TIME WARP
By Timothy Taylor/Photographs by Mark Gilbert
 

You might think it's the year 2000, but a group of prominent Russian mathematicians is arguing that history is all wrong, and it's actually 936AD. They've set off a battle that's now come to Canada, and it's getting nasty 

The man in the tweed jacket sitting ahead of me is growing visibly agitated. We're at a mathematics conference at the University of Alberta just before the end of the school year, and things have been predictably calm so far. But twice in the past minute what's coming from the front of the room has made my tweedy neighbour twist angrily in his seat. 

Our speaker is Gleb Nosovskii, a mathematics professor from Moscow State University, a man with a long black beard and dark eyes who is deeply serious about the matter at hand. This is only appropriate, because his presentation is nothing short of a mathematical case against history as we know it. 

Nosovskii and his Russian colleagues, led by the famous Moscow State geometrician Anatoly Fomen-ko, believe that our "global chronology" is profoundly flawed. They argue that the conventional sequencing of historical events in the Mediterranean and in Europe from 3000 BC to 1600 AD - a chronology they say was formalized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the scientists Josephus Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius, and has never been fundamentally challenged since - is shot through with inexplicable dupplications. These duplications, Nosovskii maintains, are revealed through mathematical-pattern analysis. 

In essence, it works like this: if you take the number of years ruled by each king in a succession of fifteen kings, you get a series of fifteen numbers that's called a "dynastic function." Now, if you compare one dynastic function from the biblical kingdom of Judea to a dynastic function derived from a series of fifth-century popes, you might be surprised to find these functions looking exactly the same. Your surprise would be justified, because there is an infinitesimally small statistical chance that two different series of fifteen rulers from completely different parts of the global chronology will randomly be born, crowned, and die in precisely the same pattern. 

According to Nosovskii, however, there are several dozen examples of such duplication through the ages, right up until reliable historical documentation begins, some time around the sixteenth century. At that point the duplications abruptly stop. 

This is so statistically improbable, Nosovskii argues, that one must conclude there are serious errors in Scaliger and Petavius's chronology. Specifically, Nosovskii says their version of history, drawn from accounts in different languages and from different oral traditions, is greatly elongated. To explain the incredible statistical anomalies, the Russian mathematicians are suggesting that early Renaissance historians made mistakes. Some errors might have been honest (such as treating two accounts of the same event as two distinct events) and others could have been intentional (whereby historians, at the behest of their benefactors, might have altered history in their favour). The effect of all this, Nosovskii, Fomenko, et al. believe, is that phantom epochs were added to the global chronology. If they're right, the sweep of human history is overstated by thousands of years and a great number of ancient events happened much more recently than previously thought. 

Here at the U of A conference, Nosovskii has spent the past hour using astronomical data to bolster this case. He has redated half a dozen ancient eclipses centuries later than conventionally understood; he has shown us depictions of planets and constellations taken from Egyptian tombs and temples, and has resolved their dates into the medieval era; now, he is approaching the summit of his argument with a reworking of the astronomical data surrounding the first Noël. "And what new date for the birth of Christ will we obtain if we use modern astronomy as our tool?" asks Nosovskii as he prepares his final slide. 

The overhead projector hums. The students, professors, and a few curious members of the public wait as the next transparency slides into place. The man who has invited Nosovskii here today, Professor Wieslaw Krawcewicz of the University of Alberta's Department of Mathematical Sciences, is in the front row, craning his neck around, gauging the reaction of the audience. Nosovskii's new date for the birth of Christ fills the screen. The man in tweed in front of me squints and reads. A math student eating an extraordinarily large sandwich stops chewing, his mouth full, and stares. 

1064 AD

The man in tweed erupts. He comes an inch out of his chair, makes a noise, falls back. "But that would mean . . . . " he stammers, incredulous. "That would mean that the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea preceded the birth of Christ! That's absurd!" 

Krawcewicz registers this reaction without surprise. He knows that campus opinion on Fomenko is already starkly divided, and that a number of professors, most of them historians, think the whole thing is nonsense. Archaeologist Steven Hijmans thinks Krawcewicz shouldn't even have asked Nosovskii here today. "Bluntly put," Hijmans will later say, "can research be so bad that the U of A should not be associated with it?" 

In fact, Fomenko's research is built on, and supported by, leading Russian mathematicians, as well as the legendary Russian world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Krawcewicz is one of the few academics in North America familiar with the Russian theories and is also the man instrumental in bringing the battle across the Atlantic. Late last year, Krawcewicz co-authored a paper that no doubt raised the ire of the archaeological community by characterizing their dating methods as "highly subjective and based on presumptive evidence." 

Krawcewicz takes particular issue with carbon-14 dating. Since carbon-14 is absorbed by living organisms and decays at a steady rate following death, carbon-14 levels are measured in objects recovered at archaeological sites to determine their age. Krawcewicz notes that the method must be calibrated using carbon-bearing samples of a known age. He argues that since this "known age" is established according to the conventional chronological tables, the dating power of carbon-14 relies on a circular argument. Hijmans disagrees, saying that carbon-14 dating can be calibrated using (among other things) long master sequences of tree rings, a process known as dendochronology. One sees the positions being staked. 

In person, Krawcewicz betrays no acrimony towards historians or archaeologists. Neither does he show much concern about the interdepartmental ice storm that his conference and his paper risk unleashing. Instead, he's direct and good-humoured, a jeans-and-sneakers type of professor prone to laugh spontaneously at evidence of human absurdity. We talk in the dining room of his house, the table stacked with math texts. 

"Many people don't like the involvement of mathematicians in this particular area," Krawcewicz says. "But the work of Fomenko and his collaborators leads to a very strong statement that there are serious problems with the traditional chronology."