Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

psychohistory

Just now, I was googling around the web in search of the Latin adjectival form for the city of Cairo, when I dropped in on the New Tradition website. So, what had Garry Kasparov been up to after losing to IBM's Deep Blue chess program? Obviously, lending his good name to the efforts of A. T. Fomenko (1945- ), Russian mathematician, who has proved that written history is only about 1000 years old. He had some help from N. A. Morozov (1854-1946), who had proved that written history only went back to 300 CE. I have to admit I was a little shocked to discover such a rich vein of academic psychoceramics of which I was totally unaware. The New Traditions website is hosted by Vladimir Melamed who runs Lencom Software, Inc. which sells email marketing software.

There's plenty of information around the web concerning Fomenko, Morozov, and company. Here's a choice example:

The number of inconsistencies and errors in the book is unbelievable.
Let me remind you that according to Fomenko everything in the world
history is eventually mapped to medieval Italy. He even takes great
pains to prove that the Bible actually describes Italian events
of X - XIII centuries. Fomenko undertakes some linguistic analysis
to show that Hebrew word 'Mitzraim' which is usually associated with
Egypt stands in fact for Rome, Sinai is Mt. Vesuvius, etc. His exercises
in linguistics are not just weak - they're ludicrous because this
esteemed scholar is apparently unaware of the basics of the discipline
that he is boldly calling for help.

…

Fomenko is a decent mathematician though. I think that either the book is
a hoax and he's secretly laughing over the people who take it seriously,
or we just witness a peculiar case of dementia which affects only
the part of brain responsible for logical reasoning.

[Vitaly Shmatikov on soc.culture.soviet]

I ran across the assumption more than once online — usually from Fomenko's compatriots — that he was writing a satire of sorts. You can judge for yourself. Here's one of his articles in English at the University of Omsk.

Dynastic stream of English kings from 640 to 1040 A.D.
(400-year period) is a duplicate (reflection) of Byzantine
dynastic stream from 378 to 830 A.D. (452-year period). These two
dynastic streams coincide after 210-year chronological shift.

…

Even if the vowels of common words are not that important
(you can easily reconstruct a well-known word from the context),
the situation changes completely when combination of consonants
meaning a city, country, the name of a king, etc., appears in an
ancient text. Tens and hundreds of different variants of vowels
for one term (word) may be found, stating the "identifications"
of the biblical vowel-free names of cities, countries, and
others, made by traditional historians proceeding from the
chronological (and geographical) version of J.Scaliger and the
localization referring the biblical events to the Near East.

…

Where was the land Britain which was conquered by Brutus located? In what direction his fleet cruised?

Ancient Troy located in medieval Italy; King Brutus of Britannia existed; Russia not an island. These are just some of the fantastic observations in the preceeding article. I am exhausted.

[Addendum 08/03/03: An interesting anti-Fomenko article: Who Lost the Middle Ages?.]

[Addendum 08/04/03: Mr Aitch over at Giornale Nuovo has an entry which reveals another side to the fascinating Fomenko: he's an artist.]