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Most helpful critical review

81 of 104 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Some people will swallow anything ByAmazon Manon September 23, 2008

Looking through this book reminded me of the movie "A Beautiful Mind". A brilliant mathematician constructs a fantasy world complete in every detail. The only problem is that it doesn't exist, and that he's as mad as a hatter.

Just two examples of the many "possibilities" suggested by our schizoid author:

(1) The Biblical flood and the Trojan War were the same event because Noah was Aeneas, who fled Troy to found Rome. (Noah and Aeneas had names that sound alike. Thus it is proven.)

(2) Nine kings fled the fall of the Tower of Babel and seven kings founded Rome. Therefore, Rome was founded by the kings who fled the fall of the Tower of Babel. (In the author's words, the Biblical figure of nine is "close enough" to the Roman figure of seven.)

Most of this book's positive reviewers don't support their opinions with science, but those who do cite what they think are the author's strongest arguments: (A) carbon dating isn't accurate; and (B) the Bronze Age can't be thousands of years old because tin, a bronze ingredient, wasn't isolated until much later.

(A) Carbon dating is indeed accurate, and gets more accurate all of the time. But even if it wasn't, taking many disparate samples from a single site, and averaging the results, gives an extremely reliable estimate of the site's age. For example, the pyramids of Egypt contain many different forms of carbon, all of which have been tested in the last decade - and not, I might add, by Fomenko's bete noir, the Jesuits. All of these different samples, averaged out, give a date many thousands of years old, far outside even the "1,500-year error range" claimed by Fomenko and his defenders.

(B) The first bronze artifacts were made by ancient metallurgists who inadvertently mixed increasingly scarce copper ores with those of antimony, zinc and other metals found naturally with copper. Tin is one of those metals, so pure tin was never required for the ancient production of bronze. The same can be said for brass, which is made with a metal - zinc - never isolated in ancient times.

Fomenko's nutty conspiracy theory has feet of clay.

pitenius

Well, I can see some holes in Fomenko, but... reposting a review is only moderately interesting. Have you read it? Would you like to?

I'm not asking you to believe the book. I'm interested in the conspiracy angle. How many of our beliefs about history can be documented? What does that documentation mean? How should an argument be made? On the one hand, Fomenko has an interesting piece of evidence: variations in D''. However, I think the "data" to compute D'' is VASTLY misoverestimated. But here's the rub: should "science" direct the reconstruction of history or can history open our eyes to things that "science" says shouldn't happen? (There's the philosophical overlap with a lot of conspiracy.)

I'm interested in your ideas (and those of /v/conspiracy , generally). It's a ... passable read, I guess. There's a lot translation problems, the topic is a bit dry in some ways, but it's fun. I'm not searching for "truth" with this post, just trying to communicate with VOATers.

Rereading the review, I'd take issue with the support of C14 dating. There's some howlers in there, but ... let's not start there...

k_digi

humans as a race are uniquely lost (a little) because they both don't know where they come from and don't know where they are going. how do you think that ends for the most part?

pitenius

I think this book kind of recognizes this problem: where is humanity from? There's a power in controlling chronology. They make that clear. I'm not sure I believe their suggestion, though.

There are two conspiracy camps in chronology: the "dark ages never happened" crowd and the "antediluvian technology" club. They both irritate "conventional" historians. The problem is that conventional history rarely get a ... holistic? perspective. Most people just think about their little corner.

How does it end? Poorly. I think civilization was a bad idea. We aspire to be ants, not apes.

k_digi

'civilization' just is, it was not ones idea it's just the sum of all the vectors of the variant humans that exist on the planet, if you want to look at it scientifically it's like a database, but with huge variables. then you have to add into the equation a bunch of things you don't know about presently and you get the present reality. the human type container is all about the galaxies in various forms, so if the book comes to that conclusion it's generally correct. if it comes to the conclusion that humans did not originate on earth. also correct.