that earned Scaliger a research profes- sorship at the newly established University of Leiden in Holland, where he worked from 1593 until his death in 1609.

Though his interest in historical dating began when he was twenty years old, he did not complete his first book on the subject until more than two decades later. In 1583, the year following the calendar reform of Pope Gregory XIII, Scaliger published De Emendatione Temporum (On the Correction of Chronology), which assigned dates to the most important ancient and medieval events. The revised edition of this book was fol- lowed in 1606 by his final work, Thesaurus Temporum (Repertory of Dates), a collection and arrangement of all available ancient chronologi- cal sources.

Researchers of chronology had, however, existed before Scaliger. Ephorus (ca. 405-330 BC) appears to be the earliest. In his thirty-volume work of universal history, of which only fragments survive, he showed a keen interest in dating events. Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. AD 160—240), often called the first true chronologist, was the father of biblical history. Though Theophilus of Antioch (ca. AD 115-180) produced a brief chro- nology of the Bible about half a century before him, it is not known whether Julius used it.

In his work, Chronologia, Julius attempted to put together Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian sources. His methodology became a model

34 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

for future chronologists. An example referring to Moses shows how he connected various pieces of information:

If one computes backwards from the end of the captivity, there are 1,237 years. So, by analysis, the same period is found to be the first year of the Exodus of Israel under Moses from Egypt, as from the 5 5th Olympiad to Ogygus, who founded Eleusis. And from here we get a more notable beginning for Attic chronography.?

The work of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (ca. AD 260-341), became more influential than that of Julius Africanus. Eusebius lived during the time of Constantine the Great, who invited him to take part in the First Council of Nicaea, a gathering of western (Latin-speaking) and eastern (Greek-speaking) bishops of the Christian church. Eusebius endorsed the Arian doctrine of a Christ inferior to God, a belief that brought him close to excommunication, but he won the favor of the Roman emperor by presenting him with a new edition of his chronology books.

To make his point more clearly, Eusebius introduced tables that pro- vided parallel dates for major events, organized by different cultural refer- ence points. Thus, for example, Jesus was born 2,010 years after the birth of Abraham, or in the year of the 194th Greek Olympiad, which is the same as the forty-second year of Augustus’s reign and the twenty-eighth year after the Roman subjugation of Egypt, or the death of Antony and Cleo- patra. All of Eusebius’s entries began with the “year of Abraham.” The calculations were based on the life spans mentioned in the Bible; for in- stance, Adam lived 930 years, Noah 950, Abraham 175, and Moses 120. This information was taken seriously, as Jack Repcheck notes in his book, The Man Who Found Time: “For Eusebius and all future chronologists [of the Bible], these explicit life spans were always the starting point.”*

A later chronologist of influence was Georgius Syncellus (end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth century), who, as a monk in Constan- tinople, held a position of authority under the patriarch Tarasios. He wrote a chronicle of universal history that preserves a rich collection of ancient sources, many of them otherwise unknown. Much later, the re- ligious reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) published a notable chro- nology book, Supputatio Annorum Mundi (Reckoning of the World’s Years). And there were others.

In spite of these contributions, chronology until Scaliger was only a

A New Science 35

gathering of disparate dates for practical or religious purposes, such as Easter calculations or the ordering of biblical stories. As Denys Hay, a professor of medieval history at the University of Edinburgh, noted in 1977: “In classical antiquity there was virtually no system of chronology available to historians.”* .

Things didn’t change much during the Middle Ages. Most chronolo- gists aimed at predicting the date of Jesus’s return to Earth and the end of the world, which the Bible puts at six millennia after the Creation. But from Julius Africanus, who set the event in AD 500, to James-Ussher (1580- 1655), the Archbishop of Armagh, who calculated that it would occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century, every chronologist shifted the date of the Creation, placing the Apocalypse a few hundred years after his own lifetime.

Although no one before Scaliger had connected the world’s Western and Eastern cultures in a global understanding of history, an attempt had been made. In 1568, Gerardus Mercator—the father of cartography and the inventor of the first flat projection of the globe—published a 4 50-page volume in which he calculated several historical dates from eclipses and astronomical observations.* Unfortunately, the Inquisition declared the book heretical, because it cited prohibited works from antiquity. The few printed copies of Mercator’s book vanished into private collections and had no impact on the further growth of the field.

Scaliger, therefore, had to start almost from scratch. He became inter- ested in chronology while studying the linguistics of calendars. In 1568, prompted by a book written by the Roman grammarian Censorinus in the third century AD, Scaliger wrote: “I do not see how the month of April can derive its name from aperio [to open, to discover]. First of all, since the year initially had only ten months, they must have always wandered and had no fixed positions in the year. . . . [In fact] aprilis comes from aper, which is boar.””

‘ Most old chronicles used dates that no one in Scaliger’s time under- stood. Explaining, for example, what “Athyr 20 in 476 Nabonassar” meant was a difficult feat at the end of the sixteenth century. Scaliger had to decipher the structure of the Egyptian year, find out what month Athyr was, determine Nabonassar’s era, and, finally, design an algorithm for converting the dates. Each calendar posed similar problems.

The early Chinese based their time reckoning on the Moon’s period;

36 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

ancient Mayans used the Sun; and Jews and Muslims combined the two systems into lunisolar calendars. Since a year consists of a noninteger number of lunar revolutions (about 12.4) and a noninteger number of days (about 365.25), calendars had to be continually adjusted. Some cul- tures introduced leap years to keep the months in pace with the seasons, whereas others rounded off the numbers to simplify the calculations.

But deciphering calendars was not Scaliger’s goal. He wanted to grasp the flow of philological ideas. Who had influenced whom? What ancient poet had borrowed from what writer? To answer such questions, he needed to know when they lived. And to know those dates, he had to arrange the main historical events in chronological order.

In the mid-1570s Scaliger asked a difficult question: What are the origins of the European peoples? He approached the problem through the genealogies of their leaders, information he could trace from documents. Soon he had connected European rulers to their ancestors in the Near East and the Middle East and found that the web of genealogical trees spread all over antiquity. Everything he wanted to know about the origin of peoples and cultures led to the problem of global dating.

During the next few years Scaliger’s main scholarly interests shifted toward chronology and the astronomical aspects of dating. Astronomy played an important role not only for understanding the structure of and the relationship between various calendars. It also proved essential in determining when the total eclipses or the passage of the comets described in chronicles had taken place. An especially useful book for Scaliger was Liber de Epochis (The Book of Eras), published in 1578 by Paulus Cru- sius, a professor of mathematics and history in Jena. The main contribu- tion of this German professor had been his dating of several epochs men- tioned in the Almagest, Ptolemy’s famous astronomy treatise from the second century AD.’ Among the thirty-two eras Crusius determined were the ones of Nabonassar (747 BC), Seleucid (312 BC), Philip (324 BC), and Dionysius (285 BC), all of which occurred in ancient texts.

At the end of May 1581, Scaliger wrote a friend about his latest project, a book that dealt with the ancient and modern calendars ofall nations and with the problems of calendar reform. When published in 1583 in seven massive tomes, De Emendatione Temporum provided dates for the main historical events of humankind. This colossal work treats in detail the astronomical! bases of more than fifty calendars. Scaliger’s list of

A New Science 37

eras, the skeleton on which his theory was built, had seventy-eight entries, several of which disagreed with Crusius’s tabulations.

Scaliger amended Crusius’s biblical dates; for instance, the Creation (from 3963 to 3949 BC), the Flood (from 2307 to 2294 BC) and the Exodus (from 1511 to 1496 BC). He also calculated dates for other events, such as the fall of Troy (1181 BC), the era of Augustus (AD 43), the correction of the Julian calendar (AD 8), and the era of Constantine (AD 308). When agreeing with Crusius, as occurred with the foundation of Rome (753 BC) and the Seleucid era (312 BC), Scaliger nonetheless tried to improve the arguments of his predecessor. Both Scaliger and Crusius were rigorous in their conclusions; in that respect they differed from the work of previous chronologists, who had used fewer calculations and more spec- ulation to fix the dates.

The length of Scaliger’s arguments varied with each event. For exam- ple, his dating of the battle of Marathon, which marks the Athenian vic- tory at the opening of the Persian Wars, was straightforward. Scaliger cited the Greek historian Herodotus, according to whom the Persian King Darius I ruled for thirty-six years and died in the sixth year after his Marathon defeat. So the battle occurred during 31 Darius, which, accord- ing to Eusebius, was the 286th Olympic year. Since Scaliger had pre- viously fixed the first Olympiad in 776 BC, he then set the Marathon battle in 491 BC. This date also matched a lunar eclipse mentioned in some documents, an event that astronomers had traced to April 25 of the same year. Invoking different reasons, historians today place the battle in September 490, but some mention 489 or 492.

Other of Scaliger’s arguments are long and difficult to follow for those who are unfamiliar with astronomy and ancient calendars. The founding of Rome (753 BC) and the year in which the First Council of Nicaea was held (AD 325), for instance, involve lunar cycles, divergent eras, and details of solar eclipses. But disagreements among various sources make some of these dates controversial among historians even today.

Public reaction to De Emendatione Temporum was mixed. Some scholars praised the book as a great achievement; others attacked it as superficial and filled with mistakes. Scaliger attempted to deal with these critics in the second edition of the book, but he failed to satisfy his detrac- tors. On his side were his friends and several colleagues, including the respected chronologist Sethus Calvisius, who had studied and dated a few

38 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

VEGA ® ® POLARIS (Future North Star) (Current North Star)

FIGURE 2.2 Day and night occur because Earth rotates around its axis. In a first approximation, the direction of the axis is fixed with respect to the ecliptic (the plane in which Earth revolves around the Sun). In reality, however, Earth’s axis moves very slowly and makes a complete rotation in approximately 26,000 years. The angle of the axis with the ecliptic remains constant.

hundred eclipses.? Among the foremost critics was the respected astron- omer Johannes Kepler, whose vast knowledge of chronology and calen- dars would involve him in the debate on Jesus’s date of birth.!° Kepler found Scaliger’s presentation difficult, and he was in disagreement with Scaliger’s main conclusions.

In the following years Scaliger continued to revise his proofs, adding argument and substance to his work, which appeared in 1606 as The- saurus Temporum. Though he made many improvements and analyzed in depth the writings of early chronologists, his initial list of eras remained basically unchanged.

Scaliger’s critics kept attacking him. Perhaps the strongest criticism concerned his refusal to accept the precession phenomenon, on which astronomical calculations depend. Scaliger insisted that all astronomers who affirmed its existence, including Copernicus, were wrong.

Precession occurs because the direction of Earth’s axis through the poles is not fixed but instead wobbles very slowly. This phenomenon resembles the motion of an unstable toy top, whose axis fails to stay perpendicular to the ground (figure 2.2). Since Earth’s axis rotates once about every 26,000 years, spring each year arrives around twenty minutes

A New Science 39

earlier than it did the previous year—a fact that inspired the name of this phenomenon." ,

Over time, these minutes add up, advancing spring’s arrival by one day every seventy-one years. However, the imposition of calendrical cor- rections, which also address other astronomical problems, forces the equi- nox to fall on March 20 or 21. Any chronologist who neglects to take precession into account for, say, dating an ancient solar eclipse for which the place, the season, and the time of the day are known could lead to errors of centuries.

Scaliger had two pieces of evidence against precession: first, the Egyptian claim that Sirius had been rising on the same day of the Julian year for more than a millennium and a half; and second, the steady rising of Arcturus sixty days after the winter solstice. Had either of these arguments been true, they would have proved Scaliger’s point. But they were wrong. Scaliger produced them by relying on literary texts, not on astronomical records.

He based his conclusion about Arcturus on a passage in Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, whom tradition places in the eighth century BC. “When Zeus has finished sixty wintry days after the solstice,” Hesiod wrote, “the star Arcturus leaves the holy stream of Ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk.”!2 But astronomical observation had shown that the sixty-day estimate would only hold true for several decades, not sev- eral centuries.

It is interesting to note how, in this particular case, Scaliger had ig- nored a scientific achievement and let himself be deceived by a text whose credibility he could not verify. Velikovsky made the same mistake on a much larger scale. Time and again, this phenomenon occurs in the work of other chronologists, allowing bias to inhibit reasoning.

Refusing to acknowledge precession was not the only major trap for Scaliger. Mathematicians lost confidence in him after he claimed to have solved the ancient trisection of the angle problem, which requires dividing an angle into three equal parts with a compass and an unmarked ruler. Nobody knew then that the problem was insoluble (a fact proven only in 1837 by Pierre Wantzel),!° but the mathematicians pointed to Scaliger’s elementary mistakes. Adding insult to injury, they also found arithmetical errors in his calendrical calculations. ,

After 1606—in addition to the humiliating attacks on his work— Scaliger suffered a downturn in his personal life. His landlady sold the

40 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

house in which he had spent the past decade, and he had difficulty finding another place to live. He finally moved into a dwelling that was cold and drafty in the winter and let water in during the summer. His health deteri- orated quickly, and he died less than two years later, on January 21, 1609.

Despite its deficiencies, his chronology survived. As Princeton Univer- sity’s Anthony Grafton remarked in 2002: “The few modern historians who mentioned Scaliger described him as a brilliant innovator who cre- ated a discipline in the teeth of ferocious opposition.”!+ Chronology was the new science on which history would rest.

Petavius and the First Opponents

Scaliger’s table of eras became the backbone of the modern world’s under- standing of ancient and medieval history. Any event linked to one of the entries in Scaliger’s list could now be dated, thus filling in a new piece of the huge puzzle historians were trying to solve. But this edifice was fragile: if one basic date of Scaliger’s proved to be wrong by a few centuries, his system would probably collapse.

~ The weakness of his structure was not due to any shortcoming on his part. There are no better ways in which to build a chronological system. In a sense, this field of knowledge resembles geometry, where the modifica- tion of an axiom affects all the theorems resting on it. The amendment of the parallel’s postulate led, in the nineteenth century, to non-Euclidean geometries,!° which have played an important role in the birth of Ein- stein’s theory of relativity. But while the physical sciences benefit from the fragility of such constructions, history suffers because of it.

This is why the next generation of chronologists felt the need to revise Scaliger’s work. Among the new critics was Denis Pétau, a Jesuit theolo- gian and philologist born in Orléans, France, in 1583, the year of publica- tion of De Emendatione Temporum. He is better known under his Latin- ized name of Dionysius Petavius, to which he often added Aurelianensis, in honor of his birthplace.1¢

After finishing his theological studies in Nancy and being ordained in 1609, Petavius taught rhetoric in Reims, La Fléche, and Paris. During this time he read several classical and Christian writers and became interested in dating the events they described. In 1621 he was offered a professorship

A New Science 4L

in positive theology at the Collége de Clermont in Paris, a position he kept for three decades, until shortly before his death.

In 1627 Petavius published his fundamental work on chronology, De Doctrina Temporum (On the Doctrine of Chronology), the first edition of . which he dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, the prime minister of France. Written as a polemic, the book corrected Scaliger and provided a chrono- logical theory based on new or improved methods and techniques.

Petavius took the year AD 1 as the central date in history and estab- lished the usage of BC (before Christ) and AD (anno Domini, the year of the Lord). Though this practice was not uncommon among the monastic chroniclers of the late Middle Ages, it became widespread only after Pe- tavius. He laid more weight on astronomical phenomena than his pre- decessor had, coming up with ingenious ways of relating dates to the motions of celestial bodies. Petavius used the combined-cycles method extensively—lunar (19), solar (28), and indiction (15)—a system Scaliger had developed from the twelfth-century work of Roger of Hereford.1” The rationale for those cycles can be described succinctly.

Nineteen stands for the smallest number of full years the Moon takes to complete a full number of orbits (namely, 23 5) around Earth. Twenty- eight is the fewest number of years after which the calendar repeats itself, with the dates matching the days of the week. Fifteen represents the Ro- man indiction, a taxation cycle established by the Emperor Constantine, starting with AD January 1, 313. This period became standard in account keeping throughout the Eastern Roman Empire.

The combined-cycles method assigns to every date in history its corre- sponding Julian count, having as its base the Julian epoch (set by Scaliger in 4713 BC, mainly for mathematical reasons, and counting as r).18 The year 753 BC, for example, has the Julian count 3961, because 4713 — 753 + 1 = 3961. Every Julian count up to 7980 has a unique triplet of num- bers, resulting from the remainder obtained when dividing the Julian count by 19, 28, and 15.

The method works as follows: if certain documents associate a histor- ical event with some year in the lunar cycle, another in the solar cycle, and yet another in the indiction cycle, then the year can be uniquely deter- mined. This method, however, has its limits; if one of the three elements is missing, the date cannot be ascertained.

Other ingenious techniques allowed Petavius to compute many new

42 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

dates and to correct the ones of Scaliger’s that were based on less rigorous approaches. For these reasons, the two French scholars are now considered to be the cofounders of traditional chronology. But it was not always so. Like Scaliger, Petavius also encountered opposition from his contemporaries.

Aside from facing disagreements regarding one date or another, Peta- vius’s. work was deemed fundamentally wrong because of the way he interpreted some documents. The French Jesuit Jean Hardouin, known for his scholarship on classical literature, proposed a radical critique.!? In 1685 he published a new edition of Pliny’s Natural History in which he claimed that the majority of classical Greek and Roman texts had been forged during the Middle Ages by a group of Benedictine monks. Asked to elaborate, Hardouin said he would reveal the monks’ reasons in a letter that should be read only after his death. But the executors of his estate were never able to locate that document.

As a result, most seventeenth-century criticisms of the work of Scal- iger and Petavius were quickly forgotten, and the two chronologists re- ceived more recognition in the following decades. Still, it wasn’t long before their conclusions were challenged again. In the 1720s Isaac New- ton, who regarded chronology as one of the great issues of modern sci- ence, raised serious concerns about the dates given by Scaliger and Peta- vius and proposed a system of his own. Newton’s chronology attracted public attention and led to a bitter debate, which survived him by almost a century.

In 1856 and 1857 the German historian August Mommsen wrote several articles in which he attempted to revise Greek and Roman chronol- ogy. His more famous brother, Theodor, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, criticized August in an 1858 book entitled Die Rémische Chronologie bis auf Caesar (The Roman Chronology up to Caesar).?° In Theodor Mommsen’s view, several significant dates remained unclear, while many estimates had to be changed slightly.

The application of such great minds meant that chronology grew to be a highly regarded research subject. Historians adopted and continued to develop the system of Scaliger and Petavius, but several results needed an independent verification. Astronomy, which had improved its tech- niques in the meantime, was ready to offer some help.

A New Science 43

A Russian Polymath

In the second part of the nineteenth century, the Austrian astronomers Friedrich Ginzel and Theodor von Oppolzer sought to set traditional chronology on a firmer base.2! They investigated many of the astronomi- cal events described in ancient and medieval chronicles and tried to im- prove the mathematical aspects of calendrical computation. Their results confirmed many traditional historical dates but cast doubt on others. Among the problematic landmarks were those of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, whose beginning Crusius and then Scaliger had assigned to 431 BC, and the birth date of Jesus Christ. The latter date had been repeatedly challenged by chronologists, but a newly raised un- certainty about the dating of the Peloponnesian War was particularly important, because its time frame relied on the occurrence of three eclipses with well-known, relative dates. Descriptions of such phenomena are rare in history, so Scaliger had considered 431 BC a very firm date for marking the start of the war.

In the early twentieth century, these issues came to the attention of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov, a Russian polymath with a strong and rebellious personality (figure 2.3). He had had a difficult life early on, but the troubled years of his youth were now behind him, and he seemed ready to embark on a long and risky adventure with the problems that were consuming chronology.

Morozov was born in 18 54 in the town of Borok, near Yaroslavl, north of Moscow. His father was an aristocrat, but his mother had been a simple peasant. Since his parents had married only in a civil ceremony and not in the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikolai was given his mother’s last name.

At the age of twenty, he joined the ill-fated revolutionary movement against the tsar. This led to his imprisonment in 1881, first in Petropav- lovsk and later in the infamous Schliisselburg fortress on Lake Ladoga, east of St. Petersburg, where he spent more than twenty years. During this time Morozov wrote poetry, memoirs, and essays; taught himself eleven lan- guages; and became erudite in astronomy, history, physics, mathematics, chemistry, linguistics, and biology.?* Between his release in r905 and the Russian revolution of 1917, he focused on writing, science, and education.

44 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

FIGURE 2.3. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov (1854-1946), the polymath who first claimed that historical chronology was wrong by about a thousand years.

In 1906, at the recommendation of the respected chemist Dimitri Mendeleev, Morozov was awarded an honorary doctorate for a work entitled Periodic Systems at the Foundation of Matter. This distinction marked the first official recognition of Morozov’s lengthy and intense creative activity, which ended only at his death in 1946. He published technical papers and books in chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, astro- physics, cosmology, biology, gravitation, relativity, atomic physics, his- tory, geology, aeronautics, philology, and linguistics, as well as his own literary creations, and he translated several novels into Russian, including The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

The victory of the October Revolution changed Morozov’s life. He was appointed director of the P. F. Lesgaft Institute for the Natural Sci- ences in St. Petersburg and was later elected a member of the Russian Academy. In 1923 Lenin ordered that Morozov’s land be exempt from nationalization, thus rewarding the aging polymath’s contribution to the revolutionary movement. Morozov spent his last years on his estate, creat- ing a branch of the Academy and a recuperation center for its members. After his death, his birthplace was turned into a museum.

Morozov’s first book about chronology, Revelations in Storm and Thunder, appeared in 1907. It dealt with several events described in the last book of the Bible. His dates differed from those of Scaliger by several

A New Science 45

centuries. In his second book, Prophets, published in 1914, he analyzed the chronology of biblical prophecies by using astronomical arguments. Again, his conclusions contradicted the traditional ones.

Morozov then initiated a systematic study of the chronological system founded by Scaliger and Petavius. The fruit of his research was the seven- volume treatise Christ: The History of Human Culture from the Stand- point of the Natural Sciences, published in Russia between 1924 and 1932.23 Morozov argued that accepted chronology had been artificially inflated by the mistaken repetition of the same events in different epochs.

By airing this unconventional view, Morozov encountered serious ob- stacles in the publication of Christ. Until 1921, when he completed the first three volumes, all his submissions were rejected. In frustration, he wrote directly to Lenin, complaining that the bureaucratic system of the Soviet publishing houses blocked the spread of new ideas. Lenin asked his educa- tion minister, Anatoli Lunacharsky, to look into the matter. The minister’s report confirmed the bureaucracy’s decision to reject the manuscript.

But Morozov didn’t give up. He persuaded Lunacharsky to attend a meeting where he presented his ideas. Morozov must have been very per- suasive, for the education minister became convinced of the power and novelty of the argument in Christ. In a letter to Lenin, Lunacharsky em- phasized that Morozov’s book was “no absurdity” and urged him to order the book’s publication. Lenin consented.

In spite of that support, the printing of Christ was repeatedly post- poned. Morozov asked the authorities to intervene again in 1923. But this time he approached Felix Dzerzhinsky, the commissar for internal affairs and head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (better known as Cheka), which had carried out hundreds of thousands of executions.** Nobody dared to op- pose Dzerzhinsky, and the first volume of Morozov’s treatise appeared in 1924.

The first seven volumes came out, but after his powerful supporters died (Dzerzhinsky in 1926 and Lunacharsky in 1933), Morozov was again banned from publication. This time he was blocked because his next installment sharply revised Russian history, a change that Josef Stalin—in power since 1924—disliked. Morozov could do nothing, and the last three volumes of his work never appeared in print.

The seven published volumes of Christ dealt mainly with the chronol-

46 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

ogy of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China. Morozov used astronom- ical records to show that the traditional dates ascribed to them were wrong. He analyzed ancient horoscopes to date the sky configurations they encoded, employed statistics and probabilities to argue that the dy- nasties of certain rulers overlapped, and brought forward linguistic argu- ments in favor of his ideas.

Though he was not the first to oppose the theory of Scaliger and Petavius, nobody before Morozov had argued against the accepted chro- nology for China, which seemed to have grown independently of the European scheme and was apparently untouched by its problems. But Morozov disagreed. In his view, Chinese chronology had not developed until the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries AD, and then under the influence of Scaliger and Petavius.

Morozov argued that Chinese astronomy had never reached the high level of sophistication later attributed to it. The recorded astronomical observations were imprecise and unreliable, and only a few of them could be used for chronological purposes. In his opinion, the Chinese couldn’t have invented the telescope long before the Europeans did, and the idea of an ancient and then a medieval Chinese civilization that might be deemed superior to contemporaneous Western culture derived from an erroneous chronology.

Morozov considered the mistake to have been made in a misappre- hension of the Saturn-Jupiter cycle. For time reckoning, the early Chinese had used the sixty-year period during which Jupiter and Saturn simulta- neously complete the smallest number of full revolutions around the Sun (Jupiter, five; Saturn, two). The Chinese observations of these planets led Morozov to conclude that the starting point of the first recorded cycle was not the third millennium BC, as history books taught, but AD 1323.

As evidence for this radical reordering of the millennia, Morozov mentioned a Chinese emperor traditionally considered to have lived be- tween 2513 and 2436 BC. The use of the sixty-year cycle had begun during the reign of this ruler, whose astronomers recorded the alignment of all visible planets near the stars « and B of the constellation Pegasus. But the grouping of planets in a certain region of the sky is a very rare phenom- enon, and no such configuration occurred in those years. The only viable alignment took place on AD February 9, 1315.

It is astonishing to see Morozov shortening Chinese history by almost

A New Science 47

four millennia. After all, Chinese documents exist that record daily events for hundreds of years. But other Western sources appear to support Moro- zov’s view. For instance, the respected British historian Sir Herbert Butter- field wrote in his book, The Origins of History: “The cataclysms of Chinese history seem to have spared little of the historical writings of the pre- Confucian days [before 5 50 BC]; and from early times there seems to have been controversy about the genuineness or the textual accuracy of the things that did survive.”6

Still, Morozov was attacked both in the popular and the scientific press. Unlike the situation during the age of Scaliger and Petavius, the knowledge that had accumulated by the twentieth century had become too vast to be mastered by any individual, no matter how brilliant. Conse- quently, many experts found flaws in Morozov’s arguments and ridiculed his conclusions. But he remained unmoved by his critics. Though admit- ting to the possibility of weaker claims, due to the uncertainty of the information he found in some historical sources, he strongly believed in the core of his work. The principle of repetitions and their inflationary effect on historical chronology was an idea he never abandoned.

Time Shifts

Morozov had no students, and his work in chronology was in danger of being forgotten. But in the early 1970s the Russian mathematician Mi- khail Postnikov revived Morozov’s ideas through a lecture series given at the History Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Postnikov con- cluded that even if Morozov was not correct in all his claims, he was right in principle, and traditional chronology left much to be desired. Although historians were not impressed, a young Russian geometer named Anatoli Timofeevich Fomenko became interested in the subject. He obtained a copy of Morozov’s Christ and read it in detail.

Fomenko soon connected a problem in celestial mechanics with Mo- rozov’s theory. Records of ancient and medieval eclipses showed that a certain component of the Moon’s acceleration exhibited anomalies that could not be explained in terms of gravity. But if history were shown to be shorter than had been thought, the dates of these eclipses might be wrong, and the apparent anomalies of the Moon’s acceleration might be resolved.

48 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Years later, when he gathered enough evidence for a new chronology, Fomenko thought he could solve the problem merely by shuffling dates around. He described the aftermath of his finding as follows:

I had to address several distinguished historians with this quandary, in- ‘cluding the ones from our . .. Moscow State University. Their initial re- action was that of polite restraint. According to them, there was no point whatsoever in questioning the consensual chronology of ancient history since all the dates in question can be easily verified in any text- book on the subject and have been proved veracious a long time ago. The fact that the diagram of some parameter [the component of the Moon’s acceleration] started to look natural after revised calculations based on some flimsy new chronology was hardly of any relevance [to them]. Moreover, it would perhaps be better for the mathematicians to occupy themselves with mathematics and leave history to historians. The same sentiment was expressed to me by [the famous Russian histo- rian] L. N. Gumilyov. I refrained from arguing with him.?7

Another issue Fomenko studied was the dating of astronomical occur- rences related to key historical events. He understood immediately that the Peloponnesian War was a critical landmark. He disagreed with Scal- iger’s date of 431 BC for the start of the war and confirmed that the date proposed by Morozov, AD 1133, matched the documentary description of the eclipses. But Fomenko also identified a third possibility—AD 1039 —and showed that no other solutions existed for that time interval of history.

Other events he researched included the eclipses described by Livy and Plutarch, those seen during the life of Jesus, and the observation of the star of Bethlehem, which could have been a huge star explosion called a supernova. Like Morozov, Fomenko concluded that these events had hap- pened closer to the present time, by about a millennium.

Also connected to astronomy was the Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar, which Fomenko and his assistant Gleb Nosovski analyzed in detail. They challenged the accuracy of the ten-day correction made by Pope Gregory XIII in the sixteenth century. This reform relied on the date of the First Council of Nicaea, which Crusius had fixed in AD 322 and Scaliger in AD 325. But the Russian mathematicians calculated that the council had met some five and a half centuries later.

A New Science 49

Together with Nosovski and Vladimir Kalashnikov, Fomenko also dealt with the problems raised by the Almagest, Ptolemy’s famous second- century astronomical treatise. By examining the configuration of the star catalog, the eclipses, and the records describing the obscuring of stars by planets, they dated the Almagest between AD 600 and 1300, with a high probability of it’ being written in the ninth century.

Fomenko also continued Morozov’s study of Egyptian zodiacs and hor- oscopes. Some of the paintings and reliefs that feature these configurations were not familiar to historians, whereas others had been under the scrutiny of Egyptologists for many decades. Fomenko and his colleagues placed some of these objects at least a millennium later than Egyptologists had.

Shifting ancient historical dates forward in time poses the problem of fitting the documented rulers during that period into a span of fewer years. The long lists of kings and queens in various parts of the world seem to contradict a shorter chronology. Or is this contradiction only apparent? In addressing this problem, Isaac Newton identified two parallel kings whose reigns had instead been made consecutive, and Morozov indicated several monarchs whose reigns had been duplicated, but under different names. Fomenko went further by pointing out fourteen pairs of overlap- ping dynasties. He saw this as an indicator that entire historical periods had been mistakenly created.

To support his dynastic method, Fomenko came up with a statistical study of the documents’ language and the maps’ geographical features. Then he applied his findings to specific texts and charts. The results agreed with his earlier conclusions.

One of his arguments concerned the chronology of the books of the Bible. It had always been known that 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel speak about the same events as 1 Kings and 2 Kings, and that 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles also overlap. According to Fomenko, however, several other chapters also refer to simultaneous events, and the present ordering of the books in the Bible is thus flawed.

In addition, Fomenko brought many etymological arguments in sup- port of his thesis, which he outlined in two volumes published in Russia in the 1990s. But he encountered harsh criticism from linguists, who think that both his premises and his conclusions are wrong.

In spite of strong opposition from specialists in many disciplines, Fomenko claims to have a mountain of evidence in favor of.a new chro-

50 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

-100 100

i | | I | 1 l { I 4 t ' ! | | I ! ] ' 1 l I ' 4 1 i | i} i} | ' ' 1 | I 4 i ! | | I l 4 1 I I a

gad et icles eee

EIGURE 2.4 Fomenko’s three shifts, of 333, 1053, and 1778 years. In a first approximation, Fomenko has claimed that an original chronicle was repeated three times. In fact, the sequences in each shift are not identical, but they do resemble each other. S, is the original chronicle, and S,, S,, and S, are the shifts. Every block in each sequence represents a repetition. For example, the block K . describes the same events; the same holds for the black triangle. The top sequence summarizes Fomenko’s view on the repetitions in the Bible, and the one below it refers to Europe. In both cases some blocks overlap, which means that the historical events they represent are intermingled.

nology. He thinks that tradition has mistakenly shifted an “original chron- icle” (by which he means the documents that describe the historical real- ity) back into the past three times over. In other words, an event that happened x years ago, where x is larger than 500, was interpreted to have also taken place x + 333, x + 1053, and x + 1778 years before (figure 2.4). Though the idea of these shifts had already occurred to Morozov, Fomenko was the first to attach specific numbers to the concept.

But is he right? Can his mathematics lead to such conclusions? To explain how science adds to the understanding of chronology, it is neces- sary to grasp the meaning of the basic scientific dating methods, including radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, thermoluminiscence, fission track- ing, archaeomagentic dating, and paleography. An analysis of these tech- niques reveals useful information about historical chronology and the rela- tionship between the defenders of tradition and the advocates of reform.

Indeed, Fomenko and his colleagues are not alone in their quest to rewrite the past. They belong to a larger circle, which includes some pro- fessional historians and many amateurs. Few of their books have been published, and even those that are in print remain largely obscure, having captured only a small audience. Some of these researchers, however, have had a social and cultural impact, like Immanuel Velikovsky. But most of them have enjoyed no media coverage, and their conclusions are unknown to the general public.

In the following chapters I will investigate many of the problems outlined above, by presenting the arguments of some reformers of chro- nology and the important reactions to their ideas. The one man who laid the foundations for the understanding of physical reality, however, needs no detailed introduction. His name is Isaac Newton.

52 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

CHAPTER 3

Swan Song

aa aterm

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night: ‘God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. ‘ALEXANDER POPE

saac Newton’s work and personality had been with me since my

high school years. After I decided to pursue research in celestial mechanics—the science that Newton brought into being in 1687 with the publication of his masterpiece, Principia Mathematica—he loomed even larger in my mind.

Some biographers, such as Richard Westfall in Never at Rest, present Newton as an aloof genius who had no interest in worldly pleasures. Oth- ers, like David and Stephen Clark in Newton’s Tyranny, focus on his at- tempts to rule the British scientific community of the early 1700s through intimidation. And there are some, including James Gleick in Isaac Newton, who are sympathetic to the man.!

I knew that the great scientist had nurtured many interests, but until I turned to chronology, I had overlooked his contribution to historical thought. My research on this aspect of his life and work revealed struggle and intrigue, disputes and debates that have ramifications even in our time. This is the story of Newton’s attempt to rewrite the past and of the controversy that followed.

53

Academic Piracy

On March 20, 1727, Sir Isaac Newton died in Kensington at the age of eighty-four (figure 3.1). He was the first scientist to be buried in Westmin- ster Abbey, already the final resting place of monarchs and poets. Among the hundreds of manuscripts Newton left behind, one in particular drew the attention of John Conduitt, the executor of his estate: The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. Conduitt knew how keenly Newton had prepared this manuscript for publication during the last months of his life, and he carried out Newton’s wish. In 1728 the book appeared first in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and then in Paris in a French translation.

Based on astronomical and calendrical evidence, the Chronology was an attempt to redate the histories of the ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. Newton’s conclusions sharply con- tradicted those of Scaliger and Petavius, his main point being that the French chronologists had mistakenly created historical periods that never existed.

What prompted Newton to spend the last years of his life untangling the complex and controversial problems of ancient chronology? His achievements in science and mathematics had already granted him immotr- tality. Wasn’t he afraid that becoming involved in the history of antiquity would only damage his reputation?

Not at all. From his early youth, he had set his restless mind to investi- gate various phenomena that he felt were far from clear. A notebook he kept from 1664 to 1665, when he was twenty-two, shows his first at- tempts to comprehend notions like attraction, gravity, motion, fire, and light. The initial thirty-seven entries eventually increased to seventy-three. Some were mere headings—he failed to elaborate on the subjects of sta- bility, fluidity, and humidity—but his comments on motion and color expanded to several pages.

Newton’s interests were universal and developed in many directions, from physics and mathematics to theology and alchemy. He was very much concerned with religious studies, which led him to question the history of some wars and the dating of certain events. But he made a coherent presentation of his chronological system only late in life. He had many reasons to postpone this project: he focused on mathematics, as-

54 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

FIGURE3.1 This medallion depicting Isaac Newton was issued in 1727, soon after his

death.

tronomy, and optics; wrote the first two editions of Principia; led a fierce priority debate on calculus with the German philosopher and mathemati- cian Gottfried Leibniz; was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University; ran for Parliament; and served as president of the Royal Society and master of the Mint. And he might never have writ- ten The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended had it not been for an act of academic piracy.

The person at the center of the scandal was Signor Abate Conte An- tonio Conti, better known as Abbé Conti, a Venetian nobleman noted in the intellectual and aristocratic circles of Europe as a tragedian, translator of Alexander Pope and Racine, dilettante poet, and amateur scientist. In the early 1720s—under conditions of privacy and discretion—Newton gave Conti permission to make a copy of a manuscript he had entrusted to Caroline of Anspach, the Princess of Wales. Entitled “A Short Chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great,” the manuscript contained an introduction and a list of ancient historical events from 1125 to 33.1 BC, but with very few details about how they had been dated.

Not only did the abbot tell just about everyone he met about the “Short Chronicle,” but he also allowed some people to see it. Among those who read the manuscript were Etienne Souciet, a Jesuit famous for his research on ancient chronology, and Nicolas Fréret, a scholar at the Aca- démie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. While Souciet contented himself with privately informing Newton about his objections to the dates presented in the chronicle, Fréret translated the entire work into French and submitted it to his publisher, Guillaume Cavelier, who sent Newton a

Swan Song 55

letter requesting permission to print it. The English scientist didn’t reply. On March 20, 1725, a frustrated Cavelier appealed to Newton again:

Sir, six months ago I had the honour of informing you that a copy of your chronology had fallen into my hands. I asked you to inform me whether you had any additions or corrections to make in it because of errors on the part of the translator. Since the savants await anything which comes from a man as talented as you, with great eagerness, Sir, ] have the honour of writing you this second letter to ask you to inform me immediately if you have something to change in it. If I do not hear from you, I shall take your silence for consent and let it appear as it is and J shall give it to the public with Remarks.”

In spite of its arrogant tone, the letter made Cavelier’s intentions clear. Newton answered this message with anger, prohibiting publication. Nev- ertheless, on November 11, 1725, he received a complimentary copy of his work, newly translated into French. The decision to print it had been made long before his response arrived.

Newton was outraged. He immediately drafted an article, of which seven versions have survived, and submitted its final form to the Philo- sophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He denounced the pirated translation of the “Short Chronicle” and emphasized that Fréret’s remarks attempting to demolish his theory showed nothing but an utter misunder- standing of his work. But Newton felt that more than an article was needed to prove his theory correct, and he soon started drafting The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.

Once the “Short Chronicle” became public, Father Souciet felt ab- solved of any obligation to keep his opinion private. In 1726 he published five long essays that drew on astronomical, numismatic, and literary evi- dence to attack Newton’s work. John Conduitt, the relative who would become the executor of Newton’s estate, was so afraid to let the octogenar- ian scientist read those articles that he asked a friend to summarize them in a positive light. Newton, however, went to the original sources and studied them carefully. To Conduitt’s surprise, Newton didn’t get angry; in his view, Souciet was simply wrong. Newton thought that the Jesuit father had no way of grasping his arguments from the “Short Chronicle,” and that the new book would clarify the misunderstanding. But although he completed his project, Newton didn’t live to see it in print.

56 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

His treatise is a mixture of logic and technique, very similar in style to his Principia. Like Scaliger and Petavius, Newton fixed a few dates and then linked other historical events to them. In those cases where the ancient documents gave the configuration of the sky, he used astronomical calcula- tions to find out when these events occurred. Of the first three initial dates he fixed, the most important one referred to the Argonautic Expedition, named after the ship Argo, which sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.

In Newton’s time, chronologists were under the influence of Euhemer- ism, a theory originating in the fourth century BC, according to which mythology stems from the deification of human beings and the elabora- tion of their lives. Newton therefore believed in the reality of Apollonios Rhodios’s story Argonautica, written in 295 BC. Traditional chronology dated the voyage in 1200 BC or earlier, but Newton came up with the year 936 or 937 BC. In the “Short Chronicle” he noted, in his tortured prose:

[In the year] 939, the ship Argo is built after the pattern of the long ship in which Danaus came into Greece: and this was the first long ship built by the Greeks. Chiron, who was born in the Golden Age, forms the Constellations for the use of the Argonauts; and places the Solstitial and Equinoctial Points in the fifteenth degrees or middles of the Constella- tions of Cancer, Chelae, Capricorn, and Aries. Meton in the year of Nabonassar 316, observed the Summer Solstice in the eighth degree of Cancer, and therefore the Solstice had then gone back seven degrees. It goes back one degree in about seventy-two years, and seven degrees in about 504 years. Count these years back from the year of Nabonassar 316, and they will place the Argonautic expedition about 936 years be- fore Christ.?

This argument is hard to follow (and typical of Newton’s cryptic language), but an astronomer can quickly decipher it. In it, Newton in- voked the precession of the equinoxes (see figure 2.2). Since every spring’s arrival precedes that of the previous year by a few minutes, the time of the equinox identifies the year.

This idea was revolutionary. Although astronomy had become an

‘important chronological tool by the sixteenth century, nobody before Newton had thought to link precession with fixing the year. Any text that indicated the Sun’s position at the equinox relative to the stars could now

be dated.

Swan Song 57

Reconstructing the Colures

To provide an illustration of the exact positions of planets and stars, astronomers have designed an imaginary celestial sphere, which—like Earth—can be endowed with parallels and meridians (figure 3.2). The main point in Newton’s argument was the position of the colures, repre- sented by the two circles of the celestial sphere that cross perpendicularly at the celestial poles—one passing through the equinoctial points and the other through the solstitial points.

An ancient account of the colures, described in relation to the fixed stars, had appeared in a second-century BC treatise by Hipparchus, who quoted the fourth-century BC observations of Eudoxus. Newton com- mented on them:

For Hipparchus tells us that Eudoxus drew the Colure of the Solstices through the middle of the great Bear, and the middle of Cancer, and the neck of Hydrus, and the star between the Poop and Mast of Argo, and the Tayl of the South Fish, and through the middle of the Capricorn,

- and of Saggita, and through the neck and the right wing of the Swan, and the left hand of Cepheus; and that he drew the Equinoctial Colure, through the left hand of Arctophylax, and along the middle of his Body, and cross the middle of Chelae, and through the right hand and fore- knee of Cetus, and the back of Aries across, and through the head and right hand of Perseus.*

Alas, the curves described above are not circles, and Newton spent considerable time trying to make them match the colures. The numerous drafts found among his unpublished manuscripts show how keen he was to understand this crucial point. In the end he estimated that from the time of Eudoxus to his own time the position of the spring equinox had changed by 36 degrees and 29 minutes.

Taking seventy-two years for the passage of each degree—because 26,000 (years) divided. by 360 (degrees) is approximately 72 (see figure 2.2)——Newton concluded that Eudoxus had recorded an astronomical observation made in 939 BC (namely, 2,627 years before AD 1689—the year in which Newton was making his calculations). Given the inexact nature of Hipparchus’s description, Newton never considered the dates

58 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Zenith at P

A

Ecliptic plane

Equatorial plane

,

Horizontal Plane

FIGURE3.2 Astronomers assume that all stars and planets belong to an imagi- nary celestial sphere, which they endow with meridians and parallels similar to the ones imagined on Earth. This sphere has an equator and two poles. The Polar Star is very close to the North Pole, around which the celestial sphere apparently turns due to Earth’s rotation around its axis. The equinoctial points are the posi- tions of the Sun at the spring and fall equinoxes; these points lie at the intersection of the equator with the circle on which the Sun moves during the year. The equinoctial colure is the circle that passes through the North Pole and the two equinoctial points. The solstitial colure is in the plane of the page.

based on it to be very precise, conceding in his “Short Chronicle” that “there may be Errors of five or ten years, and sometimes twenty, and not much above.” ° . . .

But Newton didn’t place Eudoxus in the tenth century BC. Citing Hipparchus, he reasoned that Eudoxus had merely reproduced the obser- vations recorded when the Greeks had invented the celestial sphere. So, in Newton’s mind, 939 BC was the year of the invention. Now he had to find the inventor.

The Greeks had divided the celestial sphere into constellations, which Aratus of Soli described in the epic poem Phaenomena in the third century BC. Examining the names and the symbols of the constellations, Newton identified them with historical figures (figure 3.3). Since these people lived before the Argonautic Expedition, he suspected that the sphere had been invented prior to the voyage, to help the Argonauts in navigation. So he read everything that had been written on the subject, trying to find out who had conceived of the celestial sphere.

As his manuscripts show, Newton sought the inventor among the as-

Swan Song 59

FIGURE 3.3. A 1690 map of the southern celestial sphere from Prodomus astronomiae, by Johannes Hevelius. Newton used this map to determine the position of Chiron’s colure.

tronomers of Greek mythology: Achilles Tatius, Atlas, Endymion, Chiron, and Palamedes. He initially chose Palamedes, but in the end he settled for Chiron, who had been Palamedes’ master. In his eighties at that time, Chiron had an interest in helping the expedition because two of his grand- children had been chosen to take part in it.°

Finding the inventor of the celestial sphere completed Newton’s argu- ment. He could now reconstruct ancient history.

Landmarks

The next event Newton dated was the fall of Troy. Herodotus, the father of history, had mentioned in the fifth century BC that the time interval

6o The Challenges of Historical Chronology

between the Argonautic Expedition and the end of the Trojan War was one generation, or roughly thirty-three years. Therefore Newton set the fall of Troy during 904 BC.

This conclusion allowed him to date the founding of Rome. In 19 BC the Roman poet Virgil wrote the story of Aeneas, who had escaped from Troy with his son Ascanius. After many adventures, the Trojans reached the west coast of Italy, where they settled. Ascanius founded the city of Alba Longa, in which Romulus—the legendary founder of Rome—and his twin brother, Remus, were born generations later. Estimating the time between Ascanius and Romulus, Newton fixed the event in 627 BC; Scal- iger’s date was 753 BC.

But historians have always debated this issue, because of two tradi- tions: one claiming that Aeneas, and the other that Romulus, had been the founder of Rome. In the second century BC, the Roman general, politi- cian, and writer Marcus Porcius Cato combined the two stories into the . generally accepted version, which Newton used in his calculations.

Like the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, most of Newton’s ancient dates follow from the Argonautic Expedition. They are based on documents, which Newton interpreted to the best of his ability. He had little confidence in historical sources other than the written word. John Conduitt recalled Newton saying about Lord Pembroke: “Let him have but a stone doll and he is satisfied. I can’t imagine the utility of such studies: all their pursuit are below nature.”® This belief was common during Newton’s time. Not until another century had passed would ar- chaeology compete with the legends.

Supporters and Opponents

When Newton died, the debate over historical chronology had just begun. His old friend Edmund Halley, the astronomer royal after whom a famous comet is named, was the first to defend him. But Halley was cautious about committing himself on the general validity of this amended chronol- ogy. Though in 1727 he endorsed Newton’s calculations of the colure and the dating of the sky configuration, he refrained from commenting on whether those findings had anything to do with Chiron and the Argonau- tic Expedition.

Swan Song 61

This issue turned out to be the heart of the polemic. There were also other murky issues, such as the average length of royal reigns. When the documents gave no information on the duration of a king’s rule, Scaliger and Petavius had estimated it to be a generation (thirty-three years). New- ton disagreed. He computed the average length of reigns from documents and came up with twenty years. But this issue paled when compared with the correct dating of the Argonautic Expedition. In his Défense de la chronologie, Nicolas Fréret criticized Newton’s approach:

Does one have to conclude from it [Eudoxus’ text] that the sphere of Eudoxus was that of the first inventor of Greek astronomy? Is it not probable that this first sphere, very crude and faulty as the first essays of the human mind always are in sciences, had been later refashioned and that it was this Sphere corrected several centuries after the time of Chi-

ron which Eudoxus used?7

Though these views were not published until 1758, Fréret had started his criticism three decades earlier. But if, before Newton’s death, he feared that the aged scientist might have some surprise arguments to defend his position, after 1727 Fréret voiced his objections without restraint. Still, things didn’t work out as easily as he had thought. His early attempts to demolish Newton’s chronology met with resistance.

It is interesting to note how polarized the issue had been from the beginning. In his earlier scientific debates, Newton had defended the pri- ority of his results, not their validity. That shows how different science and mathematics are from history and chronology, in which truth and myth are so difficult to separate.

Among Newton’s defenders was Andrew Reid, a popular-science writer and editor of a magazine in whose April 1728 issue a summary of Newton’s chronology appeared. Reid praised Newton for having “clearly explained the greatest mysteries of nature and obscurities of history.” He thought the late English scientist “worthy to have statues of gold raised to his memory or rather . . . ranked among gods: for no mortal ever ap- proached Divinity so near.”8 This article had great popular success: it saw another London edition in 1732 and one in Dublin fifty years later, as well as a translation published in France.

A strong attack against Newton came from William Whiston, who had been his student and later his successor as Lucasian Professor of

62 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Mathematics at Cambridge University from 1702 to 1710. Having spent many years around Newton, Whiston knew the man well. No one was better informed about the evolution of his mentor’s ideas about chronol- ogy, which Whiston didn’t find very enlightening.

In 1728 Whiston published a 120-page critique of Newton’s book. Apart from putting forth the objections raised by other opponents (such as the dating of the Argonautic Expedition; the average duration of royal reigns; and the identification of two ancient kings, Sesac and Sesostris’), he also criticized Newton’s claim that Homer and Hesiod had been almost contemporaneous. In regard to Eudoxus and the celestial sphere, Whiston accused Newton of gross misinterpretations. In his opinion, the tradi- tional date of the voyage should have been raised by a century, not low- ered by three.

The chair Whiston had occupied was very prestigious. Henry Lucas, a Member of Parliament for the university, had left instructions in his will for the purchase of land to go toward supporting this professorship, which was established in 1663. The first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow, renounced the chair in Newton’s favor. Newton occupied it from 1669 until 1702, when he decided to focus on his duties at the Mint. A more recent holder (the seventeenth) was Stephen Hawking, famous for his re- search on black holes and as the author of A Brief History of Time, one of the best-selling popular-science books ever written.1°

It seems unlikely that Whiston would have obtained this position without Newton’s support, so why would he viciously denounce his pro- tector? Whiston’s reasons for doing so downplay his critique. While hold- ing the Lucasian Chair, he publicly denounced the Trinity doctrine and the Nicaean Creed, lending his support to Arius, who had claimed that God the Son ranked below God the Father. These views deprived Whiston of his professorship in 1710. Although sympathetic to Whiston’s ideas, Newton didn’t raise a finger to help him. Moreover, he voted against Whiston’s election to the Royal Society.

Newton had always endorsed Arianism, but he was clever enough not to make his unorthodox religious beliefs public. His nomination first as warden and then as master of the Mint, as well as his attempt at a political career, showed him to be a far more shrewd politician than most of his biographers conveyed. Whiston, however, seemed to have learned little from him.

Swan Song 63

There is another reason to give Whiston’s criticism less credibility. In 1732, John Conduitt received a letter from a Swiss mathematician living in London, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, known for having added drilled rubies (as jewel bearings) to the mechanism of clocks. De Duillier compared the examinations of the celestial sphere made by Newton and Whiston and indicated that he was inclined to agree with the former. He promised to check the truth with a new method, which—to his surprise—neither New- ton nor Whiston had used. But no follow-up letter was found among Conduitt’s effects after his death, so it is unclear what de Duillier could have proved.

The harshest criticism of Newton’s amended chronology came from a Frenchman, the Jesuit scholar Jean Hardouin, who was the same man who had attacked the works of Scaliger and Petavius. In 1729 he pub- lished an article in the Mémoires de Trévoux, in which he mocked New- ton’s conclusion that Chiron had fixed the position of the colures on the celestial sphere. Hardouin stated that Chiron had been no astronomer, but a physician known for curing plagues, and that Newton’s theory was’ nothing but “a frivolous system . . . imaginary and chimerical.”!

A later supporter of Hardouin’s view was Abbé Banier of the Aca- démie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, who, in his Mythologie et les fables expliquées par I’histoire, which appeared in 1740, ridiculed New- ton’s argument as circular. Though it’s hard to believe that Newton could have made such mistakes, this is not the only time he was accused of blundering. In 1990 a mathematician claimed that Newton had mixed up the direct and the inverse theorems in a proof—an allegation that turned out to be unfounded. But chronology is not mathematics, and Abbé Ban- ier speculated on the various interpretations of a text.

In spite of the many charges laid against Newton on both sides of the English Channel, another French personality came to support him. This time it was the philosopher Voltaire, who, in Letters Concerning the En- glish Nation, published in 1733, devoted ample space to Newton’s chro- nology. If Voltaire was cautious in the first edition of his book, he fully endorsed Newton in subsequent printings. In 1758 he cast serious doubts on the criticisms of Souciet and Fréret, who had based their attacks on the pirated version of the “Short Chronicle,” which Newton had disowned.

Francois Marie.Arouet de Voltaire was neither a scientist nor a histo- rian, but a literary giant who had the ability to convey difficult scientific

64 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

ideas to the public. His admiration for Newton led Voltaire to publish a popular account of Newton’s life and work. The book, which sold excep- tionally well, made known the story that Newton’s hypothesis of universal gravitation was prompted by the fall of an apple.

Fréret’s Défense de la chronologie was published posthumously, in 1758. Fréret had started writing the book in 1725, and he was close to completing it in the summer of 1728 when he asked that a commission of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres examine his work. On De- cember 17 he made his presentation in a closed session of the academy, which applauded his achievement. But then Fréret changed his mind about publication and continued to refine the arguments until his death in 1749. It took nine more years before the book appeared.

If Fréret’s criticism passed almost unnoticed in 1728, it had a strong impact thirty years later. As Frank Manuel wrote in 1963: “Fréret dis- puted most of Newton’s textual interpretation with a wealth of learning which made the scientist’s classical knowledge look thin by contrast.” Fréret contested Newton’s estimate of twenty years for the average length of royal reigns by showing that the figure was based on taking into consid- eration collateral as well as successive kings.

But Fréret’s main point was again the Argonautic Expedition, and on this issue he attacked Newton from several directions and with more data than anyone else. According to Fréret, Thebes had been founded in 1594 BC, some five centuries before Newton’s date, and the Phoenicians had made contact with the Greeks as early as 1884 BC. Obviously, Newton and Fréret had very different views about the early history of humankind.

The Next Generation

Fréret’s book ended an important period in the debate: the one in which Newton’s detractors and supporters were his contemporaries. They had either known him in person or had corresponded with him. Those who followed belonged to the next generation, and they judged the work more than the man. ’

The first new voice was that of twenty-one-year-old Edward Gibbon, who would go on to become one of the most respected experts on the history of Rome. In 1758 he read Newton’s amended chronology and, to

Swan Song 65

fix its ideas in his mind, summarized it in writing and emphasized its strong points. By the end of this exercise, while agreeing with Newton’s position, he refrained from accepting all its conclusions. Nonetheless, not even the works of Souciet and Fréret could convince Gibbon that Newton was fundamentally in error. About the English scientist, he wrote with admiration: “The name of Newton raises the image of a profound Genius, luminous and original. His System of Chronology would alone be suffi- cient to assure him immortality.”!3 About Fréret, he expressed regret: “Already full of esteem for this man of letters, I avidly devoured his re- sponse to the Newtonian chronology; but dare I say it?-—it did not mea- sure up to my expectations.”*4

Although Gibbon became one of the giants in the field of ancient history, it is legitimate to ask whether he was mature and learned enough at the age of twenty-one to understand the subtleties of chronology. He had converted to Catholicism six years earlier, influenced by his religious read- ings. Scandalized, his father sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he spent five years in the company of a Calvinist minister, whose persuasion led Gibbon to rejoin the Church of England. While in Lausanne, Gibbon met Voltaire, who had a strong influence on him. It may therefore be that Voltaire planted a seed through his own admiration for Newton, which would explain the enthusiasm Gibbon showed for the English scientist.

Another of Newton’s defenders was the mathematician William Emer- son. In 1770 he published A Short Comment on Sir I. Newton’s “Princi- pia,” where he devoted a chapter to the voyage of the Argonauts. He criticized a Dr. Rutherford, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, who had attempted to demolish Newton’s chronology solely on the basis of Chiron’s colures. Emerson insisted that Newton had many other historical arguments to prove his point. He also rebuked Rutherford for claiming that the constellations had been mapped for religious pur- poses and not for navigation. As if to support Emerson, a new edition of Newton’s amended chronology came out that same year.

In 1775 the classicist Robert Wood voiced a mixed opinion in An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. Wood, who was one of the few who did not take a clear position for or against the amended chronology, considered Homer to be the first poet of “barbaric” Greece. Thus Newton’s shortening of Greek history suited his claim, and he praised Newton for this

66 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

achievement but blamed him for giving Chiron too much credit. An astron- omer who had both the science and the instruments to measure the colures did not fit easily with Wood’s image of an uncivilized Greece.

A critique of how Newton had handled the Olympic years appeared in 1782, in the posthumous work of the Greek scholar Samuel Musgrave. As explained in chapter 2, Scaliger and Petavius used the dates of the Olym- piads as landmarks in their chronology. Musgrave complained about New- ton’s claim that tradition had fabricated forty games. Again, it was a matter of interpretation, over which Musgrave and Newton disagreed.

Losing Ground

The polemic took a sudden downturn toward the end of the eighteenth century. Between 1779 and 1785, Samuel Horsley published an edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s complete works. The amended chronology appeared in the last volume, which included footnotes that pointed out what the editor thought to be errors. Horsley was a mathematician, an astronomer, and the secretary of the Royal Society, and he made no secret of the fact that he didn’t believe in Newton’s historical system. Therefore his editorial com- ments appeared to be an admission that Newton had been wrong. Not surprisingly, the debate faded away during the following years, and few saw any point in flogging the dead horse of chronology.

More than four decades later, in 1827, an anonymous professor at Cambridge University published a work entitled Essays on Chronology: Being a Vindication of the System of Sir Isaac Newton, which was an isolated attempt to support the amended chronology. The author’s wish to hide his identity shows how risky it had become to defend Newton a century after his death. No one approached the subject again until the Second World War.

In 1942 the Soviet Academy printed a volume to celebrate the three- hundredth anniversary of Newton’s birth. It included essays on various topics from mathematics to philosophy, but one was of special interest. An article signed by S. Y. Lur’e examined Newton’s amended chronology, claiming that this theory had failed because of erroneous premises and hypotheses. Newton was not to blame for the mistakes of “dull and lazy

Swan Song 67

bureaucrats,” by whom Lur’e meant the scribes who had copied (and altered) the original works of the ancients. The peculiarity of this state- ment is equaled only by the article’s conclusion: Newton fell short in chronology because of his religious beliefs.

Frank Manuel took this idea further. In his book Isaac Newton, His- torian, he offered the opinion that Newton’s Judeo-Christian monotheism was his main motive for writing the amended chronology. Manuel seemed so convinced of this fact that he ended the book with the following words:

To show that the Israelites rather than the heathen were the first found- ers of the humanity of the ancient world was [for Newton] the one his- torical end to which the long astronomical calculations and the reams of literary analysis were ultimately subservient. To relate himself to his- torical Judaism and primitive Christianity and to cut down the pagans and the Papists was the passion that animated his history. While the his- torical apparatus was neutral and the marginal annotations were accu- rate, sectarian religious commitment swept everything before it.15

This conclusion is difficult to prove or disprove. No doubt Newton was a pious man. He dedicated more time and energy to religion than to science, and even his scientific writing is marked by religious belief. But does this mean that he snubbed ethics to show that the polytheistic Greeks could not be the founders of European civilization? If he had been so strongly driven to prove the priority of Judaism, why didn’t he write his Chronology earlier in his life? Wasn’t he drawn into this debate only after an act of academic piracy, which prompted him to defend his reputation? More likely, Newton’s motive for taking on this subject was his thirst for understanding—a desire he had nurtured all his life.

Revival

Newton’s attempt to rewrite history might have been forgotten, were it not for some late twentieth-century reformers who reached similar con- clusions. A British group led by Peter James, a writer and generalist in Mediterranean cultures, constructed a.chronology of the ancient Near East, Middle East, and Europe, starting from the nineteenth Egyptian

68 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Dynasty, around 1200 BC, and from 700 BC in Greece. In their 1991 book, Centuries of Darkness, the dates they obtained match Newton’s.'¢ This team had solid credentials: I. J. Thorpe was an archaeologist spe- cializing in. European prehistory; Nikos Kokkinos, a historian of antiq- uity; Robert Morkot, an Egyptologist; and John Frankish, an archaeologi- cal expert of the eastern Mediterranean.

The starting point of the book was well motivated. Since the early nineteenth-century work of Jean-Francois Champollion, who, by deci- phering the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, laid the foundations of Egyptology, the Egyptian dating has become fundamental for understand- ing antiquity. The ancient cultures of the East and the West can both be linked to Egypt, so their chronologies depend on it. By the end of the nineteenth century, archaeology had made progress in Greece, in the Near East, and especially in Egypt, whose chronology was regarded as scien- tifically sound. Consequently, historians viewed Egyptian chronology as a reliable base for dating antiquity. But this myth didn’t last long. In 1892 the classical scholar Cecil Torr attacked a few basic Egyptian dates, trig- gering a four-year dispute with the British historian Sir Flinders Petrie, now known as the father of modern archaeology.’”

In 1896 Torr completed his arguments concerning the Egyptian site of Memphis and the Greek culture of Mycenae, wherein he allowed several overlaps between certain dynasties, thus shortening Egypt’s chronology. The historian John Myres countered him in the Classical Review, and this response led to another two-year debate in the pages of that journal. In both disputes Torr had the last word, not for having won each argument on logic, but because his persistence wore his opponents out.

In addition to the Torr and Petrie-Myres debates, Peter James and his colleagues analyzed similar polemics on various issues, from the dating of the earliest Roman remains to those of pottery and inscriptions belonging to other civilizations. Looking at these disputes in the light of the most recent archaeological discoveries, they concluded that, although both sides were correct to some extent, their overall framework remained shaky.

According to Centuries of Darkness, the chronology of Egypt must be shortened by 2.50 years. That would bring the Trojan War to the mid-tenth century BC, in agreement with Newton’s estimate for the fall of Troy (904 BC), and, as a result, the other dates of the amended chronology fall into

Swan Song 69

place. So, by taking a different route, James and his colleagues appear to have proven Newton correct. But soon after its publication, Centuries of Darkness also came under attack.

The most vehement critic was Kenneth Kitchen, a history professor at Liverpool University and an expert in Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, which spans the interval from 1100 to 650 BC; that is, from the twenty- first to the twenty-fifth dynasties. To historians, Kitchen’s 1973 book marks the chronological foundation of that particular time and place.'8 James and his colleagues, however, had based their theory on partial over- laps between the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-fifth dynasties, thus contradicting Kitchen’s chronological system.

In a review published on May 17, 1991, in the Times Literary Supple- ment, Kitchen called the authors “young graduates” and “sons of Velikov- sky,” criticizing their theory in the harshest terms’ and predicting that it would have the same fate as that of their mentor.’ One of his points was the controversial list of Egyptian pharaohs created by Manetho, an Egyp- tian priest from around 300 BC. Among other things, Kitchen blamed the authors for their “irrational hatred” of Manetho.

Two weeks later, James responded with a letter to the editor: “Sir, The tone used by K. A. Kitchen ...shows that we have touched a raw nerve. Our book highlights a mass of archaeological and literary evidence, ranging from Spain to Iran, showing that Egyptian chronology must be seriously in error.” James defended his views with good arguments, challenging Kit- chen to explain why the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties were successive rather than overlapping. He also quoted Kitchen as saying that Manetho’s list could not be trusted.

On June 21, Kitchen responded with new evidence, standing by his initial review. He also brushed off James’s critique of Manetho, complain- ing that his book review had been taken out of context. Two weeks later James published another letter, remarking that Kitchen had not addressed the issue of the dynasties’ successiveness, thus indirectly confirming his lack of proof for it. James remarked that although Kitchen’s work on the Third Intermediate Period was fundamental for further studies, it was not as sound as its author claimed. The discussion seems to have ended here, leaving James with the last word.

Other critics took a more balanced approach. In KMT: A Modern

70 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Journal of Ancient Egypt, Aidan Dodson, an archaeologist at the Univer- sity of Bristol, although disagreeing with the 250-year figure, said that Kitchen’s scheme was also wrong. In his view, between a quarter and half a century should be excised from the chronology of Egypt, depending on key events in Mesopotamia, which lacked firm dates.

But Egyptologists seem far from agreeing on where to fix the pillars of their field. In 1977 Johannes Lehmann, a German theologian, philoso- pher, and television personality, noted: “In the course of a single century’s research, the earliest date in Egyptian history—that of Egypt’s unification under King Menes—has plummeted from 5876 to 2900 BC and not even the latter year has been established beyond doubt. Do we, in fact, have any firm dates at all?”°

No wonder there is so much difference of opinion in the field. Some- times, even people who strive toward a common goal change their mind and pursue new directions. That occurred in James’s group, which had been larger before Centuries of Darkness appeared.

Disagreements about Egypt

His name was David Rohl, and in 1989 he decided to part with James and the other colleagues in the group because, in his view, Egypt’s history was shorter than they thought. When, as a nine-year-old, he had first visited Egypt, journeying up the Nile from Cairo to the Temples of Abu Simbel in Nubia, Rohl fell in love with the ancient world of the pharaohs and dreamed about becoming an archaeologist. But his first career was in music. He founded a band, which released several albums, and made a living as a rock musician, producer, and recording engineer. Still, that childhood trip up the Nile haunted him until the desire grew obsessive, and one day he decided to change his life.

Rohl returned to school and studied Egyptology. While working on his Ph.D. dissertation, he excavated at archaeological sites in Syria and Egypt. During this time he joined James’s team, only to realize a few years later that he didn’t fully agree with his colleagues. But this initial collab- oration helped him find his own way.

His first book, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History,

Swan Song 71

appeared in 1995 in Britain,*! and this was followed by the three-part TV series Pharaohs and Kings. In 1998 he published a second volume, Leg- end: The Genesis of Civilisation, which led to the documentary movies In Search of Eden and The Egyptian Genesis.

Like James and his collaborators, Rohl began with the four main pillars that support the chronology of Egypt:

1. 664 BC, the year the Assyrians sacked Thebes;

2. 925 BC, when the biblical King Shishak, identified as Shoshenk I of the twenty-second dynasty, plundered the Temple of Solomon;

3. £279 BC, when, according to a document known as the Leiden Papyrus, Rameses II ascended the throne; and

4. 1517 BC, mentioned in a medical text called the Ebers Papyrus as the ninth year of Amenhotep I.?2

In A Test of Time, Rohl argued that. aa the first (atdiaaek was sound, One among many reasons for doubting the others was a rock- carved inscription unearthed at Wadi Hammamat, in the eastern Egyptian desert. The text—recorded during the times of Darius I, whose era is fixed in 496 BC—listed twenty-two generations of architects and connected the first generation to the early reign of Rameses II. Assuming (as Newton did) an average of twenty years for each ruler, Rohl concluded that a more plausible dating of Rameses’s accession was 936 BC, about three and a half centuries later than tradition claimed.

But a single inscription is not.enough to overturn history. It may have been that some generations of architects were missing from the list or that the text was misleading. Rohl went through a long analysis of biblical accounts of Egyptian events to prove the overlap of the times in which the rulers of the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties lived. This overlap favored his shorter chronology of Egypt.

Though Rohl’s books and-movies created quite a stir in the British media, the experts’ reviews were mixed. A couple of them gave Rohl high marks, others showed more reservation than enthusiasm, and a few dis- missed the entire theory as nonsense. But the most vocal critic of Rohl’s work happened to be the same Kenneth Kitchen who had attacked Cen- turies of Darkness in 1991.

72 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

Kitchen’s first objection to Rohl’s findings was that the founder of the twenty-second dynasty, Shoshenk I, had dedicated a statue to Psusennes II, the last ruler of the twenty-first dynasty. It proved that the two periods could not overlap. But Rohl had a good answer. There had been two kings named Psusennes, and it wasn’t clear which one the inscription referred to. Traditional chronology had assumed—without evidence—that it was Psusennes IJ. The equally plausible assumption of Psusennes I would con- firm Rohl’s theory.

Kitchen invoked another inscription, this one on a statue in the British Museum, according to which Osorkon I, the son of Shoshenk I, had mar- ried the daughter of Psusennes II.23 This showed that no dynastic overlap was possible. Rohl responded with a similar type of argument as before. By identifying the name Osorkon with King Osorkon I, Kitchen had as- sumed the continuity of the two dynasties. The choice of Osorkon II, however, gave Rohl a new confirmation of the overlap.

Kitchen also mentioned two sequences of high priests, one in Thebes and the other in Memphis. Each straddled the border of the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties, ruling out any overlap between them. Rohl answered that Kitchen had assumed conventional chronology to be correct when referring to a text that gave the years of a particular reign without specifying any rulers. This argument was circular, so it didn’t hold up.

Kitchen’s final objection relied on an inscription describing the annual flooding of the Nile during the reign of King Merenpath of the nineteenth dynasty. He drew on a technical detail to fix the period and show that the time span following it could not exist if the twenty-first and twenty- second dynasties were assumed to be parallel.

But Rohl was at home here. To reach his conclusion, Kitchen had cited an Egyptologist who had read only a copy of the text, without ever seeing the original. Rohl, however, had visited the archaeological site, deciphered the inscription, and interpreted it. He pointed out not only the errors of the published version that Kitchen had relied on but also explained why the inscription confirmed his own theory.

Kitchen was far from convinced. After the broadcast of Rohl’s first TV series, he sent a letter to several Egyptologists in which he described the show as 98 percent rubbish. In his 1973 book, which saw a second edition in 1986, Kitchen had worked out a detailed chronological map of

Swan Song = 73

the period, connecting thousands of details and building a foundation for future studies. Rohl’s work threatened its very core, as Centuries of Dark- ness had done a few years before.

So; who is right—James, Rohl, or Kitchen? They each appear to have valid arguments, which makes arriving at a conclusion far from easy. Kitchen is an established expert, but James and Rohl possess real exper- tise, too. It thus seemed like a good idea to maintain some distance from them all and move away from the murky waters of the humanities. Per- haps, I thought, the scientific objectivity of Anatoli Fomenko would be more enlightening.

74 The Challenges of Historical Chronology

CHAPTER 4

Historical Eclipses

eau srasraueert

Chronology is nothing but the computation of celestial motions. SETHUS CALVISIUS

natoli Fomenko has both the inquisitiveness and the capacity to

‘Ae many areas of culture. Proof of this lies in his vast and complex body of work. ,

But even as a mathematician, Fomenko has been controversial. Quite a few distinguished colleagues, like my friend Tudor Ratiu, think highly of him. Others are less convinced. Most of them, however, have formed an opinion not by reading his work, but by listening to what more influential researchers say. The attitude toward Fomenko is deeply polarized.

“You'd like him,” Tudor had once told me. “He’s a fine and sensitive man.” Tudor’s remark made me cautious. If wanted to remain objective, the last thing J needed was to involve my feelings. I decided not to meet Fomenko before completing this book. I had to judge the work, not the man.

The critical attitude toward Fomenko has nothing to do with the correctness of his mathematical theorems. It concerns their significance: are they deep and comprehensive, do they have crucial consequences, should we care about them? These aspects of inquiry leave the realm of mathematics and approach the world of art and fashion, in which trends, personalities, taste, and biases play an important role.

Becoming intimately acquainted with Fomenko’s mathematical work, which has no connection with his chronology claims, would have involved an investment of my time and energy that I couldn’t afford, so I decided to focus on understanding his contributions to historical dating. Two aspects

77

interested me. First, did Fomenko have a case against traditional chronol- ogy? Second, was his new dating system correct? Though not unimpor- tant, the second issue mattered less, assuming that the answer to the first question was yes. If historians had not been able to clarify the problem in four centuries, I could overlook his failure to solve it in three decades. Reading Fomenko’s work straight through would have been a de- manding task, so I decided to focus on one aspect at a time. And since astronomical results are among the most reliable data to be found in the field of chronology, I began with them. They reveal Fomenko at his best.

The Peloponnesian War

A landmark document for the classical age of ancient Greece is Thucydi- des’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Very little is known about its author; the few existing bits of information come from what he disclosed in his book. He was an Athenian of Thracian royal origin, nearly thirty years old when the war began. He suffered and recovered from the plague at the beginning of the conflict and died in his late sixties or early seven- ties, without finishing his work. In spite of the mystery that veils his life, historians trust his word, and his book provides much of the knowledge acquired about that period.

The Peloponnesian War between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta lasted twenty-seven years.! Its main cause was the enmity between the conservative and militaristic Spartans and the democratic and innovative Athenians, and the clash of their philosophies and interests. The diplomacy of Pericles, Athens’ leader, could only delay the armed conflict. Periods of intense fighting alternated with relative calm. Eventually Sparta won, but the length of the strife and the decades of animosity that followed weakened both powers, making them easy prey for the Macedonian invaders.

Thucydides chronicled the first twenty years of the war, abruptly end- ing his story in midsentence. In spite of tangled, occasionally opaque prose, he comes across as an eyewitness who is trying to describe things as accurately as possible.

But when did this war happen? The answer accepted today, and on which much of Greece’s ancient chronology is based, came in 1578 from Paulus Crusius, who calculated that the conflict started in 431 BC, a date

78 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

that concurred with the conclusions Joseph Scaliger published in 1583. As discussed in chapter 2, Crusius based his dating on two solar eclipses and a lunar one, all of them described in Thucydides’s book.? The first event took place soon after the war’s outbreak: “The same summer, at the begin- ning of a new lunar month, the only time, it seems, at which it is possible,

_the Sun was eclipsed after midday: it took the form of a crescent, then some stars became visible, and it turned full again.”?

The second eclipse occurred seven years later: “In the first days of the next summer a partial eclipse of the Sun took place at new Moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake.”* Then eleven more years passed until the third event: “All was ready, and they [the Athenians] were on the point of sailing away [from Syracuse], when the Moon, which happened then to be at the full, was eclipsed.”°

To determine how reliable these reports are, historians have ques- tioned whether Thucydides witnessed the eclipses himself. Most likely he did, though he failed to mention it explicitly. Weather conditions permit- ting, these rare astronomical events are observed by millions of people over large areas of our planet, and it would be unusual if Thucydides missed them in a place like Greece, where the summers are long, dry, and clear.

The traditional BC dates for the three eclipses are August 3, 431; March 21, 42.4; and August 27, 413— indicating that the conflict began in 431 and ended in 404 BC.$ For more than three centuries no one chal- lenged these findings. Even Isaac Newton supported the methodology: “These things are so well determined by eclipses and Olympic games and other records of good credit and so far agreed upon by chronologists, that I do not think it material to entertain any dispute about them.””

But by the late 1800s, when astronomers had improved their tech- niques and computed all the eclipses, starting from the twelfth century BC, several experts noted that the 431 eclipse had been partial in the Peloponnese. This information posed a problem, because stars are un- likely to become visible unless the solar disk is completely obscured.

More research followed, and some astronomers redid the calcula- tions, taking into account the possible perturbations in Earth’s and the Moon’s motions.® But the conclusion was the same: an observer in Athens saw at least 9 percent of the Sun during the maximum phase. Perhaps the mentioning of stars was an exaggeration?

Historical Eclipses 79

In his Life of Pericles, the Roman biographer Plutarch told how the darkness caused by an eclipse at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War had frightened the Athenians and how Pericles had used his cloak to explain the phenomenon and dispel their alarm.? The Roman orator Cicero reported the.same eclipse in his book De Republica.*° But both accounts were written centuries after the fact, so the only surviving eye- witness description is that of Thucydides.

Another possibility is that, instead of seeing stars, he saw planets and didn’t know the difference. Astronomers have investigated this possibility, but their findings have buried any hope that it might be true. Though Venus may have been visible at the time, Mercury was very faint and Mars stood only 3 degrees of arc above the line of the horizon, a position where the planet was unlikely to be seen.'! Jupiter and Saturn were below that line, as was the star Sirius, which can be brighter than a planet. That left Venus alone and thus failed to explain Thucydides’s report.

The latest word on the 431 BC eclipse came from two British re- searchers, Francis Richard Stephenson and Louay Fatoohi, at the Univer- sity of Durham. As experts in a branch of astronomy that deals with understanding and explaining ancient observations, they revised the old computations and, in 2001, published their results.

The reason for reexamining the problem was a phenomenon that hadn’t been considered a century before. A modern interpretation of his- torical eclipses and, more recently, laser measurements have shown that the distance between Earth and the Moon increases by a few centimeters a year. This is due to a slowdown of Earth’s rotation around its axis ata rate that lengthens the day by about 2.3 milliseconds per century. To obtain accurate astronomical results, this aspect must be taken into consideration.

According to Stephenson and Fatoohi, the maximum phase of the 431 BC event showed a 12 percent crescent in Athens (figure 4.1). In fact, the eclipse was nowhere total and only 98 percent annular (ringlike) at best. The researchers’ calculations positioned the band of annularity as shown in figure 4.2. Still, this doesn’t explain the appearance of stars, so this disparity continued to cast serious doubt on the contention that Thucydi- des’s first eclipse took place in 431 BC.

A recent event, however, seemed to undermine the reliability of these results: the huge Asian earthquake that triggered a deadly tsunami whose devastation the world watched in horror in March 2011. According to

80 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

that concurred with the conclusions Joseph Scaliger published in 1583. As discussed in chapter 2, Crusius based his dating on two solar eclipses and a lunar one, all of them described in Thucydides’s book.? The first event took place soon after the war’s outbreak: “The same summer, at the begin- ning of a new lunar month, the only time, it seems, at which it is possible, the Sun was eclipsed after midday: it took the form of a crescent, then some stars became visible, and it turned full again.”

The second eclipse occurred seven years later: “In the first days of the next summer a partial eclipse of the Sun took place at new Moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake.”* Then eleven more years passed until the third event: “All was ready, and they [the Athenians] were on the point of sailing away [from Syracuse], when the Moon, which happened then to be at the full, was eclipsed.”5

To determine how reliable these reports are, historians have ques- tioned whether Thucydides witnessed the eclipses himself. Most likely he did, though he failed to mention it explicitly. Weather conditions permit- ting, these rare astronomical events are observed by millions of people over large areas of our planet, and it would be unusual if Thucydides missed them in a place like Greece, where the summers are long, dry, and clear.

The traditional BC dates for the three eclipses are August 3, 431; March 21, 424; and August 27, 413—indicating that the conflict began in. 431 and ended in 404 BC.° For more than three centuries no one chal- lenged these findings. Even Isaac Newton supported the methodology: “These things are so well determined by eclipses and Olympic games and other records of good credit and so far agreed upon by chronologists, that Ido not think it material to entertain any dispute about them.””

But by the late 1800s, when astronomers had improved their tech- niques and computed all the eclipses, starting from the twelfth century BC, several experts noted that the 431 eclipse had been partial in the Peloponnese. This information posed a problem, because stars are un- likely to become visible unless the solar disk is completely obscured.

More research followed, and some astronomers redid the calcula- tions, taking into account the possible perturbations in Earth’s and the Moon’s motions.’ But the conclusion was the same: an observer in Athens saw at least 9 percent of the Sun during the maximum phase. Perhaps the mentioning of stars was an exaggeration?

Historical Eclipses 79

In his Life of Pericles, the Roman biographer Plutarch told how the darkness caused by an eclipse at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War had frightened the Athenians and how Pericles had used his cloak to explain the phenomenon and dispel their alarm.® The Roman orator Cicero reported the. same eclipse in his book De Republica.!° But both accounts were written centuries after the fact, so the only surviving eye- witness description is that of Thucydides.

Another possibility is that, instead of seeing stars, he saw planets and didn’t know the difference. Astronomers have investigated this possibility, but their findings have buried any hope that it might be true. Though Venus may have been visible at the time, Mercury was very faint and Mars stood only 3 degrees of arc above the line of the horizon, a position where the planet was unlikely to be seen.!! Jupiter and Saturn were below that line, as was the star Sirius, which can be brighter than a planet. That left Venus alone and thus failed to explain Thucydides’s report.

The latest word on the 431 BC eclipse came from two British re- searchers, Francis Richard Stephenson and Louay Fatoohi, at the Univer- sity of Durham. As experts in a branch of astronomy that deals with understanding and explaining ancient observations, they revised the old computations and, in 2001, published their results.12

The reason for reexamining the problem was a phenomenon that hadn’t been considered a century before. A modern interpretation of his- torical eclipses and, more recently, laser measurements have shown that the distance between Earth and the Moon increases by a few centimeters a year. This is due to a slowdown of Earth’s rotation around its axis at a rate that lengthens the day by about 2.3 milliseconds per century. To obtain accurate astronomical results, this aspect must be taken into consideration.

According to Stephenson and Fatoohi, the maximum phase of the 431 BC event showed a 12 percent crescent in Athens (figure 4.1). In fact, the eclipse was nowhere total and only 98 percent annular (ringlike) at best. The researchers’ calculations positioned the band of annularity as shown in figure 4.2. Still, this doesn’t explain the appearance of stars, so this disparity continued to cast serious doubt on the contention that Thucydi- des’s first eclipse took place in 431 BC.

A recent event, however, seemed to undermine the reliability of these results: the huge Asian earthquake that triggered a deadly tsunami whose devastation the world watched in horror in March 2011. According to

80 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

EIGURE 4.1 The 431 BC eclipse of the Sun as seen in Athens at its maximum phase of 88 percent, showing a 12 percent crescent.

FIGURE 4.2 The (dark) band of annularity for the 431 BC eclipse, where 98 percent of the Sun was obscured. An observer located at a point on the dotted line saw a crescent showing

10 percent of the solar disk. In Athens, 12 percent of the Sun was visible

(see figure 4.1).

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, a shift of mass toward Earth’s center during the quake caused the planet to rotate 1.2.6 microseconds faster and tilted its axis at the poles by 16.5 centimeters.

The change in rotation was negligible in comparison with Stephenson and Fatoohi’s calculations, and, since no more than three or four events of this kind take place every century, this is not something to be accorded too much weight. The tilting of Earth’s axis, however, could produce new readings for the positions of celestial objects and thus affect all our astro- nomical data. The effect of such accidental events cannot be predicted by celestial mechanics.

A few computations were sufficient to assure me that the Asian earth- quake had no impact on astronomical measurements. It produced a change about 1,000 times smaller than the power of our best telescopes to dis-

Historical Eclipses 81

tinguish between two close points. I now knew that earthquakes, not even of the highest magnitude, can negate our astronomical records.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, astronomers have sought other possible solutions for the start of the Peloponnesian War having occurred in the interval from 600 to 200 BC without finding one to fit the descriptions provided by Thucydides. Historians suggested either that he was wrong or that he made the observation more to the north, in Thrace, where he owned several goldmine concessions. But, as he did not mention making any trips before the eighth year of the war, the last assumption is only conjectural.

Nobody extended the search for a different solution to a wider inter- val of time until the 1920s, when Nicolai Morozov pointed out a sequence of eclipses that agreed with the observations: AD August 2, 1133; March 20, 1140; and August 28, rr51. In the 1970s, Fomenko found another sequence: AD August 22, 1039; April 9, 1046; and September 15, 1057. In both cases, the first eclipse was total in the Peloponnese. These are the only solutions that agree with Thucydides’s descriptions.

Wanting to be certain of his source, Fomenko checked the translation of the original document with linguist E. V. Alexeeva, in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Moscow. She assured him that all the char- acteristics of the eclipse had been correctly interpreted."

In their 2001 paper, Stephenson and Fatoohi also touched on another aspect. In chapter 23 of Book 1, Thucydides wrote that, during the war, “eclipses of the Sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history.”!4 Although observers can err when describing detail, they are less likely to make false statistical statements, in which the counting must be only approximately correct. Consequently, the two British astronomers redid the computations for all the eclipses that occurred twenty-seven years after and fifty years before 431 BC. Eight could be seen in the Peloponnese during the traditional dates for the war (figure 4.3), and sixteen in the preceding half century.

Stephenson and Fatoohi found Thucydides’s remark baseless: eight events in twenty-seven years give a frequency similar to sixteen in fifty. But what can be said about Morozov’s solution? From AD 1133 to 1160, there had been seven eclipses visible from the Peloponnese, compared with fifteen in the previous fifty years. Again, the frequency is very much the same during both periods.

82 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

@O.eo©

AUG 3,431BC NOV4,426BC MAR21,424BC JUNI1, 418 BC 88%, 5:30 PM 32%, 2:05 PM T1%, 8:30 AM 12%, 10:40 AM

2%. @

JAN 27,411 BC — JUN.1,409BC MAR 20, 405 BC SEP 3, 404 BC 35%, 10:20AM 47%, 12:00(noon) 38%, 4:45 PM 73%, 8:35 AM

FIGURE 4.3. The eight eclipses that occurred in Athens between 431 and 404 BC, as computed by Stephenson and Fatoohi. Each of the eclipses is shown at its maximum phase. The percentage indicates the covered (dark) area.

Things are different in Fomenko’s case. Between AD 1039 and 1066, the Greeks could count eleven eclipses, while there were only fifteen dur- ing the preceding fifty years. Eleven eclipses in twenty-seven years com- pared with fifteen in half a century give a significantly higher frequency, in accord with Thucydides. This fact seems to make AD 1039 more likely to mark the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.

I mentioned this fact in an email to Gleb Nosovski in late November 2003. A month later I received a New Year’s greeting from Anatoli Fomenko in which he congratulated me on my conclusion. But I didn’t feel I deserved the compliment; my email to Nosovski had omitted my concerns.

Thucydides’ statement about the high frequency of eclipses occurs in a paragraph claiming that the war took place during a period of disasters that had no previous match in history. Never had so many people been displaced, so many cities destroyed, and so much blood shed. Thucydides mentioned plague, drought, famine, and earthquakes of “unparalleled extent and violence.”'5 Could the remark about the eclipses be an exag- geration to emphasize his point?

It’s also prudent to ask whether Thucydides’s knowledge about the fre- quency of eclipses prior to his own observations came from an expert source. A positive answer would favor the year AD 1039, while a negative one would not. Since small eclipses have a negligible effect on daylight, or-

Historical Eclipses 83

dinary people—uninformed about such phenomena and not in the habit of studying the skies—are likely to overlook them, whereas experts would not.

Thucydides’s words—‘“with a frequency unrecorded in previous his- tory,”! or, in another translation, “at more frequent intervals than re- corded at all former times”—made him seem familiar with astronomy, because he appears to rely on “recorded” sources. But in the original Greek, the word Thucydides wrote is mnemoneuomena (uvnpoveopeva), which means “remembered” and doesn’t imply methodical cataloging.’”

Then again, if Scaliger’s dates for the war (431 to 404 BC) are correct, why did Thucydides describe only two of the eight solar events that had taken place during that period? Did he not see the others? That is likely; except for the 404 BC occurrence, the smaller eclipses had too little effect on light during the day to attract attention. Moreover, a description of the 404 BC eclipse is missing because the book failed to report on the last seven years of the war. Does this mean, therefore, that Thucydides relied on expert opinion in making his frequency statement?

Although eleven eclipses in twenty-seven years are above the average frequency of such events in Athens, the length of the period Stephenson and Fatoohi chose is arbitrary. Extending their search by two years both into the past and into the future shows two new eclipses around Scaliger’s solution. This reduces the frequency gap between tradition (now with a total of ten eclipses) and Fomenko (with eleven eclipses), because the increase in the time interval leads to no new eclipses in Fomenko’s case. Still, Fomenko’s dating matches Thucydides’s text better than the dates proposed by the others.

Livy's Eclipse

The eclipses of the Peloponnesian War are not Fomenko’s only astronomi- cal arguments against tradition. He also analyzed a solar eclipse described in Book 37 of Livy’s History of Rome, a lunar eclipse mentioned by both Livy and Plutarch, and another lunar eclipse referred to in the New Testa- ment at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. Fomenko disagreed ‘with the ac- cepted dates of March 14, 190 BC for the first; June 21, 168 BC for the second; and AD April 3, 33 for the third. His calculations places all of these events about a thousand years later.

84 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

Let us start by examining Livy’s solar eclipse. Born Titus Livius in 59 BC, Livy was a Roman historian and a contemporary of Julius Caesar. His forty-five-volume History of Rome from Its Foundation, which is all that has survived from the original 142 books, is considered a jewel of world literature and fundamental for understanding the ancient era. Withdrawn from the political evils of his time, Livy led the quiet life of a man of letters. He died in AD 17, three years after Tiberius’s accession to the throne.

In Book 37 he described an astronomical event that had taken place many years earlier: “When the consul [Publius Africanus] left for the war, during the games celebrated in honour of Apollo, on the fifth day before the ides of July, ina clear sky during the day, the light was dimmed since the Moon passed before the circle of the Sun.”18

This passage gives the date of the month when the eclipse took place. In the ancient Roman calendar, the fifteenth day of March, May, July, and October, and the thirteenth day for the other months, were called ides, so the “fifth day before the ides of July” is July ro.

Fomenko, as had others, interpreted the text as saying that the contour of the Moon was visible, which happens only when the Moon passes below the center of the Sun. This optical effect is known to astronomers, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, noticed that the eclipse of March 14, 190 BC, didn’t satisfy this condition in the given geographical zone.

The traditional date, albeit four months earlier than Livy’s specific mention of July, nevertheless went unchallenged, probably because there is no other viable solution matching that optical effect close to 190 BC. Fomenko, broadening the search by surveying all the eclipses from 600 BC to AD 1600, found only one that matched both the text’s description of the eclipse and its reference to July: AD July 10, 967. But it is also possible that Livy’s observation that “the Moon passed before the circle of the Sun” has nothing to do with the visual effect mentioned above. It might only be the way the writer chose to portray the eclipse or to suggest that he was aware of its cause. Unlike the reference in the History of the Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides explicitly mentions the occurrence of stars, it is unclear if Livy’s description—of an event that occurred before his lifetime—implies the passage of the Moon below the center of the Sun. If it does, Fomenko’s dating is correct. Otherwise, Livy’s remark about the Moon is unhelpful, because it allows for too.many solutions. Livy was writing a posteriori, so variables could have been introduced in

Historical Eclipses 85

the transmission of information. Tradition has it that the event was accu- rately portrayed, but the month and day were slightly off. If, instead, the date was correct, but poetic license was used in describing the eclipse, that leaves open the possibility of another type of eclipse that occurred on a July xo date. If both parts of Livy’s passage have flexible interpretations, then the field is wider still.

The Lunar Eclipse of Livy and Plutarch

Things were more straightforward for the lunar eclipse reported by both Livy and Plutarch. The latter lived from AD 45 to 125 and served asa priest in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the site of the famous Delphic Oracle. Plutarch is mostly known for having written the biographies of many prominent men of antiquity, including Pericles, Alexander the Great, Pom- pey, and Julius Caesar. In his “Life of Aemilius Paulus,” Plutarch described the following event: “When it was night and, supper being over, all were turning to sleep and rest, all of a sudden the Moon, which was then fully high in the heavens, grew dark and, gradually losing her light, passed through various colours, and at length was totally eclipsed.”

From this and other contextual information given by Livy and Plu- tarch, researchers concluded that a lengthy total lunar eclipse occurred on the night of September 4 to 5 (Roman calendar) of an unknown year, after the summer solstice.2° Traditional chronology computed the Julian date of June 21, 168 BC, but this day fell before the summer solstice, in violation of the historical text.

Attempts to find a viable solution between 300 and 100 BC were fruitless. Fomenko extended the search to the interval from 600 BC to 1600 AD and found three candidates, one in each of the years AD 415, 955, and 1020. By also including the eclipses that took place at sunset, he discovered another one in AD 434. Those from 955 and 1020 had the longest duration, in agreement with Livy and Plutarch, so both of these were more likely than the others.*! Fomenko provided no historical rea- son to prefer either one, but pointed out that both confirmed his millen- nium shift. .

Still, he wanted more evidence for his theory, so he researched other events.

86 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

The Crucifixion

The dating of the eclipse at Jesus’s crucifixion, chronicled in the New Testament, turned out to be more problematic for Fomenko than the other eclipses he examined. Three biblical passages refer to it. Matthew 27:45 reads: “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.” Mark 15:33 merely rewords the statement in Matthew: “And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.”: Luke 23:44-45 provides additional informa- tion: “And it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the Sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.”

According to tradition, it was a lunar eclipse, occurring on AD April 3, 33. This is surprising in view of Luke’s remark about the Sun, which suggests a solar eclipse. But John 19:14 states that the Jesus’s crucifixion took place around the time of Passover: “And it was the preparation of the Passover, and about the sixth hour: and he saith unto the Jews, ‘Behold your King!’”

The computation of Passover is based on a lunar calendar and re- quires a full moon. A full moon is also necessary for a lunar eclipse, which can take place only if Earth is between the Moon and the Sun. For a solar eclipse to happen, the Moon must be between Earth and the Sun, which occurs during a new moon. Moreover, the maximum possible duration of a solar eclipse is 7 minutes and 31 seconds. So, unless the Passover infor- mation in John is disregarded, the passage in Luke probably means that the eclipse occurred at night.

The main problem is that the AD April 3, 33, event had a short duration in and around Jerusalem, lasting only a few minutes instead of about three hours—as the Bible implies. In the late 1920s Nicolai Moro- zov pointed out the existence of a long-lasting lunar eclipse that met all the biblical criteria. The only such eclipse between 200 BC and AD 800 took place on AD March 21, 368.7

As in other cases, Fomenko extended the search up to AD 1600 and discovered another solution: AD April 3, 1075. Though this eclipse was as short as the traditional one, Fomenko preferred it, because it had all the other characteristics of the latter, yet coincided more with the rest of his re-

Historical Eclipses 87

vised dates. But both choices are worse than Morozov’s, which matches the ancient description. So what source is to be accepted: the text, the tradition, or the millennium-shift hypothesis? And, although Morozov’s solution accords with the Biblical account, how does AD March 21, 368, agree with the dating of other astronomical events at the time of Jesus’s birth?

Calendar Reform and the First Council of Nicaea

i anotstenmnenotasneenee mee

The date of Jesus’s birth is also controversial.?> Its first computation is attributed to a sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus (Dionysus the Lit- tle)—from what is now Dobrogea, on Romania’s Black Sea coast-—who became known for his mathematical skills and vast knowledge of astron- omy. In AD 525, at the request of Pope John I, he wrote Liber de Paschate, a table of Easter dates with instructions on how to calculate them. As a starting point he took the year AD 1, about which he indicated:

_If you want to find out which year it is since the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, compute fifteen times 3 4, yielding 5 10; to these always add the correction 12, yielding 522; also add the indiction of the year you

. want, say, in the consulship of Probus Junior, the third, yielding 525 years altogether. These are the years since the incarnation of the Lord.

We can only speculate about what Dionysius meant in this cryptic paragraph. But nobody disputes that the division of time beginning with AD 1 came into existence with this manuscript.”5 Although the legitimacy of the dating has been questioned ever since, nobody before Fomenko placed Jesus a millennium later than AD 1. An apparently simple way to contradict Fomenko is to invoke the sixteenth-century calendar reform of Pope Gregory XIII, whose ten-day correction allows the dating of Caesar’s reign. But, as I will explain below, Fomenko and Nosovski found this approach far from convincing.

Our calendar has its origins in 46 BC, when Julius Caesar established the length of a month at thirty or thirty-one days and introduced the leap year. The emperors Augustus, in 8 BC, and Constantine the Great, at the time of the First Council-of Nicaea, made small changes to this calendar, but its basis remained the same.

The Julian year differs from the solar year by-a few minutes and, as a

88 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

result, timekeeping errors added up. By the sixteenth century the begin- ning of spring fell in early March. So, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII acted on the advice of the German mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius and shortened that year’s month of October by ten days. He also changed the rules of the leap year, canceling February 29 in the years ending in two zeroes, except for those that are multiples of 400, such as 1600, 2000, 2400, and so on.

There are documents that connect Jesus with Tiberius, the Roman emperor from AD 14 to 37. In his Annals, Cornelius Tacitus (AD 5 5~120) wrote that Christians “derived their name and origin from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate.”°

Tiberius was the second Roman emperor, born soon after Julius Cae- sar’s first calendar reform, and he can be easily related to the later re- formers Augustus and Constantine. These connections mean that, given the ten-day correction of Pope Gregory XIII, one can calculate with some accuracy when Tiberius lived. Even if it were impossible to pin down the exact years, it would allow one to show that the error couldn’t be counted in hundreds of years, as Morozov and Fomenko claimed.

But Gleb Nosovski disagreed, claiming that the corrections made to the Julian calendar were wrong. He objected to the computations of Luigi Lilio (Aloysius Lilius), a Neapolitan physician, astronomer, and mathe- matician, on whose results Clavius had recommended the changes. No- sovski started from Gregory’s papal bull, issued on February 24, 1582, which stated:

Our care was not only to reinstate the equinox in its long ago nomi- nated place from which it has deviated since the Council of Nicaea by approximately ten days, and to return the 14th Moon [full Moon] to its place, from which it has deviated by four and five days, but also to settle such modes and rules according to which future equinoxes and the 14th Moon would never move off their places. . .. Therefore, to return the equinox to its proper place established by the Church fathers of the Council of Nicaea on the 12th day before the April calends [March 21], we prescribe and order relative to October of the current year, 1582, that ten days, from the third day before nonas [October 5] to the eve of the ides [October 14] inclusive, be deleted.?”

Historical Eclipses 89

Nosovski noticed two errors in the bull. The first concerns the time difference between the spring equinox and the full moon, which the text claimed would be kept constant in the future. This is impossible, because the cycle of full moons and the date of the equinox shift at different rates. But probably this mistake rests with those who drafted the bull, for it is hard to believe that an astronomer made it.

The second error, however, is important, and has to do with the deter- mination of the dates of the equinox and the full moon. To understand Nosovski’s objection and the way he solved the problem, recall that Scal- iger placed the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 (see chapter 2). This year is essential for the accuracy of the Gregorian reform; the ten-day correction depends on it.

The Christian calendar consists of a rigid portion and a flexible part. The former is the “old-style” solar Julian system, with its fixed celebra- tions, whereas the latter is the lunar Easter Book, which determines the variable Christian feasts and festivals. All religious services are based on these two systems.

The difficulty of combining the lunar and the solar calendars has confronted theologians ever since the Christian church first celebrated Easter—which, according to tradition, started in the second century AD. The rules on when (i.e., on which day) this celebration was to occur were given in the Easter Book, canonized by the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325. But this dating system in the Easter Book remains unclear, because the original text of the Nicaean Creed has not survived. The only existing contemporaneous document that tells how to compute the date of the Easter celebrations is the message of Constantine to the bishops who were absent from the council, and it doesn’t mention the rule that Easter should take place after the spring equinox.

In the fourteenth-century Collection of Rules of the Holy Fathers of the Church, by the medieval scholar Matthew Vlastar, the conditions for determining the anniversary of Christ’s resurrection were described as follows:

The rule on Easter has two restrictions: not to celebrate together with the Israelites and to celebrate after the spring equinox. Two more were added by necessity: to have the festival after the very first full Moon after the equinox and not on any day but on the first Sunday af-

90 —- Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

ter the full Moon. All the restrictions except the last one have been kept firmly until now, but now we often change for a later Sunday. We al- ways count two days after the Passover [full Moon] and then turn to the following Sunday. This happened not by ignorance or inability of the Church fathers who confirmed the rules, but because of the lunar

motion.?8

So, by approximately AD 1330, when Vlastar wrote his account, the last condition of Easter was violated: if the first Sunday happened to be within two days after the full moon, the celebration of Easter was post- poned until the next weekend. This change was necessary because of the difference between the real full moon and the one computed in the Easter Book. The error, of which Vlastar was aware, is twenty-four hours in 304 years.

Therefore the Easter Book must have been written around AD 722 (722 = 1330 X 2 X 304). Had Vlastar known of the Easter Book’s AD 325 canonization, he would have noticed the three-day gap that had ac- cumulated between the dates of the computed and the real full moon in more than a thousand years. So he either was unaware of the Easter Book or knew the correct date when it was written, which could not be near AD 325.

With the Easter formula derived by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1800,”? Nosovski calculated the Julian dates of all spring full moons from the first century AD up to his own time and compared them with the Easter dates obtained from the Easter Book. He reached a surprising conclusion: three of the four conditions imposed by the First Council of Nicaea were vio- lated until 784, whereas Vlastar had noted that “all the restrictions except the last one have been kept firmly until now.” When proposing the year 325, Scaliger had no way of detecting this fault, because in the sixteenth century the full-moon calculations for the distant past couldn’t be per- formed with precision.

Another reason to doubt the validity of AD 325 is that the Easter dates repeat themselves every 532 years. The last cycle started in 1941. The previous ones were 1409 to 1940, 877 to 1408 and 345 to 876. Buta periodic process is similar to drawing a circle—you can choose any start- ing point. Therefore, it seems peculiar for the council to have met in AD 325 and yet not to have begun the Easter cycle until 345.

Historical Eclipses 91

Nosovski thought it more reasonable that the First Council of Nicaea had taken place in AD 876 or 877, the latter being the starting year of the first Easter cycle after AD 784, which is when Nosovski believed the Easter Book was probably compiled. This conclusion about the date of the First Council of Nicaea agreed with his full-moon calculations, which showed that the real and the computed full moons occurred on the same day only between AD 700 and rooo. From rooo on, the real full moons occurred more than twenty-four hours after the computed ones, whereas before 700 the order was reversed. The years 784 and 877 also match the traditional opinion that about a century had passed between the compila- tion and the subsequent canonization of the Easter Book.

Nosovski didn’t stop here. He also wanted to confirm the date of Jesus’s resurrection. For this calculation he used the conditions that had guided Dionysius the Little in his determination of the first Easter. Nosov- ski obtained them from the same source as Scaliger: the fourteenth-century writings of Matthew Vlastar. With the help of a computer, the Gauss

’ formula, and the Easter Book rules, Nosovski checked the interval from 100 BC to AD 1700. Only the year 1095 satisfied all conditions, though nine others fulfilled the basic requirements that the full moon after the spring equinox was on a Saturday, March 24, and that the resurrection took place on a Sunday.?° But none of them was within the acceptable margins of traditional chronology.

One argument against the year 1095 is its derivation from medieval sources. But these are the same sources employed by Scaliger, who, No- sovski explained, drew the wrong conclusion, due to the imprecise astro- nomical methods of Scaliger’s era, the sixteenth century. Another argu- ment against Nosovski is that Jesus would then have lived some three centuries after the First Council of Nicaea, which decided to put him on an equal footing with God the Father. Nosovski recognized the difficulty of providing a good reason for this reversal. At the same time, he claimed to have contradicted not the truth, but the point of view of the Christian church’s history, which was formed only about five centuries ago.

Still not satisfied with having reversed the two events, Nosovski reex- amined his dating of the First Council of Nicaea in his 2003 paper, wherein he suggested that the council occurred in the year AD 1343. His new “proof” is linguistic, claiming that Nike was the Greek goddess of victory, and therefore the “Council of the Victors” (generally considered to be a

92 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

later ecumenical council) is the same as the “Council of Nicaea.” For rea- sons that will be made clear in chapter 8, this argument is not convincing. The years 876 or 877 remain Nosovski’s best solutions for the date of the First Council of Nicaea.

Another surprising statement in Nosovski’s work is his identification of Dionysius the Little with Matthew Vlastar. But this claim is based on an attempt to explain how Dionysius arrived at the computation rules-given in Liber de Paschate, and, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, one can only guess at the source of those algorithms.

Both Fomenko and Nosovski have remarked that Scaliger opted for a more distant date in the past whenever he had a choice. For this, they blamed the spirit of the times, which claimed “the older, the better.” As an example, Nosovski showed why the year AD 325 was the one furthest back in time that Scaliger could assign to the First Council of Nicaea: According to early documents, in 325 the spring equinox couldn’t have occurred later than March 21, since that was the date the council estab- lished for the equinox, and the first time it fell on that date was at the end of the third century. This difference of twenty-five years or more, however, is one of Fomenko and Nosovski’s many arguments against Scaliger’s chronology.

Jesus

In his 2003 book, Nosovski took a different approach to the dating of Jesus’s life. He first interpreted the star of Bethlehem as a famous super- nova, which gave birth to the Crab Nebula and:-was recorded by Chinese observers in AD 1054. Then he argued that the Biblical passage in Luke that was mentioned earlier in this chapter describes the total solar eclipse observed in the Mediterranean area on February 16, 1086. So Jesus might have been born in 1054 (or perhaps 1053) and crucified in 1086.

But the 1054 dating of that supernova has been disputed in literature. In 1997, the Italian Giovanni Lupoato noted that a medieval manuscript, the Rampona Chronicle, may have remarked on the explosion.*! To Lu- poato, the date recorded in the manuscript, June 24, 1058, was a transcrip- tion error in the fifteenth-century copy that survived the original: MLVIII (1058) instead of MLIHMI (1054). Still, it is not clear if this chronicle reports

Historical Eclipses 93

the same event. Moreover, since Fomenko and Nosovski also chalienged the Chinese chronology, the year 1054 might be incorrect even in terms of their own standards. .

Fomenko and Nosovski gave three possible dates for the resurrection of Jesus: 1075, 1086, and 1095. The fact that these dates were all close to each other, Nosovski believed, suggest that Christ lived in the eleventh century AD. Each of these proposed years was obtained by looking at different documents, but the texts all have apocryphal aspects. Nonethe- less, some rare astronomical events that happened near the time of Jesus’s life might have been associated with his birth or crucifixion.

How credible are these three conclusions by the Russians? The 1086 date, that of a solar eclipse, is the least likely one, for reasons made clear in the above section on the Crucifixion. The year 1075 is based on a lunar eclipse, thus satisfying most characteristics described in the Bible, except for the long duration; though this date is better than the AD 33 choice, it is worse than Morozov’s AD 368 solution. The year 1095 has a weak point, too: the First Council of Nicaea precedes it. So this date isn’t more likely than the previous ones, unless church history has got it all wrong.

The dating of Jesus’s life, moreover, is a questionable landmark, be- cause all the existing sources referring to it are tainted with legend. Some authors, such as theologians Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Tom Harpur, go so far as to claim that Jesus never existed and that the early church borrowed his story from ancient religions. Such a wide spectrum of contradictory beliefs and evidence make it hard to rely on the life of Jesus for chronological purposes.

The situation changes, however, with the First Council of Nicaea. Referring to the same sources Scaliger had, Nosovski arrived at the year AD 876 or 877 by using verifiable arguments. This date seems worthy of further explorations, which might endorse or disprove its validity.

But these conclusions are not the only ones Fomenko and his collab- orators base on astronomy. Their methodology also mixes astronomical records with celestial mechanics and mathematical statistics. Applying these techniques has led them down some intriguing paths.

94 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

CHAPTERS5

The Moon and the Almagest

REA saree

When I follow the windings of heavenly bodies, I no longer touch the earth with my feet, but stand in the presence of Zeus and take my fill of ambrosia—food of the gods. CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY

0 science is 100 percent exact; each involves certain approxima-

N viens But if there is one science that comes closest to perfection, it’s celestial mechanics. From 1687, when Isaac Newton inaugurated this field of study, until today—the age of electronic computers—celestial me- chanics has been able to forecast the return of comets, discover new plan- ets, and guide rockets in space. No mission has ever failed because of it, and no eclipses have ever occurred at any time other than those it predicted.

As I showed in chapter 1, Velikovsky can be refuted within the frame- work of celestial mechanics by calculations that encompass everything seen in nature. If we don’t trust that, and prefer instead to accept the existence of unobserved forces, we might as well believe in fairy tales.

Astronomical data and historical texts that contradict celestial me- chanics are, therefore, highly suspect to any reasonable mind. This was Fomenko’s point when he began his research in chronology, and few peo- ple would disagree with this approach. His conclusions, however, are startling.

95

Celestial Mechanics

_mesunaaninintivaiinensnentintint aie etusnuninriiinmavanenruieionsaiindtinieamiasenaniatitntintionaninitusnninsennstennminnunnnhanareinunninneniasaeinesmienanannints

The question that started Fomenko on the path of historical dating had nothing to do with history. When he attended Mikhail Postnikov’s lectures on Morozov in the early 1970s, he was studying the motion of the Moon.

The Moon’s orbit around Earth has occupied many researchers since the time of Isaac Newton. But not until the end of the nineteenth century, when the American mathematician George William Hill found a suitable model, did experts have a reasonable understanding of it. Still, some details of its orbit remain unclear, and Fomenko was dealing with one of them.

Fomenko looked at what researchers call the Moon’s elongation, which is the angle between the Moon and the Sun as viewed from Earth.! The change in the speed at which this angle varies defines the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation, denoted by the expression D” (read “D double prime”).? This quantity is computable from observations, and its past behavior can be determined from records of eclipses.

The values of D” are very small (measured in seconds of arc per cen- tury squared), and most of them range between —18 and +2. The acceler- ation is slightly above zero and almost constant from about 700 BC to AD 500, then drops significantly for the next five centuries, and finally settles around —18 after AD 1000 (figure 5.1). The problem, however, is that this variation cannot be explained on the basis of gravitation, according to which the graph should be a horizontal line.

In 1979 Robert R. Newton, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Univer- sity in Baltimore, published the first volume of The Moon’s Acceleration and Its Physical Origin, which considered the issue by looking at histor- ical solar eclipses. The second volume appeared in 1984 and dealt with the same problem from the point of view of lunar observations. Unable to explain the behavior of D”, he concluded that some unknown forces must be responsible for its variations.3

In January 1980, when Fomenko submitted his conclusions on the Moon’s acceleration to a respected journal in celestial mechanics, he had read Robert Newton’s first volume and several of his articles. The Russian mathematician rejected the idea of unknown forces. Instead, using his new chronology, Fomenko redated Newton’s astronomical records and ob- tained the graph in figure 5.2, where D” was almost constant. This result

96 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

Acceleration -

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FIguRE 5.1 The graph of D” obtained by Robert Newton. The symbol * indicates values calculated from recorded solar eclipses; ©, lunar eclipses; A, solar eclipse duration; and V, phases of solar eclipses.

Acceleration

Year

-1000 0 +1000 +2000

FIGURE 5.2 Fomenko’s graph of D” (the symbols remain the same), after he shuffled the calendrical dates of the astronomical events considered by Robert Newton. Until about AD soo there are no observations, and those from AD 500 to 900 are unreliable, whereas the ones between AD 900 and 1900 lead to an almost constant lunar acceleration.

agreed with gravitational theory, according to which a deceleration of the Moon corresponds to a slowdown of Earth’s rotation around its axis.

Robert Newton was probably ignorant of Fomenko’s results; his sec- ond volume, published in 1984, didn’t mention them. Instead, he con- tinued to present evidence for the unpredictable changes of the Moon’s acceleration until he died in r991 at the age of seventy-two, without ever hinting he had read Fomenko’s work.

Among the possible nongravitational factors that change the values of D”, Newton proposed the tidal friction between water and sea bottoms, Earth’s magnetic force, the withdrawal of the ice caps, and the growth of Earth’s core. But he couldn’t tell how realistic these proposals were, since there is no way at present to compute their contribution to the Moon’s acceleration. It is far from clear that their influence on D” could account for the bend in figure 5.1.

The two researchers approached the problem from radically different starting points. Newton didn’t question the traditional dating of any eclipse, whereas Fomenko doubted them all. Newton was choosy when it came to ancient descriptions, trusting only a handful of the 370 cases he studied. In the second volume of his book he complained: “We have found too many instances of an eclipse that could not possibly have been total but that was so recorded, sometimes in a quite picturesque manner.”* Fomenko, instead, took the word of the ancients for granted, as he did with Thucydides. Depending on the choices they made, the two experts reached different conclusions.

Fomenko appears to be more convincing, because he resorted to no mysterious forces. But a closer look at figures 5.1 and 5.2 shows that Fomenko’s graph after AD 900 is very much the same as Newton’s. In the middle period, the one in which Newton noticed a sharp drop of D’, Fomenko obtained a mixture of results, which he deemed unreliable. The most ancient period vanished, because Fomenko’s chronology is shifted forward.

Ignoring the period before AD 900 means there is no significant differ- ence between the results of Newton and Fomenko. The change of cal- endrical dates has not led to an approximately straight line starting with antiquity, but instead has only eliminated the data before AD 500 and created confusion between the years 500 and 900. This result doesn’t

98 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

prove that Fomenko’s new chronology is correct. In fact, he characterized the fluctuating values of D” as follows:

Either the scarce astronomical descriptions that chronologists ascribe to this period [before AD 900] are very nebulous, or, what is more proba- ble, these chronicles are also misdated, and the events they describe are in need of re-dating. However, due to utter vagueness of the remaining astronomical descriptions, they cannot be used for dating purposes since they offer too many solutions.‘ .

Though this result doesn’t support Fomenko’s new system, it chal- lenges tradition. Newton’s contribution can be viewed in much the same way: in the absence of unknown forces, his graph casts a doubt on con- ventional. chronology. This leaves three possibilities: there are unknown forces; the laws of physics have changed since the past millennium; or traditional chronology is wrong.

The first two choices are not impossible, but physicists would argue that they seem very unlikely. The controversies described in previous chapters support the idea that the timetables of history are fragile, so the balance of probabilities tilts in the direction of accepting the third possibility. Fomen- ko’s result shows the need for taking a closer look at traditional chronology.

Alleged Fabrications

The Moon’s acceleration was not the only issue on which Robert Newton and Fomenko disagreed. They also differed on the most influential astron- omy book ever written, the Almagest. Its author, Claudius Ptolemy— considered one of the greatest scientists of antiquity, particularly in his contributions to geography, optics, and mathematics—lived during the second century AD, mostly in Alexandria, on the southeast shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Ptolemy wrote the Almagest during the reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, which is traditionally set from AD 138 to 16x. Any firm evidence for a different dating of this treatise would change the entire chronology of Rome. Divided into thirteen books, Ptolemy’s opus touches on the main problems of astronomy, from the nature of the universe to

The Moon and the Almagest 99

lunar and planetary motion. It also contains detailed star catalogs and records of eclipses, occultations, and equinoxes. The original version of the Almagest has been lost, but in its many translations the work has been in circulation for almost two millennia.

In 1977 Robert Newton published The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy, a book in which he accused the ancient astronomer of the greatest sin a scientist can commit—fabricating evidence.” Newton argued that many of the coordinates presented in the Almagest as “observations” were noth- ing but fraud.

He started with Ptolemy’s records of equinoxes and solstices for AD 132, 139, and 140. The ancient scientist had given times of occurrence that were wrong by twenty-eight to thirty-six hours. This is a huge discrepancy because, on the one hand, equinoxes and solstices advance by only twenty minutes a year (see chapter 2); on the other, Aristarchus, Euctemon, and Hipparchus, who lived centuries before Ptolemy, made errors of less than seven hours. Newton proposed various schemes, according to which Ptol- emy’s “results” had been produced from earlier observations.

His list of alleged fabrications includes coordinates of eclipses, plan- ets, and stars. To Newton, the goal of Ptolemy’s deliberate fraud was to make data agree with theory, as immature students might do to cover the tracks of their weak laboratory work. When suggesting this metaphor, Newton didn’t seem to worry about the difference between a student paper, which ends up in the recycling bin, and a book that is open to the scrutiny of peers.

But criticism of Ptolemy isn’t new. As early as AD 1008, the Egyptian astronomer Ibn Yunis remarked that the positions recorded in the Alma- gest contain serious errors. In 1817 the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre preceded Newton’s 1977 arguments by asking: “Did Ptolemy do any observing? Aren’t the observations he claims to have made mere computations from his tables and examples to help him ex- plain his theories?”® Closer to the present, the dissertation of John P. Britton, defended at Yale University in 1967, claimed that the equinoxes and solstices of the Almagest had been forged.?

In 1979 Rolf Brahde, of the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Oslo, wrote a rave review of Newton’s Crime of Claudius Ptolemy, one that the historian of science Kristian Peder Moesgaard endorsed.!° A few years later the Dutch mathematician and Zurich professor Bartel Leendert

100 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

van der Waerden went as far as to state: “Delambre and Newton have con- vincingly proved that Ptolemy had systematically and intentionally falsi- fied his observations in order to make his results agree with his theory.”"

But not everyone shared this view. In 1978 the journal Science pub- lished the appraisal of University of Pittsburgh professor Bernard Gold- stein, who suggested that Robert Newton had often distorted the facts.’ A year later Owen Gingerich at Harvard University, Noel Swerdlow at the University of Chicago, and Victor Thoren at Indiana University, after whom an asteroid is named, remarked in Scientific American that New- ton’s conclusions were based on a flawed statistical analysis that disre- garded the methods of early astronomy." In 1988 the respected translator of the Almagest, Brown University historian of science Gerald J. Toomer, took a similar position, dismissing Newton’s arguments.4

Among the more recent critics were Gerd GraShoff, at the University of Bern, and Oscar Sheynin in Berlin. While GraShoff found the argu- ments against the early astronomer superficial and unjustified,!5 Sheynin wrote that Ptolemy didn’t falsify, but merely selected convenient obser- vations, a practice common in ancient times.'¢ In the opinion of James Evans, at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, very few historians of astronomy have agreed with Newton’s fabrication theory.”

But why regard Newton’s work as either black or white? Could it have been correct in some respects and wrong in others?!8 These were the questions that Fomenko thought were worth pursuing.

A Different Opinion

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Fomenko considered The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy a valuable piece of work, but he disagreed with its conclusions. Being familiar with Nicolai Morozov’s seven-volume Christ (see chapter 2), the Russian mathemati- cian knew things the western critics didn’t. In the 1920s, Morozov had already thought about the Almagest and had offered his own opinion: Ptolemy, or whoever produced his catalog; must have lived much later than the second century AD.!° In Fomenko’s view, Robert Newton con- firmed this claim without knowing it.

From ancient times, astronomers have used two systems of coordi- nates to record observations: equatorial and ecliptic (see figure 3.2). As

The Moon and the Almagest 101

the name implies, the first employs the equatorial plane as a reference, whereas the second relies on the ecliptic (the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun). Before the seventeenth century, both systems were in common use; after that, the equatorial coordinates became dominant, as they were more convenient and led to more precise observations.

Ptolemy preferred ecliptic coordinates. In the Middle Ages, astron- omers deemed them to be more reliable, because the equatorial plane oscillates, due to precession (see figure 2.2). What they did not know was that, because of the planets’ gravitational pull, the ecliptic varies, too— though much less than the equator—so these coordinates offer no real advantage. Ptolemy was also unaware of that.

Ptolemy used an astrolabe for his astronomical observations, which he duly described in the Almagest. This instrument is not easy to handle, and it might have been a source of his errors. Some researchers think he made some equatorial measurements and transformed them into ecliptic ones. The corresponding formulas depend on the precession rate—roughly 1.4 arc degrees per century; Ptolemy used 1 degree instead. This approxima- tion led him into new errors, but they are consistent, and therefore easier to trace.

From the start, Morozov was surprised to see Ptolemy’s star catalog claiming a ro-arc-minute precision. Such a high degree of accuracy could not be achieved without a minute-hand clock, which was not invented until much later, in the Middle Ages. So, even before proceeding with his mathe- matical analysis, Morozov suspected a medieval origin for the Almagest.

One way to determine the year in which an observation was made is to use precession. Since Earth’s axis rotates 360 degrees in 26,000 years, the angle, and therefore the longitude of every star, changes by about 50 arc seconds per year. Dividing the difference between the present equa- torial longitudes and those of Ptolemy by fifty, Morozov obtained an apparently shocking result: Ptolemy’s observations came from the six- teenth century AD.

But Morozov didn’t jump to conclusions. This anomaly could be due to the error Ptolemy had introduced by using a precession rate of 1 degree instead of 1.4. Another possible reason was the star catalog, which came froma sixteenth-century Latin translation. So Morozov checked the Greek version and learned that the stars’ longitudes differed by about 20 degrees, thereby corresponding to the traditional second-century dating.

102 Fomenko’s Battle against Tradition

Morozov thought that perhaps the coordinates of the Latin transla- tion had been updated. But a thorough comparison of the two editions showed the observational errors in the Greek edition to be much smaller than those in the Latin text. This contradicted the common assumption that the Greek version was an early copy and nota later translation.

Morozov noticed other strange things about the Greek edition. First, the records in it corrected the observations of the stars’ latitudes with the value of the atmospheric refraction, a phenomenon not discovered until the Middle Ages. Second, due-to precession, the choice of Polaris (a-Ursae Minoris) as the first star of the Greek catalog would not have made sense in the second century AD, when Earth’s axis pointed closer to B-Ursae Mi- noris. Last, but certainly not least, the star Achenar, though present in the catalog, had been visible in Alexandria only since the fifteenth century AD.

These anomalies made Morozov conclude that the Almagest had been written at least a millennium later than historians thought. But was this claim legitimate?

In Search of a Solution

Fomenko wasn’t convinced by Morozov’s arguments. He found them sub- jective, as well as too dependent on the editions Morozov consulted, texts that could have differed from the original. Nevertheless, Fomenko also thought something was wrong with the dating of the star catalog, and he decided to study it himself.2° The best version of the star catalog turned out to be the one by Christian Peters and Edward Knobel, published in 1915. The authors had compiled the star positions from all historical manuscrip