History Online - Chronology

This fibre can be called 'critical'. Here, we analyze the traditional datings of events of the ancient and medieval history of Europe, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. To make it convenient for the reader, we gather here the vast data scattered throughout the scientific literature, known to the specialists of various disciplines (however, often not of general common knowledge), and shall reveal the serious difficulties on the way to justifying the dates of certain ancient events.

We shall inform the reader of the fundamental research of the remarkable Russian scientist and universal scholar N.A. Morozov (1854-1946), Honorary Member of the USSR Academy of Science, who was the first to pose and fully formulate the problem of justifying ancient chronology by means of the methods of natural science, and who collected enormous critical material, putting forward daring hypotheses. We also speak of Isaac Newton's chronological research (questioning the dates of many ancient events), of well-known representatives of the critical school in chronology, and of various others working in the field. We then let major specialists in archaeology, source research, or numismatics speak and often resort to quoting and supplying the opinions of well-known scientists, juxtaposing different points of view so that the reader can form his own attitude toward the problems touched upon. The analysis of the dates of ancient events is the basic application of the empirico-statistical methods we worked out. I was therefore forced to analyze possibly all preserved versions of the datings of particular events. As a matter of fact, ancient and medieval texts often differ with respect to the dates of many important events. Attempting to stay as close as possible to the 'original' versions (and perhaps to reconstruct them), we usually preferred the versions established in the chronological documents from the llth to the 16th century. The chronol-ogists of that time were nearer to the ancient events described, which is very important. The versions recorded between the 17th and the 20th century are often the consequence of later, secondary treatment, sometimes blurring the original chronological scheme. The reader should always remember this when looking at the dates given in this book.

Let me clarify this thought. Consider the evolution in time of historical documents and that of attitudes toward the datings of the described events. In the absence of a unique system for denoting dates in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the same events and documents could be dated differently by different chronologists belonging to different epochs. Let an event occur in the year to and be fixed in a document X written in to (or around this time) by a contemporary. X starts 'living' when generations succeed each other. Another chronicler living in a later year t could no longer have access to all the necessary information and might 'calculate' the date of an event. Denote by D(to,t) the date ascribed to an event in X, and actually occurring in to, by a chronicler who lived in the year t. It is clear that D(to,t) can be different from [o by some positive or negative value. The chronicler's version of the date can turn out to be older (then D(to,t) is less than to) or, on the contrary, younger (then D(to,t) is greater than t). Thus, D(to,t) establishes the point of view elaborated by the chronicler in t with respect to the datings pertaining to X. It is obvious that D(to,t) is dependent either of [o or t. We can assume that -0(^0, to) == to, i.e., the contemporaries mostly date the contemporary events correctly.

Let us construct the graph of the dependence of D(to,t) on t for a fixed [o. We then obtain the visual representation of the evolution of the later chroniclers' view of dating an event actually occurring in to. It is convenient to represent it in the form shown in Fig. A. Dating the event to, given by the contemporary chronologists, is denoted by D([o,1986). In other words, ^(to, 1986) indicates the modern version of the dating if the event actually occurred in to. Of course, D(to, 1986) can be different from the true dating, for example, be more ancient or younger.

Since the same event in to could be described by the contemporaries in several different documents (this being the typical situation), these individual versions start existing individually as separate texts not related to each other irom the viewpoint of subsequent generations. We have represented this fact thematically in Fig. B by doubling or repeating some events and their datings several times. The further evolution of each version is represented by its own curve, each emanating from the same diagonal but subsequently behaving absolutely independently. Meanwhile, different versions of the description of an event, outwardly totally different, can diverge far from each other from the standpoint of later chronologists. The complete evolution of datings of ancient events is given in Fig. C. Each subsequent epoch finds its own attitude toward the datings of the past events. These versions can vary substantially with time (we give examples of this in the book). Starting with the period from the 16th to the 17th century (see Fig. C), the chronological version of ancient times suggested by I. Scaliger and D. Petavius, is being 'stabilized', and the modern point of view coincides, in its basic features, with their chronology. This circumstance shows in the increasing straightening of the 'alignment' of the dating trajectories. Today, we have assimilated only this version. However, very little is known about all the previous versions, which often differ sharply from today's. In other words, we are only well aware of the topmost line for the dates D and know very little of other lines, which obviously make up the bulk of the diagram. Thus, the enormous base of the chronological iceberg is hidden, within which the modern version of ancient chronology has been formed. The basic question formulated in the critical fibre of the book (the second 'fibre') is related only to the underwater part. It is in this sense that we paid so much attention to the ancient chronological versions of the 10th- to 15th-century scientists.

We now elucidate what is meant by 'correct', or 'authentic', chronology in terms of the graphs in Figs. A, B, and C. It is the chronology in which the evolution of the date of an ancient event would be represented by approximately vertical lines (see Fig. D). Only in this case can the dates accepted today be regarded as realistic. To verify whether today's ancient chronology satisfies this condition, we should exhibit chronological tables associated with each horizontal line in Fig. C, made up by subsequent chronologists of ancient times. In other words, we should find the originals of those ancient chronological versions forming the steps of a staircase which the dates were 'ascending'. Meanwhile, we have to see that the transition from each version to the previous or subsequent one is represented by vertical lines in Fig. C.

However, an attempt to descend into the past on these 'steps', say by jumping over the 20 to 30 years that make up a generation, permits us to move only to the 12th and 13th centuries (with the 'staircase' breaking earlier than that). Here we only discover 'dating' of pieces that are not united into chronological tables preserved until today, and which fix the viewpoints of the ancient chronologists. Earlier than approximately the 13th century, no sequence of 'shorter' predecessors of the chronological table can be found. It is desirable that the 'shortening' of the table (respectively, its 'extension') occurred approximately by 20 to 30 years, in the hope that the events of this time were described by a contemporary. The important characteristic of the second 'fibre' is that the critical material is gathered only here. It thus acquires a new quality and permits us to embrace a larger volume of critical data on the basis of one point of view, accumulated in special works on ancient chronology. We assume that the reader is at least roughly familiar with tradtional ancient chronology (having studied it at school, university, etc.) In general, we do not repeat the traditional version, since we believe it to be known by everyone, but rather focus our attention on the account and criticisms of the competing versions, which are sometimes much different from the traditional one and were developed by many scientists between the 16th and the 20th century.

Within the framework of the second 'fibre', we also supply a brief analysis of the traditional dating methods based on archaeological or radiocarbon data, which is of use if the reader would like to estimate the degree of reliability and accuracy. We shall also pay much attention to the dating of events that are about one, two, or three thousand years old and will demontrate, again by citing a number of authors, the difficulties that arise. Dating of material more than three thousand years old is beyond the scope of this book.

The author has constructed the so-called global chronological diagram (GCD), which can be regarded as a sufficiently complete and traditional 'textbook' for ancient and medieval chronology. All the basic events of ancient history with their traditional dates, lists of the names of principal characters, and so forth, have been plotted on the time axis, and the basic preserved primary sources marked for each epoch. The diagram contains tens of thousands of dates, names, references. Occupying an area of several tens of square metres, it is a convenient collection of statistical data and a guidebook to the building of the traditional version. The graphic representation along the time axis of the principal dates proved useful for the statistical experiments. Since the GCD contains too much material, it was included in this book only in abbreviated form as short tables or graphs and is often replaced by this shorter version. We stress once again that the GCD is based on the traditional dating of ancient events, arising from the Scaliger and Petavius chronology.