Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Similarly thin is the ground uniting Herakles and Briareus. Graves holds that the Pillars of Herakles were once associated with Briareus and later assigned to Herakles after the Briareus myth “faded from memory,” though he does say (without evidence or explanation) that the earliest Herakles was named Briareus.[377] Temple’s troubles are compounded when we discover that Graves identifies Herakles directly with Gilgamesh[378] without the need for Briareus or reference to the Argonauts. Worse, Graves specifically identifies Achilles as another Gilgamesh “variant,” and he cites the older myth of Jason’s descent into the dragon’s stomach (one Temple ignores) as related to the Bible’s tale of Jonah and the whale, Jonah being cited as synonymous with Marduk, the Babylonian god!

  As the reader may have guessed, Graves, who was a poet and novelist rather than an academic, had a particular and penchant for finding fanciful correspondences between mythological characters and for imposing his idiosyncratic views on the Greek myths. Immediately upon publication of The Greek Myths reviewers attacked Graves for his “defective scholarship”[379] for which there was “no conceivable evidence” to support his “inaccuracies, evasions, improbable analogies, and amateur etymologies.”[380] In short, his scholarship was not to be trusted, and no reputable scholar would use Graves’s theories without copious documentary support, which is not to be found in The Sirius Mystery. However, Temple sees Graves as “invaluable” and “superb.”[381]

  For Robert Temple to rely on Graves’s book not just as a convenient secondary reference for Greek myths but as the foundation for his understanding of mythology and the interrelationship of myths to one another is simply unsupportable. Even when Temple began writing The Sirius Mystery in 1967, Graves’s missteps were well-known; by the time of the 1998 revision of Sirius, continued reliance on these erroneous interpretations was inexcusable.

  There is a further complication here for Temple’s theory. Given the vast period of time over which the Jason myth was told and retold, from the Bronze Age to late versions written under the Roman Empire, it would stand to reason that prehistoric Sirius lore should best be preserved in the oldest versions of and allusions to the myth, those closest in time to the aliens and their teachings. But Temple does not consider this and instead takes Graves’s version as “standard” (minus the apparently interchangeable heroes). All this on top of the fact that Graves himself warns that older Argonaut stories were nothing like the story from the Hellenistic age![382]

  Other than a superficial swipe at Herakles’ and Orpheus’ appearance in Apollonius, Temple makes no attempt to separate late interpolations from older traditions, thus presenting every scrap of legend from 1500 BCE to 250 BCE as part of one unified Sirius-Jason complex, as though the myth were unchanged in its details for a thousand years. This would be the equivalent of trying to study early medieval Britain using only Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1856-1885) and a rough idea that King Arthur lived in the Dark Ages. Obviously, one cannot claim on the basis of a modern retelling of a late version of a myth that an African tribe is the flesh-and-blood descendants of these mythic heroes.

  At this point, it should go without saying that any direct relationship between Jason’s fifty oarsmen and the “fifty” Anunnaki is entirely speculative. While the Anunnaki may occasionally be referred to as fifty in number (though Temple gives no source for this), their numbers vary in myth. The Babylonians, for example, considered them to be three hundred in number.[383] However, to give the devil his due, Gilgamesh did have fifty companions in the earliest versions of his myth (c. 2000 BCE), though these were left out of the later versions of the first and second millenniums BCE, the versions current when the Jason myth was promulgated and eventually recorded. However, as half of one hundred, fifty was an exceedingly common number in mythology, and unless we choose to read all reference to fifty as Sirius lore, there needs to be something more than linguistic convenience to justify such an interpretation of a rather standard poetic number.[384]

  Conclusions

  I hope this review of Temple’s misuse ancient myth in The Sirius Mystery has accomplished two things: first, to demonstrate that an author who cannot be trusted in big things (the truth of extraterrestrial visitation) cannot be trusted in small things either; and second, to put to rest the persistent myth that even if one does not support Temple’s conclusions about intelligent space-faring frogmen that his scholarship and erudition are still an important contribution to the study of ancient mythology and history.

  There is a bit of poetic irony in all this, too. Robert Temple’s knowledge of Jason and the Argonauts, and the story’s history and development, seems to derive entirely from Robert Graves and his Greek Myths. Temple does not directly cite the Jason tales of Hesiod, Pindar, and Apollonius, the ancient authors from whom we derive our knowledge of the myth.[385] Had he done so, he might just have noticed a curious passage in Apollonius, who describes Medea’s first glimpse of Jason at their clandestine meeting in Hecate’s temple: “[H]e appeared to her as she desired, like Sirius leaping high from Ocean….”[386] There you have it: Jason is Sirius! Of course, this is nothing but a bit of poetic simile, but its omission underscores just how poorly researched The Sirius Mystery really is, despite its hundreds of endnotes and reputation as the thinking person’s ancient astronaut book.

  43. Who Lost the Middle Ages?

  In 1685, a French scholar by the name of Jean Hardouin published an edition of the Roman author Pliny’s Natural History. Hardouin, however, had an unusual belief about its origins. He was convinced that all of the ancient records of Greece and Rome were forgeries perpetrated by Benedictine monks, and that all of the Greco-Roman artifacts were similarly faked. By the time of his death in 1729, he had not provided a reason why the Benedictines would fake so much history, nor a shred of evidence to back up his claims.[387] Today an intellectual successor to Hardouin claims that it is not classical antiquity that was forged, but instead the history of the Middle Ages. Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko has devised a system he calls the “New Chronology” that he says firmly establishes the fictive nature of the medieval epoch. The University of Moscow professor published a book called Antiquity in the Middle Ages: Greek and Bible History, in which he argues that the written record of human history should be condensed from thousands of years into hundreds of years. For Fomenko, history unfolded not over millennia but centuries. The English edition of the book was published in September 2003, under the title History: Fiction or Science?, with a lurid cover featuring the crucified Christ, but it is not necessary to buy the book to learn about Fomenko’s theories. Before the book’s translation, he published a 29,000-word summary of his findings online. This opus, written with G. V. Nosovskij, is grandly titled “New Chronology and New Concept of the English History: British Empire as a Direct Successor of the Byzantine-Roman Empire,” and it commits as great an assault on the English language as it does on English history. Nevertheless, it is an important and illuminating look at a new wave of alternative history, a history that appeals to Russians because it is designed to restore to post-Soviet Russia some of the power and greatness of its past.

  Fomenko begins by telling his readers that English history is flawed and broken. He argues that the source texts used to create our understanding of Britain from the Roman occupation to William the Conqueror are misdated: “In correct version, ancient and medieval English events am to be transferred to the epoch which begins from 9-10th cc [centuries]. Moreover, many of these events prove to be the reflections of certain events from real Byzantine-Roman history of 9-15th cc. Consequently, the Great Britain Empire is a direct successor of medieval Byzantine Empire.”[388]

  Say what?

  According to Fomenko, there were originally four sources of historical knowledge, books which he refers to as A, B, C, and D. The latter three were imperfect copies of A—the True History. Over time as they were copied and recopied each became so garbled that the four books were eventually assumed to be four separate histor
ies rather than flawed copies of one narrative. Therefore, when late medieval scribes set about writing history, they accidentally made history four times longer than it should have been by repeating the same history four times. Fomenko believes this accounts for “similarities” he has found in the different periods of human history. More importantly, this discovery allows him to reconstruct the True History by collapsing the four histories into a few hundred years.

  He calls this compressed version the “fibred” [fiber structure] chronicle. The three chronicles B, C, and D were embedded into A by considering each one as a rigid block and shifting them forward by approximately 333, 1053, and 1778 years respectively.[389]

  How did Dr. Fomenko decide how far to shift his dates? The answer goes to the heart of why his theory makes little sense. He says he decided to apply his knowledge of advanced mathematics to the study of history. He began by studying the astronomical phenomena recorded in Ptolemy’s Almagest, a text from the second century CE that catalogued the positions of 1,028 stars and introduced the concept of the epicycle to explain the retrograde motion of the planets. Fomenko is of the opinion that the Almagest actually records astronomical phenomena from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries CE. He detailed his reasoning in Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations Dating Ptolemy’s Almagest. Without getting into the complex mathematics, the Fomenko method of analyzing the stars does not quite prove his point. Even though he assigns a small margin of error to Ptolemy’s figures, he must then assume that Ptolemy’s values are largely without error in order to arrive at “true” dates. A small error in value on the part of Ptolemy could—and does—throw all Fomenko’s calculations to the wind.

  Using this eccentric interpretation, Fomenko proceeds to declare that on this basis all historical chronology is wrong. The Roman Empire, he claims, actually began in the ninth century, and its Eastern half, condescendingly called Byzantine, was the true model for all history. (“Byzantine” was a derogatory term associated with paganism used by the Holy Roman Empire to discredit its eastern rival.) Cutting to the chase, Fomenko concludes that British history is really Byzantine history, that the English kings were British renamings of the Byzantine Emperors, and that all of this history was fabricated when refugees from the fallen Byzantine capital “returned” to England in 1453 and brought their history to the barbarian island.[390]

  He counts Cenwalch of Wessex and Sussex (643-672 CE) as the first “English” king, and he says his reign is the British duplicate (or reinterpretation) of the Eastern Roman Theodosius the Great (378-395 CE), for no particular reason other than the 275-year shift in time that makes it match his “New Chronology.” But to make them equivalent, Fomenko can only use Cenwalch’s reign over Wessex (647-672). Even then, his 25-year reign still does not match Theodosius’ 16-year stay on the throne. Nevertheless, this error of more than 50 percent is still considered a parallel.

  His other parallels, even after a double reordering of Byzantine monarchs (they were themselves duplicated twice, you see), are still not very accurate. Beorhtric (ruled 16 years) is equated to Justin I (ruled 9 years), different by nearly half. Fomenko links Aethelbert (6 years) to Justin II (13 years), an error of more than 100%. He has to combine Zeno’s two reigns (over a period of, but not totaling, 17 years) to match the English Cuthread (17 years).

  Fomenko does manage, however, a couple of good “hits.” He links Egbert, the uniter of England (ruled 38 years), to Justinian the Great, restorer of the Roman Empire (ruled 38 years). But then he combines King Edgar (16 years) with King Edward the Martyr (3 years) and claims they both represent Leo III the Isaurian (24 years). He concludes that the names Edgar and Edward are “similar and consequently their union is natural.”[391] Of course, the eleven Emperors Constantine (and the additional Emperors named Constans and Constantius) were apparently readily distinguished by the barbarians.

  His entire theory depends on his idea that history is merely the chronicle of the reigns of monarchs, and that the mathematical relationships between their reigns is as sound as the mathematically relationship of two sides of an algebraic equation. This is nonsense of the worst kind, made worse by the fact that Fomenko had to actively rewrite Byzantine history to get his correlation to match the English history he so badly wants to appropriate (requiring tolerances, as we have shown, of more than 100%).

  In short, Fomenko cut and pasted the Emperors in any order he chose to make them conform as closely as he could to selected monarchs of England’s past. But even more damaging to his argument claiming that there are mathematical correlations between English and Byzantine rulers is the fact that he has to discount virtually every other fact known about the two cultures. Fomenko claims that Byzantine history from 1143-1453 CE is a mistaken duplicate of history from 830-1143 CE. If this were true, then why would the “fictional” or “duplicate” monarchs of the later period all have coins prominently displaying theft names and portraits? If the rulers of two Byzantine periods and England were one and the same, why should their lives and loves, their triumphs and tragedies differ markedly through “error” and “exaggeration” while the same chroniclers doggedly preserved the length of their reigns?

  For that matter, how can we expect to believe Fomenko’s arguments since Imperial coinage that documents the succession of the emperors can be gathered from virtually every year from 27 BCE to 1453 CE? How do we discount written Roman history and the great reigns of the past? Further, if Fomenko is correct, we must ignore the Magna Carta of 1215, since England’s King John would have been nothing more than a Byzantine fantasy. Paradoxically, Fomenko endorses the reality of the Crusades, perhaps because he thinks the Crusaders brought Byzantine history to back England. If so, one immediately wonders how feudalism, Catholicism, and every structure and artifact associated with the High Middle Ages developed spontaneously in the mere 50 years he allots between Rome and the Renaissance. To suggest that the British built medieval England from a Roman England that he claims lasted only from the ninth to tenth centuries is a feat that contradicts all known ideas about the development of civilization.

  Fomenko also ignores other lines of evidence. He does not account for the chronological continuity of the Roman Catholic popes, or the well-dated series of Church Councils and Papal Bulls. He completely dismisses the radiocarbon evidence that dates artifacts from Rome and the Middle Ages to the accepted timetable and not to his own revised chronology.

  Pushing his ideas still further, Fomenko argues that our confusion about the True Dates derives from the old English use of the term “Year of Grace” as a synonym for Anno Domini, A.D. He extrapolates: “Maybe the original (and now forgotten) meaning of a formula ‘Years of Grace’ differs from one which is accepted today. Maybe it was ‘years in Greece.’ ‘Greek years’ or something like this.”[392] And of course, since he claims Greece was another name for the Byzantine Empire, ipso facto Christian years become Byzantine years and England becomes the Byzantine Empire, Q.E.D. To be fair, Fomenko concedes this argument is not strong, but he bases his thesis on sound-alike names, even claiming that the continent of Asia really means “Jesus-land.” Grace derives from the Latin gratia, thanks or goodwill; Greece is from the Latin Graecia, their word for the Hellenes. Jesus was several centuries too late to get naming fights to Asia, already called that in ancient Greek times.

  None of these facts stop Fomenko from also claiming that the name “England” derived from the Byzantine dynasty of the Angeli. They are not related. In fact, the dynastic name of the three Emperors surnamed Angelus is Latin and is a Westernized version of its Greek original, angeloi. The name England derives from the Old English for “Land of the Angles,” as opposed to the Saxons. The Angles derive their name from the Latin angli which bears no relation to the word for angel, angelus. Angli was the name given to a branch of the river Suevi in Germany. Tacitus, in his Germania, names the tribe so,[393] and around 450 CE the people of the Angli river united with the Saxons to invade Engl
and.

  Nevertheless, despite lacking facts and evidence, Fomenko’s world-view argues that history is a massive fraud: “Roughly speaking, ancient English chronicles are in fact Byzantine chronicles which were taken from Byzantine to England and then modified in a such way that they seem to speak about events in England.”[394] Yet to make his case Fomenko has to massacre history and ignore the archaeological evidence from the island and from Constantinople. He has to willfully manipulate the historical record in the very way he accuses the medieval English of doing. And to what end?

  Well, that answer is quite simple. Fomenko is Russian, so it is not surprising that Fomenko “discovered” that Russia was the source of universal empire and that its culture gave rise to England. That explains his Byzantine chauvinism, for the Russian czars (= Caesars) saw themselves as the legitimate successors to the Byzantine emperors through the miracle of shared faith in the (then united) Orthodox Church. If England could be shown to “really” be Byzantium, then all the advances of England, and America, are “really” Byzantine and hence Russian. In other words, this elaborate theory is nothing more than an attempt to bolster the battered and broken shell of the formerly great Russian state, and to claim for Mother Russia a small piece of the reflected glory of a world that passed it by.

  Following the publication of Fomenko’s book in English his publisher, Delamere Resources Ltd, announced that it had received “innumerable venomous complaints with unprintable undertones.” To respond to the critics, Delamere issued a press release in January 2004, challenging scientists to disprove Fomenko’s assertions. They offered a $10,000 “cash reward” to anyone who could prove that any human artifacts existed prior to the eleventh century CE. There was one catch, however: the “proof” could not use “archaeological, dendrochronological, paleographical and carbon methods.”[395] Thus having safely excluded all scientific methods of dating and most historical methods, they confidently demanded that all proof be of the same “academic level as the heretic Fomenko.”[396]