New Chronology

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The "New Chronlogy" has been around for quite a while. Perhaps because
of the interenet, it seems to have become more popular recently. In the
old forums, there were adverstisements for material relating to new
Chronology. For those of you who aren't familiar with that this is
about, 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The New Chronology of Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is an attempt to
rewrite world chronology, based on his conclusion that world chronology
as we know it today is flawed, put together by unscientific
methods.  The ideas of Fomenko are a direct continuation of
earlier theories of Nikolai Morozov.

In his revision, Fomenko claims that our chronology is elongated by
around 1000 years, by misdating medieval manuscripts to earlier times;
for example, some manuscripts which describe history of Rome around
1000 AD were, according to Fomenko, misdated as being thousand years
older than they actually are, and so are today believed to describe
history of Rome around 1 AD which didn't actually happen. The end
result is that events which history claims to have happened 2000 years
ago are copies of events which happened 1000 years ago. As another
example, Fomenko claims that Plato, Plotinus and Gemistus Pletho are
one same person - according to him, some texts by or about Pletho were
misdated and today believed to be texts by or about Plotinus or Plato.

There are many resources on the web dedicated to new chronology, some are frighteningly large and long.

One of the oldest sites on New Chronology is revisedhistory.org. For example, let's take a look at one of its section

 http://www.revisedhistory.org/investigation-historical-datin g.htm#

Here there's a lot of discussion on dynasty funcitons. However, the
problem is that in the first graph, the dates selected for comparison
seems to be arbitrary. Some of the dates in the parentheses don't flow
smoothly to the next. Some characters like Henry I seem to be missing
from the chart. The second graph looks a lot more compelling because it
has more of relation between the two being compared. But then again,
there're only two charts and there's no reason to say that it wasn't a
coincidence. Furthermore, there seems to be something strange with the
dates around the time of "Gaius I."

We will discuss some of typical arguments against the New Chronology.
One of the most popular arguments in support of the conventional
chronology is that the carbon-14 dating method supports it. But in fact
it is not true. The carbon-14 method, which was discovered by Willard
Libby, is based on the measurement of the radiocarbon level in organic
samples. It assumes essentially uniform level of the isotope carbon-14
in every living material, but it is now clear that carbon-14 was never
homogeneously distributed. In fact, in order to improve its "accuracy,"
the carbon-14 method was calibrated using samples of "known" age. It
was done by constructing the so-called calibration curves, which are
dependent on the conventional chronology. That means the carbon-14
dating method is secondary and is not able either confirm or discard
any chronological theory. In addition, the errors induced by this
method exceed all reasonable time intervals. We would like to point out
that if the global chronology was changed, the carbon-14 dating method
would also work nicely with the new dating system. It is not possible
to present here a complete discussion of this complicated problem (we
refer the reader to [2], Vol.1, pp. 133-136, [3], Vol.1, pp. 184-214,
and [13]).

However, calibration curves do not entirely depend on known chronology,
as they are usually made in comparison with natural chronology, such as
tree rings.

There is also a huge work by Fomenko on the internet, here:

http://lib.ru/FOMENKOAT/engltr.txt

Yep, support or debunk it. 

Edited by Imperator Invictus