The claim
Anatoly Fomenko is a real mathematician. He holds a chair at Moscow State University, he is a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he was elected to it for work in geometry and topology that has nothing to do with any of this. That matters, because it is the reason the New Chronology gets a hearing that similar claims do not.
What he argues, with his co-author Gleb Nosovsky, is that the accepted timeline of the ancient and medieval world is not merely wrong at the edges but wrong by roughly a thousand years, and wrong on purpose. In his account written history effectively begins around 800 AD. Almost everything placed before that — Egypt, classical Greece, republican and imperial Rome — is a duplicate of events from between 1000 and 1500, back-projected into an invented antiquity.
The forgery has an author. Fomenko names Joseph Scaliger, the sixteenth-century scholar who did in fact do much of the foundational work on historical chronology, as the man who assembled the false scheme, in the service of the powers of his day.
The replacements are specific. Jesus, in this telling, is the Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos, born in Crimea on 25 December 1152 and executed on 20 March 1185. Jerusalem, Rome and Troy are all Constantinople. The Hagia Sophia is the Temple of Solomon, and Solomon himself is Suleiman the Magnificent. The Mongol invasions never happened as described; what existed instead was a Slav-Turkic empire, the Russian Horde, of which the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Cossacks are all facets, and which dominated Eurasia until the seventeenth century.
That last element is why the theory connects to the Tartaria claims, which this archive covers separately, and it is the part that gives the whole a political colour it is not always willing to admit to.
The method
The argument that persuades people is not the reconstruction. It is the statistics that come before it.
Fomenko compares dynasties: the lengths of successive reigns in one royal line set against another, treated as a numerical sequence. Where two sequences correlate closely he concludes they are not two dynasties but one, recorded twice and filed under different centuries. He does the same with the lengths and structures of narrative texts. From these correlations he builds a map of duplicates, and from the duplicates the compression of the timeline follows.
He also works astronomically, which is where the claim becomes properly testable. He re-dates the star catalogue in Ptolemy's Almagest by the proper motion of its stars; he reads the zodiacs at Dendera as datable horoscopes; he argues that recorded eclipses do not fit the years assigned to them.
Where it fails, in detail
Because the astronomy is testable, the objections to it are unusually concrete. They are not assertions that the theory is unorthodox. They are specific calculations.
The star catalogue. Fomenko's dating of the Almagest rests on eight stars selected from a catalogue of more than a thousand. Dambis and Efremov ran the proper-motion analysis across the fast-moving stars in bulk instead and arrived at 89 BC give or take 112 years — antiquity, not the Middle Ages. Dennis Duke later re-examined that bulk method itself and found the underlying correlation weaker than claimed, which is worth noting: the specialists are still arguing about how precisely the catalogue can be dated, and none of the candidate answers is anywhere near the twelfth century.
The obliquity. Dennis Rawlins showed that part of the statistical work treats the tilt of the Earth's axis as a constant. It is not; it changes at a known and measurable rate, and correcting for it moves the results.
Eclipses. F. R. Stephenson's systematic work on Babylonian, Chinese and European eclipse records finds they can be dated consistently with conventional chronology back to at least 600 BC — three separate recording traditions, mutually independent, agreeing. The accumulated uncertainty in the Earth's rotation over that span is on the order of a minute and a half, not a millennium.
Tree rings. Fomenko argues dendrochronology has gaps that make it useless as a check. Absolutely dated ring sequences now run back more than twelve thousand years, with independent North American and European chronologies confirming each other and cross-checked against radiocarbon.
Cuneiform. Babylonian astronomical diaries record positions of the Moon and planets alongside the regnal years of named kings, in enough detail to fix individual observations to the day. They are ignored rather than answered.
Language. The linguist Andrey Zaliznyak set out at length how the theory handles historical language data — the etymological resemblances it treats as identities, and the sound changes it would require but never demonstrates. The archaeologist Valentin Yanin compared the method to sleight of hand.
The general methodological objection is the one that recurs: matches that support the scheme are collected, matches that contradict it are not, and the correlation of reign lengths takes no account of the fact that different chroniclers in different languages counted, rounded and disputed regnal years differently.
Kasparov
The theory would probably have stayed a specialist curiosity without Garry Kasparov. The former world chess champion met Fomenko in the 1990s and wrote in support in Ogoniok, and it was that which carried it to a general readership.
His position is narrower than his advocacy is usually taken to mean. What Kasparov found convincing was the negative half — his objection that it made no sense for Byzantium to have sat on the accumulated knowledge of Greece and Rome and done so little with it, which he read as evidence that the Dark Ages as described cannot have happened. He does not endorse the reconstruction: not Andronikos as Jesus, not the Russian Horde, not the specific redating.
That distinction is worth keeping, because the two halves are often quoted together as a single endorsement, and it also marks where the interesting question sits. A reader can find the standard account of the early medieval period unsatisfying without accepting that the first millennium was invented.
Where it stands
The New Chronology is treated as pseudohistory across the professional literature, and the objections above are the reasons rather than the label. Fomenko and Nosovsky received the Abzatz anti-prize at the Moscow International Book Fair in 2004. Work continues to appear examining the astronomical claims directly, including a 2025 paper re-testing the Almagest dating and the planetary cycle the scheme depends on.
What keeps it alive is not the reconstruction, which almost nobody defends in detail, but the intuition underneath it: that the deep past is known through a chain of documents and copies, that the chain was assembled comparatively recently by identifiable men, and that a sufficiently determined forger could have got into it. The chain is real. What the eclipse records, the tree rings and the cuneiform diaries provide are checks that do not run through Scaliger at all, and it is those, rather than the authority of historians, that the theory has to get past.