The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  As I read, I would wonder why we were touring a small isle in the Mediterranean, debating the heritage of a prince—and suddenly, aha! Newton would say, “therefore,” and prove that the four generations of history we had endured proved that someone was the same age as someone else, and that his great grandson therefore could not have been as ancient as some believe. Many events are connected by degrees of association to the Trojan War, to the reign of King Solomon, or to Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem. From thence an ancient history spiders off into tales of a king whose fifty daughters married his brother’s fifty sons, then at their father’s command all murdered their husbands so as to defend against their uncle’s betrayal; to the way Philistia was overrun by exiles from Egypt, making the Philistines more powerful and land-desperate when they fought the Judges, Saul, and David. Apparently all the ancients ran around conquering each other, erecting pillars, kidnapping princesses, and stealing them back. A great king of one country would be worshiped by his colonies in other countries until no one remembered he was a king and everyone thought he’d always been a god.9

  The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended is organized around Newton’s core conviction that Jewish civilization was the first in the world and nourished all other civilizations. As we’ve seen, ancient semitic languages scholar Abraham Yahuda characterized Newton as a “Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides,” regarding him as “more a monotheist than a trinitarian” for whom “Jehovah is the unique God.”10 In the Chronology, as in many other of his works, Newton’s “secret faith”—his fierce Judaic monotheism—shines through like a beacon.

  Newton seems to have begun the Chronology in 1685 with the aim of proving that the philosophers of the ancient world knew the Earth went around the sun and that everything was made of atoms. He seems to have ended the Chronology by veering into an amazingly prescient attempt to understand, in the vein of philosophers of history like Giambattista Vico and Arnold Toynbee, the origins and rise of civilizations. His overarching concern seems always to have been to prove to the world that “the Israelites at about the time of David gave writing, art, science and commerce to countries like Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Phoenicia, and that the transmission of culture had not been the other way around”11 (although, as we will see, Castillejo had suggested that Newton’s “historical” text was a cover masking something far different).

  Newton had his work cut out for him. He first of all had to deal with the enormous time spans of ancient nations that had been handed down by the world’s first historians: for Chaldea-Babylonia, 473,000 years (Berossus, third century BC); for Egypt, 36,525 years or thirty dynasties or 131 generations (Manetho, third century BC); and for Greece, 18,000 years (as inscribed on the Parian marble, a 2,000-year-old pillar transported from Athens to London in 1627).

  As a Christian with certain fundamentalist views, Newton couldn’t countenance these figures, because according to the Anglican bishop James Ussher, the world had been created only in 4004 BC (the Flood occurring 1,656 years later, in 2340 BC).

  So how did the great chroniclers of antiquity get their numbers so wrong?

  Modern-day chronologer Larry Pierce, editor of the updated version of Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, explains that

  in the centuries before Christ, a war broke out to see which nation had the oldest pedigree, whether real or invented. Just as an arms race raged between the super-powers in the 1960s, so an age race raged among the ancient civilizations in the centuries before Christ’s birth. Each claimed to have the oldest history. While some writers seemed interested in the truth, others were playing a game to see who could spin the biggest and most convincing yarn about the antiquity of their nation.12

  Frank Manuel adds that “great age was a chronological sign that one’s kings and one’s gods were closer to the fount of pure knowledge.”13 And Newton declared, at the beginning of the Chronology, that “all nations, when they begin to keep exact accounts of Time, have been prone to raise their Antiquities; and this humor has been promoted, by the Contentions between Nations about their Originals [origins].”14

  Even non-patriotic historians faced multiple difficulties in getting their chronologies right. War, famine, treachery, rapine, revolt, the murder of monarchs, dynastic marriages, and the fury of rebellion kept the Mediterranean world in a state of semi-chaos. Historical records were easily lost, destroyed, or corrupted. In 525–523 BC, the Persians under Cambyses II conquered Egypt and destroyed or carried off the nation’s entire store of historical archives—except for that part of it which had already been carried off, a century before, when the Assyrians conquered Egypt. Never-ending war kept the priests scrambling to reconstruct a part or all of their historical heritage. It’s understandable that they made mistakes, and even that they seized opportunities to fabricate. Moreover, “except for the Bible itself, the other histories of early nations were not recorded until well after the events had passed,” writes Manuel.15 The first historian to write about ancient Egypt, for example, was Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BC). Newton believed that no oral tradition older than a century should be trusted.

  Sir Isaac had some worthy predecessors in the business of creating chronologies. Theophilus of Antioch (115–180) produced a brief catalog of biblical events based on the “divine authority” of Christianity. Later on, a pagan convert to Christianity, Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 160–240), matched up Greek and Latin history with biblical history, labeling every event from the Creation in 5499 BC to year three of the emperor Eliogabalus’s reign (AD 221) as “in the year of Abraham.”

  Eusebius of Caesarea (260/265–339/340), whom we have already met as a judicial presence at the Council of Tyre, wrote a “global” chronology but did little to shorten the astronomical genealogies of Chaldea, Egypt, and Greece. More than 1,200 years later, the formidable polymath Joseph Justice Scaliger (1540–1609) ransacked the oldest libraries in Europe and came away with fifty ancient calendars that he synchronized to create the most comprehensive chronology yet. But even he did not seriously grapple with the vain and bloated time lines of the ancient world. That task would be left to Sir Isaac Newton.

  Newton tackled the overgrown chronologies of the first empires on Earth by inventing two new laws. The first, we might call the law of parsimony. This law was to be used with breathtaking effectiveness by A. T. Fomenko and his peers in their breakout chronological multi-volume History: Fiction or Science? The law of parsimony is based on the principle of Occam’s razor: that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity; or, to put it more simply, that, all things being equal, the simplest answer is the right answer.

  Deploying this law was one of the things Isaac Newton was born to do. “It was Newton’s peculiar art to reduce unbelievable complexity to almost unbelievable simplicity,” writes David Castillejo.16 The best illustration is Newton’s universal law of gravitation, the elements of which began to form in Newton’s mind when it occurred to him that the force that makes an apple fall might be the same force that prevents the moon from flying off into outer space. John Conduitt wrote in his Memoir of Newton:

  In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge . . . to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit.17

  Eventually, Newton would prove that gravity is a function of every discrete body in the universe.

  The great mathematician would display his skill in “conflation”—compressing into one entity (or into a very few) a multiplicity of entities all bearing a resemblance to one another—in his interpretation of Saint John’s Revelation. Here, he usually calls conflating “synchronizing”; he demonstrates it when, for example, he declares that four
prophetic hieroglyphs—the woman in the wilderness, the seven-headed beast, the downtrodden court, and the witnesses in sackcloth—are one and the same event because they each have the exact same duration in time.

  Never did Newton apply the principle of Occam’s razor more vigorously than when he lit into the tangled and monstrously overblown time lines of the ancient world. Here he wields this razor like a machete. The champion of the Jews hacks away superfluous underbrush, tears out whole vineyards, and sometimes fells entire orchards—and finally history becomes rational and manageable. Newton excoriates the priests and ancient historians for inserting names of kings in lists with no mention of their accomplishments, or extending the reigns of kings into hundreds of years, or for insisting that one king is two. Reading that both Apappus, twentieth king of Thebes, and Phiops, twentieth king of Memphis, reigned for nearly a hundred years and were followed by a king named Nitocris who reigned for a year, he declares that Apappus and Phiops are the same king and Thebes and Memphis are the same kingdom. He does this—as we’ll see—and then he uses his second new law to mightily compress the time period during which this one king reigned. He wrote: “It is further to be observed that the kings are often set down in the wrong order & their names corrupted and repeated again & again & intertwined with the names of other great men & women who were only the relations of kings or their viceroys or secretaries of state.”18

  Newton is diabolically wily when it comes to identifying other, perhaps unintentional, ways in which the record has been distorted: Some kings are called one name at home, another in each conquered country, and another as a royal title or one earned through military prowess. Some legendary figures are pseudonyms for the same kings. Through prodigies of etymology and phonetics, Newton demonstrates how the names of ancient kings have been distorted and multiplied over time “producing an apparent succession of kings where there was often originally only one.”19

  In Newton’s sparse and rather forbidding sentences, mythological figures jostle cheek to jowl with historical personages. “Sesac has in his army Ethiopians commanded by Pan,” writes Newton, or, “Laomedan King of Troy is slain by Hercules.”20 Newton is ever the dedicated euhemerist; for him, mythology is history in disguise. One of his lasting achievements in the Chronology is to show that the Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris is one and the same as the biblical king Sesac. He does this by providing numerous variations on the name “Sesac,” many of which he is able to link etymologically with the name “Sesostris”; he also establishes that the actions and conquests of Sesostris and Sesac are one and the the same. This correction of history by Newton—which has been accepted by historians—is one of the ways in which the mathematician was, however indirectly, able to postpone the Trojan War until eighty-five or ninety years after the death of Solomon. As we’ll see, Newton seeks to show that the kingdom of Egypt wasn’t of long duration but consisted of a number of kingdoms of short duration unfolding side by side through history (see below). In the Chronology, and in conversation with his colleagues, he insisted that the diffusion route of temple architecture ran from Solomon through Sesostris to the Greeks. He told William Stukeley that all Egyptian temples were modeled on the Temple of Solomon: “‘These heathens first imitated the Temple of Solomon in their own temples, then plundered it, and finally destroyed it.’ And in the Chronology he mentions that the chief temple at Babylon was modeled on the pyramids.”21

  The other new law of chronology Newton invented was that of the length of reigns. He had noted that the pagan writers of antiquity tended to reckon the length of ruling dynasties in terms of three successive kings to a century; Newton believed they were mixing up the length of a monarch’s reign with the length of a generation of mankind, which was usually about thirty-three years. It seemed to him that early death, the succession of brothers, and the overall wear and tear of running a kingdom in ancient times, must surely make for an average reign of only eighteen to twenty years. (The writers of the Old Testament, on the other hand, had almost always gotten the length of dynasties right.)

  Newton culled all of history, both ancient and modern, to see how long on average that rulers ruled. He came up with the figure of eighteen to twenty years. Voltaire agreed with him, writing:

  It is very evident that mankind in general live longer than kings are found to reign, so that an author who should write a history in which there were no dates fixed, and should know that nine kings had reigned over a nation—such a historian would commit a great error should he allow three hundred years to these nine monarchs.

  Every generation takes about thirty-six years; every reign is, one with the other, about twenty. Thirty kings of England have swayed the scepter from William the Conqueror to George I, the years of whose reigns added together amount to six hundred and forty-eight years; which, being divided equally among the thirty kings, give to every one a reign of twenty-one years and a half very near. Sixty-three kings of France have sat upon the throne; these have, one with another, reigned about twenty years each. This is the usual course of Nature. The ancients, therefore, were mistaken when they supposed the durations in general of reigns to equal that of generations.22

  This may not be of great interest to us today; in our age, royalty has no political clout and suffers mainly from the wear and tear of media exposure. But Newton’s insight was a brilliant one, and, applying this law of regnal length, he was able to knock a considerable number of years off the astronomically long time spans with which the first historians had credited the first nations.*43

  The Moscow chronology dissidents, led by Chronology: Fiction or Science? author Fomenko, have taken Newton’s Occam’s razor technique of conflation to whole new new heights: they’ve rammed together entire ruling dynasties! The mathematicians assert that because there were roughly the same number of popes from 911 to 1376 as there were kings of Judah from 931 to 586 BC, then these two groups must be the same group. They’ve found similarities between the popes of 141–314 and those of 314–532 and decided these represent a single line of popes. The Russian time revisionists assert that the chronology of the Carolingian kings and that of a string of Roman emperors refer to the same rulers. In this way, the Soviets have been able to hack roughly one thousand years out of the orthodox history of the world, backing up their assertions with, among other things, what they claim to be corrected scientific data about eclipses.

  Newton was so infinitely resourceful in coming up with time lines that he seems able to reach any conclusion he wants, observes Castillejo. “His etymology and his identifications and ramifications of mythologies, between them, allow him an almost complete fluidity and freedom to rearrange the facts and events of history in any way he wishes.” Newton’s inclusion of a five-page diagrammatic description of Solomon’s Temple in the middle of the book prompted the actor-scholar to speculate that the Chronology is really about the “heathen kingdoms and empires that surrounded the Jewish people and Temple on all sides.” By placing the Temple of Solomon in the center, Newton “crystallizes the whole of Middle Eastern history round the history of the Jews.”23 By shrinking the size of the ancient nations on either side of the temple, Newton greatly increases the predominance of the Temple of Solomon, again giving weight to his assertion that it was the Israelites who had introduced civilization to the world. As Manuel puts it, “Newton has animated the political world with the equivalent of a principle of universal gravitation. . . . The sun of the human world is the monarchy of Israel. This movement toward coalescence is a real law and admits of no exceptions.”24

  The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended shades into a number of other thematically related treatises by Newton, all of them written over decades, and all of them surviving in multiple manuscripts. These are “Original [Origin] of Religions,” “Original [Origin] of Monarchies,” and “Theologiae Gentiles Origines Philosophicae” (“Philosophical Origins of Pagan Theology”); we have dealt with this last at some length in chapter 10, “With Noah on the Mountaintop.”
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br />   Often these works continue Newton’s process of “deconstructing time,” sometimes by filling in the period between Noah and “the first memory of things in Europe in 1100 BC,” other times by leaping ahead. The “Original of Monarchies” begins with a description of how Noah and his family repopulated the world. At the end of chapter 10 we left Noah, his wife, his three sons Ham (founder of the “Hamitic” race), Shem (founder of the “Semitic” race), and Japheth (founder of northeastern regions) and his three daughters-in-law atop Mount Ararat and preparing to embark on their spectacular adventure of repopulating the world. When Newton picks up the story, the “remnant” family, having finally descended the holy mountain, has spent a hundred years in Mesopotamia. (We’ll recall that human life spans were still extremely long; Noah would live to more than five hundred).

  After the conflicts around the Tower of Babel had shattered the original Noachic language into a multitude of languages, Noah kept his eldest son, Shem, with him in Shinar and sent Ham to Egypt and Japheth to Asia Minor. When it came to be Ham’s turn to divide his dominion among his four sons, he kept his eldest, Chus, with him on the Arabian side of the Nile and sent Mizraim to Thebes, where he was expected to expand southward. Then he sent Phut to the western side of the Nile; this son was expected to spread out into Northern Africa. Ham sent his son Canaan to lower Egypt, from where he was expected to expand eastward toward Syria.25

  From here on in, the permutations and combinations of the sons and all their progeny become almost impossible to follow. Edward Gibbon gives us a summary, with introduction, of the nation-building activities of Noah’s son Japheth and his immediate successors.

  Among the nations who have adopted the Mosaic history of the world, the Ark of Noah has been of the same use as was formerly to the Greeks and Romans the siege of Troy. On a narrow basis of acknowledged truth, an immense but rude superstructure of fable has been erected; and the wild Irishman, as well as the wild Tartar, could point out the individual son of Japheth from whose loins his ancestors were lineally descended. The last century [the eighteenth] abounded with antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim light of legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies, conducted the great-grandchildren of Noah from the Tower of Babel to the extremities of the globe.26