Fact-Checking Fomenko's Claim That History Is Fake
New Chronology is the theory of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko that almost all of recorded history before roughly 800 AD was fabricated, and that the conventional timeline has been artificially inflated by more than a thousand years 1. Since 1981, across a seven-volume series, Fomenko has argued that antiquity — Greece, Rome, and Egypt — is really a duplicated echo of medieval events, and that figures like Jesus actually lived in the 12th century 1. Historians and scientists reject it entirely: it requires an impossible global conspiracy, ignores independent dating methods and mountains of archaeology, and rests on statistical and astronomical arguments that do not hold up 2. Here is a fair look at the claim.
What Is New Chronology?
New Chronology claims that the standard timeline of world history is fundamentally wrong and vastly too long 1. Fomenko asserts that the chronology established in the 16th century by the scholar Joseph Scaliger was inflated through the systematic duplication of events and deliberate falsifications introduced in the 17th and 18th centuries 1. In this view, verifiable written history begins only around the 10th or 11th century, and events we place in "antiquity" actually occurred in the medieval period 1. The result, he argues, is that more than a thousand years of history were essentially invented 2.
Who Is Anatoly Fomenko?
Anatoly Fomenko is a genuinely accomplished Russian mathematician who heads a department at Moscow State University and won a 1996 State Prize for mathematics 2. Crucially, however, he has no formal training in history, archaeology, or linguistics 2. He began developing New Chronology in 1981, building on the earlier ideas of the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Morozov, who had also used astronomy to argue that chronology was mistaken 2. Fomenko's mathematical reputation is a major reason the theory attracts attention — a striking example of expertise in one field being mistaken for authority in another 2.
What Does Fomenko Actually Claim?
The specific claims are sweeping 1. Fomenko argues that ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt are reflections of the Middle Ages, and that Chinese and Arab history were fabricated by 17th and 18th century Jesuits 1. He claims the Bible is an 11th to 14th century composition, that the Biblical Babylonian Captivity is really the 14th century Avignon Papacy, and that Jesus lived in the 12th century AD 1. He also proposes that a vast Slavic-Turkic empire — a "Horde" often linked to the later Tartaria myth — once dominated much of the world before being written out of history 2.
Why Do His Methods Fail?
Fomenko's central tool is statistical: he correlates sequences of rulers and events, claiming that matching "dynastic parallels" reveal duplicated history 2. The problem is that such correlations are easy to manufacture — with enough flexibility, almost any two sequences can be made to look similar, so the parallels are contrived rather than real 2. His astronomical arguments fare no better 2. He reinterprets eclipse records and star positions in texts like Ptolemy's Almagest to force much later dates, but professional astronomers have shown the original datings are consistent with the conventional timeline 2. The methods produce the desired conclusion only by cherry-picking 2.
Why the Theory Is Impossible
Beyond flawed methods, New Chronology collides with overwhelming independent evidence 2. Modern dating does not rely on old chronicles at all: radiocarbon dating, tree-ring dating stretching back thousands of years, stratigraphy, and coinage all independently confirm the conventional timeline 2. Unconnected civilizations — Chinese, Islamic, and Mesoamerican among them — kept their own records that cross-corroborate one another, which no single group of forgers could have coordinated 1. And the archaeological record of the Classical world is vast and still growing 2. For all of this to be faked would require a conspiracy of unrealistic and impossible scale 2.
How Is This Connected to Tartaria?
New Chronology matters today partly because it is a root of the modern "Tartaria" and "mud flood" conspiracy theories 2. Fomenko's idea of a suppressed, world-spanning empire that history "forgot" laid intellectual groundwork that later online communities expanded into claims of a lost advanced Tartarian civilization 2. The appeal is similar in both cases: a dramatic hidden truth, a distrust of official history, and the authority of an unexpected expert 1. But like Tartaria, New Chronology is classified as pseudohistory, unsupported by the evidence 1.
Related fact-checks on this site: [Star Forts Lost Technology](https://innumbra.com/post/star-forts-lost-technology-fact-check) and [Worlds In Collision Velikovsky](https://innumbra.com/post/worlds-in-collision-velikovsky-fact-check).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is New Chronology? Anatoly Fomenko's theory that recorded history before about 800 AD was fabricated and the timeline inflated by over 1,000 years 1.
Is Fomenko a historian? No. He is an accomplished mathematician with no formal training in history or archaeology 2.
How does he support the theory? Through statistical "dynastic parallels" and reinterpreted astronomical records, both of which experts reject 2.
Why is New Chronology wrong? Independent dating methods and cross-corroborating records from unconnected civilizations confirm the standard timeline 2.
Is it linked to Tartaria? Yes. New Chronology is an intellectual root of the modern Tartaria and mud flood conspiracy theories 2.