Most historians and archaeologists know about the theory of the mathematician Academician A. T. Fomenko and his numerous books on chronology (to a large extent, co-authored with G. V. Nosovsky) only by hearsay. And he considers it necessary to reject and scold them - the unknown. This is done according to the old Soviet principle: "Of course, I have not read and will not read the anti-Soviet books of the renegade Solzhenitsyn, but together with the entire Soviet people I angrily reject the vile slander contained in them against our native socialist system!" And this despite the fact that books justifying the criticism of chronology and historiography - thanks to perestroika and hitherto undisguised publicity - have been printed in thousands of copies.
We present an article by Professor of Mathematics and Physics E. Ya. Gabovich with some abbreviations.
Considering this sad circumstance and the “wide” prevalence of the German language and other Germanic and Latin dialects in the homeland of the great reformer of history (will not our descendants be called Luther of the 20th century the troublemaker in historical science ?!), one can hardly assume that the broad masses “Workers of the historical-archaeological front” are familiar with the vast literature on criticism of chronology and on the revision of history, published year after year in Germany and other Western countries. The purpose of this article is not only to present the point of view of a mathematically minded author on modern historical science, but to make an attempt to familiarize the representatives of the latter - at least very briefly - with the criticism of chronology and history in some other countries, primarily in Germany.in which the author, by the will of fate, has been living and working for 20 years.
Perhaps, realizing the breadth of this criticism and its diversity both in methodology and in the range of historical topics covered, having understood how many different authors work with enthusiasm in this area, at least a small part of historians and archaeologists will think about what wonderful opportunities the most interesting scientific creativity is opened by the historical reformation. At the same time, I hope, first of all, on the young scientists and on the unorthodox-minded minority of broadly educated - and not only humanitarian - professionals, and not on the handicraft-working majority of the army of "historical workers".
Part 1. CRITICISM OF CHRONOLOGY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE PAST: FOUR CLASSICS
In almost any era, along with the army of historians floating with the flow, who did not doubt or did not dare to doubt the correctness of the given chronological milestones, there were also independent minds who were not afraid or did not consider it necessary to fear rejection by historical science and the groups of interests behind it in the criticism of chronology. Due to the fact that these courageous people and independent researchers were not afraid to reveal contradictions in the chronological ridge of historiography, the official science did not manage to hide them from the public. We will talk about some of them in this part of the article.
The four names below are just the tip of the iceberg. Many honest historians criticized the state of historical sources, not daring to cross the border of loyalty to their own science in general and to the corporately organized mass of fellows in the profession. Remaining in the shadows, they brought the radical critics of chronology and history to the line beyond which quantity passes into quality, not daring to step over it and openly pronounce what the outstanding critics of chronology and historiography named below spoke about.
Promotional video:
ISAAC NEWTON
The fact that the great English physicist was also a famous chronologist is known to the readers of Fomenko and Nosovsky's books. Practically in each of their books, the fact is emphasized that in his books [r1] I. Newton insisted on the need for a sharp reduction in historical time space. From the same point of view, he sees the role of I. Newton and Uwe Topper in the article [r2] entitled "Isaac Newton shortened Greek history by 300 years."
In the article [d3] I tried to look at the activities of the great physicist and outstanding expert on theology, which he was actively engaged in almost all his life, from the point of view of not reducing chronology, but checking its correctness.
We will assume that Scaliger conscientiously worked through the historical sources selected by him. Another question is that some of them, perhaps, were also composed by him, but since modern historiography considers them to be reliable historical sources, this circumstance - not so rare in the past - does not play a special role for us now. On the other hand, we do not have the slightest reason to believe that I. Newton was not able to accurately carry out his chronological calculations, proceeding from other sources selected by him for this purpose. Under these two assumptions, we can assert that in practice I. Newton gave - if not logically rigorous, then convincing empirical - proof of the following two theorems.
THEOREM 1. The system of historical sources is internally contradictory: from one part of it, conclusions can be drawn that contradict its other part. Therefore, it is correct.
THEOREM 2. The chronology used by historical science is incorrect. Moreover, in principle, it cannot be unambiguously deduced from the totality of historical sources.
CONSEQUENCE. The story is not chronological.
And I emphasized one more merit of the English physicist in [r3]: I. Newton was the first to apply statistical considerations to assess the reliability of chronological material. Thus, he can be considered the spiritual father of the Russian school of chronological criticism (Morozov, Fomenko, etc.), which focuses on natural science and mathematical arguments, although not limited to them.
Jean Gardouin
In our presentation, we follow in the main book [d4] and articles [d5], [d6]. Newton's contemporary - Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) was one of the most educated people of his time. A member of the Jesuit order, since 1683 he was the director of the French royal library, a professor of theology who amazed his listeners with extraordinary erudition and depth of his knowledge, and the author and commentator of numerous works (see bibliography in [d4] - [r6]) on philology, theology, history, archeology, numismatics, chronology and philosophy of history. These works today, unfortunately, are little known to a wide range of specialists, since they were mainly written in Latin.
His most famous work is a collection of all ecclesiastical acts from the first century A. D. associated with the holding of ecumenical councils. When, after 28 years of work and publications in 1684, 1685 and 1693, this grandiose work was completed in 1715 (11 volumes in total, plus volumes with commentaries), for the next 10 years it was not allowed by the church, which was worried about the time by the well-known criticism of sources, to which J. Gardouin came in the course of his work. Only after the order of the Jesuits forced J. Gardouin to renounce his views, as contradicting the church canon (this renunciation was perceived by all contemporaries of J. Gardouin as purely formal), the church allowed to use the acts published by J. Gardouin.
Beginning in 1690, J. Gardouin argued that many works of ancient authors were written many hundreds of years later than the years of their lives attributed to these authors. In other words, he classified the relevant works as fakes. In subsequent years, he steadily intensified his criticism of sources and came to the conclusion that almost all ancient works were written starting from the 13th century. He made exceptions to this derogatory criticism only in a few cases: for the works of Cicero, for the satyrs of Horace, for Virgil's Georgica, and for Pliny the Elder's Natural History. However, it is to these authors that he dedicated his famous comments and it is possible that this is precisely why it was psychologically difficult for him to understand medieval authors in them.
J. Garduin argued that Jesus Christ and his apostles, if they existed at all, should have preached their sermons in Latin. He was convinced that the Greek translations of the New and Old Testaments were made much later than the church believed. Among the other classics of Christianity who were subjected to falsification, he named St. Augustine, the truth of whose works he did not recognize. He also wrote about the falsification of almost all “ancient” coins, “old” works of art, “old” inscriptions carved in stone and, which is especially important, all documents of the ecumenical councils that allegedly preceded the one of Trent (1545-1563).
No less than the criticism of J. Garduin of historical sources, the reaction of his contemporaries to these revelations is interesting. Of course, the statements of J. Gardouin were criticized, but very often so muffled that one got the impression that the critics themselves knew very well that even relatively recently the publication of the apocryphal, i.e. attributed to older authors, works were generally accepted as the norm. Even his most ardent critics admitted that with that level of scholarship and with the highest authority in the scientific world enjoyed by J. Garduin, he did not need to seek additional fame on the slippery rut of criticism or indulge in revelations annoying church and science. Only the deepest conviction in the correctness of chronological and historiographic criticism could motivate J. Garduin on his opposition to all canonical science and theology.
It is curious that G. Garduin reacted to Newton's books on abbreviated chronology in the same style of complete denial of the historicity of deep antiquity. He urged Newton to finally stop talking about “ancient” times that did not exist in reality. The burning of Troy J. Gardouin considered the destruction of Jerusalem, which echoes Fomenko's point of view about the identity of ancient Troy, Jerusalem and Constantinople.
Most of the works of J. Garduin, including those published posthumously, were banned by the church in 1739-1742 and included in the index of prohibited books. After the death of J. Gardouin, most of the “ancient” sources that he exposed were gradually “rehabilitated” and are now included in the collection of historical works that are taken seriously by historical science.
ROBERT BALDAUF
If Newton and Garduin were world famous scientists, whose biography is well known in many details, then what is known about the Swiss philologist Robert Baldauf is that at the end of the last century he was an assistant professor at the University of Basel and that at the beginning of the 20th century he published two volumes of the four planned by him under the general title "History and Criticism", namely Volumes 1 and 4. These two volumes are of great interest to the critics of chronology and history, because in them Robert Baldouf, completely independently of Garduin and proceeding from a completely different method (the method of comparative philological analysis), came to practically the same conclusions as the great Jesuit scholar.
Investigating the archives of the famous Swiss monastery of Sant Gallen, at one time one of the main centers of Catholicism, R. Baldauf, firstly, discovered traces of a robber raid on the monastery of the famous Italian humanist (and falsifier of "antique" manuscripts) Poggio Bracciolini and his comrades (both were educated ministers of the Roman curia), who at one time stole from the library of this monastery the ancient manuscripts and numerous books. Although these manuscripts could well have been created relatively shortly before the raid of the Italian antiquities hunters, they later served Poggio and his henchmen as models for falsification in the creation of new and new "antique" works.
Secondly, while examining some of the manuscripts that were considered ancient and medieval, R. Baldauf found that among them fakes of later times predominate. In the “historical” books of the Old Testament, R. Baldauf found such strong parallels with the knightly novels of the Middle Ages and at the same time with Homer’s Iliad that he had to consider both the Bible and the Iliad as written in the late Middle Ages.
Some of the medieval manuscripts attributed to different authors had such a striking similarity in pictorial means that R. Baldauf was forced to recognize them as belonging to the pen of the same person, although it was believed that between the times of writing the two documents lie about two centuries. However, both the time of writing attributed to the first of them (9th century) and that of the second (11th century) do not correspond to the time when some expressions from the Romance languages used in these manuscripts were introduced into everyday life. In addition, the manuscripts contain plots of a clearly later origin: frivolous stories about bathing adventures (bathing and bathing houses came into European use only in the era of the late reconquest), and even hints of the Inquisition.
Exploring the poetry of “antiquity” in his volume 4, R. Baldauf discovers rhymed verses in the style of medieval troubadours in many “antique” poets. Unlike Garduin, he is confident in the medieval origin of Horace's poems. In Horace he discovers the influence on his Latin of both Italian and German. Further, R. Baldauf emphasizes such strong interdependencies in the poetry of Horace and Ovid, who allegedly did not even know about each other's existence, that there is a certainty that a third person is hidden behind both, obviously much later.
R. Baldauf is not alone in his criticism of the stylistics of "antique" authors.
He cites numerous criticisms of other 19th century scholars. As early as 1847, Borber expressed surprise at the striking similarity between the Druids (Celtic clergy) and Egyptian clergy in Julius Caesar's "Gallic War". This work itself, like his "Civil War", R. Baldauf considers a later fake.
Summing up his research, R. Baldauf wrote: "Our Romans and Greeks were Italian humanists." All of them - Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle and many others, so different for us "ancient" writers, scattered by historians for many centuries - were, according to Baldauf, children of the same century. But their homeland was not Ancient Rome or ancient Hellas, but Italy of the 14th and 15th centuries.
The entire history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the biblical "history" to some extent consistent with it, are the product of the most active creative activity of the Italian humanists, which in later times was picked up and continued by humanists from other countries.
Humanism gave humanity a whole world of antiquity and the Bible, as well as the early Middle Ages, which R. Baldauf also considered the fruit of the creative imagination of humanist writers. This fictional story was written on parchment, sculpted in stone, cast in metal and so firmly entered our consciousness that no positivist criticism is able to make humanity doubt its correctness.
WILHELM CUMMAYER
In the case of the German critic of historical sources, Wilhelm Kammeier, we do not even know the date of his birth. According to the estimate given in [d4], he was born between 1890 and 1900. He died in 1959 in Arnstadt (Thuringia), in the GDR. He was a lawyer by profession and worked as a notary in Hanover. He participated in the Second World War, was captured. After captivity, he lived in Arnstadt, where his family moved during the war years, after their house in Hanover was destroyed, in poverty and in an atmosphere of persecution by the authorities. It is believed that his death was due to chronic malnutrition.
The work of a notary gave W. Kammeier an excellent basis for a critical study of documents from the past, which he became interested in in 1923
In 1926, he completed his 292-page manuscript, entitled “The Universal Falsification of History,” in which he disparaged the historical documents underlying German medieval history. However, for many years he was unable to find a publisher for this critical work.
Then he sent a summary of the named manuscript to the Prussian Academy of Sciences with a request to provide him with the opportunity to speak publicly before historians. This request was rejected in writing under a formal pretext (without any substantive arguments) about the inadmissibility of private speeches before the Academy. Not the substantive aspect of the presented work, but only the absence of a position in a scientific institution for W. Kammeier served as a sufficient reason for the Prussian Academy of Sciences to refuse to consider seriously reasoned criticism.
Only in 1935 was Kammeier's manuscript published [r8]. This was followed by a brochure [d9], in which the criticism of historical sources was extended to the entire European Middle Ages, as well as seven more brochures on this topic. This work [r9], which has long since become a bibliographic rarity, was republished in a small print run in 1979 in the form of a book [r10], which also included the following works by W. Kammeier 1936-1939:
The world's historical mysteries are the answer to my critics.”
"The Mystery of Rome in the Middle Ages".
"Dogmatic Christianity and the Falsification of History."
"Founding of the Roman Universal Church".
Finally, the previously unpublished and considered lost manuscript by W. Kammayer about the “sources” of early Christianity and their falsification was published in the form of a book [r11].
Official science reacted to the work of W. Kammeier - naturally, critically - only in the first years after the publication of his first book. One of the critics was Prof. Heimpel. V. Kammeier was blamed for his lack of a positive outlook on history. The critic must, of course, first of all care about a positive historical picture, even if it is invented from start to finish! “If we see that in the end result the entire medieval historical picture falls apart and instead of it there is a dark spot, a big question mark, then there is an internal rejection even of the criticism carried out by Kammeier, which is well substantiated.”
To this Kammeier replied approximately like this: it is not my fault that the medieval history of not only Germany, but the entire Old World was to a great extent falsified. It is not my fault that the literary and documentary sources of this era were falsified. My only fault is that I exposed this systematic falsification. And with this new historical truth of the falsification of the history of the Middle Ages, new generations of historians will need to learn to live (as we know, they do not think about it yet!). According to Schopenhauer, truth does not need permission to exist. Once realized, the truth acquires the power of the elements: an intelligent person does not fight against it, he tries to turn it to his advantage.
However, after the criticism of historians was reasonably rejected by Kammayer, the latter switched to the tried and true tactic of silence: what people do not know about is not in the world. The outbreak of the world war also contributed to this silence. V. Kammeier's participation in it, his captivity and the disorder of post-war life interrupted his active research work for a long time.
In the GDR, V. Kammeier could only find a job as a teacher. As soon as conditions allowed, he resumed his research on the "old" documents and focused on the documentary basis of the history of early Christianity. I do not exclude that he hoped for a favorable attitude towards this topic on the part of socialist historiography in an atheistic country, which the GDR was trying to become. But it was not there. As soon as V. Kammeier brought his critical examination of early Christian documents to the attention of Gedeer historians, repressions fell upon him. He lost his job, his manuscript of the book [г11] was confiscated and for a long time was considered lost, all the family's property was nationalized, and he and his family were doomed to a hungry and miserable existence.
V. Kammayer began his research on "ancient" letters with a trivial observation that any donation legal document (deeds of gift are the most common type of medieval documents, the subject of donation can be real estate, privileges, positions, etc.) must contain information about who presented what, when and to whom and where this certificate was drawn up. Charters in which one of the provided columns (date, surname of the person to be gifted) was left blank, loses its legal force and can only very relatively serve as a historical source (for example, when writing a history of historical falsifications).
The letters stored in libraries often do not meet these initial criteria:
There are letters without a date or with a clearly later inserted date, with an incomplete date (there is no year or day) or a date written in a manner that does not correspond to the specified time of writing.
Often, letters dated one day were “signed” at different points on the map.
When analyzing the places and dates of writing the letters, the following picture is obtained: the rulers do not have a capital in which they more or less constantly reside, but continuously travel from place to place - sometimes with lightning speed over great distances - in order to endow more and more new subjects with letters. Moreover, all German emperors do this, regardless of age, state of health and ordinary human logic.
It would be interesting to enter all such data into a computer and draw up appropriate analytical reviews about the speed of movement and the hypertrophied propensity to travel of the feudal rulers. However, the tables already compiled by historians show that the German emperors more than once managed to be at the same time in different, far-apart cities. For Emperor Konrad, for 50 years, almost every year 2-3 different cities are indicated as a place of residence for a Christian holiday.
Quite often, the donation does not contain the surname of the person to whom benefits are granted (in some epochs, up to half of all surviving donations are such), so we can talk not about legal documents, but only about blanks for such.
Of course, W. Kammeier was not the first to discover forgeries while examining ancient or considered to be such documents. Entire collections of documents were declared to be forgeries long before him. The merit of W. Kammeyer is that he saw behind the shocking historians and before him the size of the falsification of history, the more or less planned and massive work of entire generations of falsifiers who were in the service of the Catholic Church or individual feudal rulers.
These forgers destroyed a myriad of truly original documents, replacing them with forgeries. Often the old text was scraped off and a new one was written on old parchment, which, in the opinion of the forgers of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, was a confirmation of the “antiquity” of the forgery. Sometimes an ancient document underwent only a slight change, designed to distort its original meaning.
The main goal of this long and massive campaign to falsify historical documents was, according to V. Kammayer, in hushing up pre-Christian history, in distorting (lengthening) Christian history and attributing to it almost all the achievements of the pagan era. In addition, of course, the demand for "legal" confirmation of ownership rights was great on the part of the new feudal rulers, who had only recently taken them away from their legitimate pagan rulers. The falsified donations were supposed to testify to the antiquity of ownership rights and go back to one of the great ancient Christian rulers, whom, if necessary, were simply invented for this purpose.
At present, the general state of historical sources is such that, against the background of an amazing number of forgeries, against the background of the absence of originals in all absolutely literary works of the ancient past (it is difficult to believe in the accident of such a state), historians continue to use false documents or because their forgery has not yet been proven irrefutable, or because the proven infidelity is hushed up and hidden from the scientific community.
In [d12] the following conclusions are noted, which were reached by W. Kammeier in the course of his research of documents of the Middle Ages:
In the massive falsification (mainly in the 15th century), along with the Catholic Church, whose historical significance should have been substantiated in the course of this falsification, also humanists.
The documents of pagan "Germanic" history were destroyed and replaced with falsified documents of Gallo-Roman history.
The existence of the Catholic popes before the so-called Avignon captivity was completely invented.
The history before 1300 is unrecoverable, as all the earlier documents were destroyed and replaced with fake ones.
The wars between the national churches in the pre-papal period of church history were subsequently presented as a struggle against heretics and apostates.
Not only medieval documents, but also "antique" literature was falsified. For example, Tacitus' Germany is one such fake.
Catholic clerics invented the New Testament, or at least rewrote it.
Even today, the church is engaged in the production of false "old" manuscripts in order to "prove" with the help of new finds the antiquity of the New Testament texts.
Part 2. DISASTERS AND CHRONOLOGY
As already noted in the section devoted to Isaac Newton, the Russian school of criticism of chronology and history differs significantly in its propensity for statistical calculations and for taking into account natural scientific arguments. This does not mean that Russian critics of chronology do not use the entire palette of humanitarian analytical tools available to them. In contrast to the Russian school, the corresponding German school, and to some extent both the English and the American ones, rely more on the methods of analysis of the humanities, and in their natural science analysis they proceed from the theory of catastrophism (= theory of natural disasters, do not confuse with catastrophe theory in mathematics).
Here it should be clearly emphasized that this theory is completely ignored either by Morozov, or Fomenko, or Nosovsky and Fomenko, or by the rest of the post-Soviet authors of this trend, which is called “new chronology”. (The attitude of Fomenko and Nosovsky to the hypothesis of “historical catastrophism” is very skeptical).
The idea of catastrophism asserts that the Earth is relatively often subjected to catastrophes of a planetary scale, which have an extraterrestrial, galactic origin. A global flood caused by an asteroid or comet nucleus falling to the Earth can serve as a model for such all-terrestrial catastrophes (it is assumed that global floods have occurred more than once in the history of the Earth). However, disasters on a planetary scale may have other reasons, not necessarily known to us or correctly understood by us. And, most importantly, the temporal distances between catastrophes on a planetary scale are measured not in millions of years, as many representatives of the natural sciences still believe, but in thousands and sometimes even hundreds of years, as the theory of catastrophes, still partly fighting for its wide recognition, claims.
IMMANUIL VELIKOVSKY
If we consider Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov as the father of modern Russian criticism of chronology, then Immanuel (Emmanuili) Velikovsky, a citizen of the world, whose fate was at the time of his formation as a researcher connected with Russia, should be recognized as the father of the corresponding criticism in the West. He is today the creator of the theory of neocatastrophism, generally recognized in critical circles, which proceeds from the fact that catastrophes occur not once in millions of years, but at intervals of a thousand or two, and sometimes even only hundreds of years. The last two, three, maybe even four catastrophes on Earth, which had a planetary character, occurred in the memory of mankind and are reflected, if not in historical documents, then at least in myths and legends of different peoples, as well as in the literary works of antiquity.
The name of Immanuel Velikovsky, unfortunately, says little to a modern educated person, although we are talking about a figure comparable - in my sincere conviction - with Albert Einstein, with whom, by the way, I. Velikovsky (hereinafter briefly I. V.) was closely acquainted from a young age. Until the death of A. Einstein, he lived with him in the same city (Princeton).
I. V. maintained intensive scientific contact with the great physicist. And the latter was not only interested in I. V.'s ideas, but also energetically supported proposals for their verification.
I. V. was born in 1895 in Vitebsk, in the family of a Jewish businessman who adhered to religious traditions, who later became one of the largest Russian wholesalers. From an early age, familiar with the Bible and other ancient books, fluent in German and French from childhood, I. V. was educated mainly at home from private teachers. As a Jew, the path to the gymnasium was not easy for him: only with great difficulty, and even then only in the last years of his school age, he entered the Moscow Imperial gymnasium, which he graduated with a gold medal.
However, even the latter did not give him the opportunity to immediately enter Moscow University. Only after studying for a year in Edinburgh (English would later become the language of all his books), at the beginning of the world war he became a student of the medical faculty: the increased need for military doctors forced the tsarist government to abolish the percentage rate for Jews. During the year in Scotland, he mainly studied natural sciences. In parallel with medicine, he studied jurisprudence and ancient history in Moscow
In 1917 I. V. and his parents, fleeing from the arrest that threatened the father of the family (as an active Zionist), fled to the south, where they wandered in danger of their lives for three years, hiding now from the Reds, now from the Whites.
In 1921, I. V., who narrowly escaped execution on suspicion of spying for the Reds, returned to Moscow, recovered at the university and received a master's degree in medicine.
The following year, the family emigrated: parents to Palestine, and I. V. to Germany, where in 1923 he married violinist Elisheva Kramer. In Berlin he studied biology, in Zurich and Vienna - psychoanalysis and the work of the human brain. In Berlin, I. V. founded the Jewish scientific journal "Scripta Universitatis", in which A. Einstein also collaborated (he edited the physics and mathematics volume of the journal) and around which the scientists united, who later created the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I. V. At the same time, he showed such outstanding organizational abilities that he was even asked to head the future university as a rector. I. V. refused this honor, believing that the rector of the new university should be a famous scientist, and not a young doctor and novice researcher.
Earning for himself and his family a living with his psychoanalytic practice, which he reduced to the absolutely necessary minimum from a financial point of view, and also - in later years - with his writing activity, I. V. devoted all his time to research. Having moved to Palestine, I. V. edited the journal Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana and published in Sigmund Freud's Imago. It was he who, in 1930, was the first to suggest that pathological encephalograms may be typical for patients with epilepsy. Freud's praise is known for one of I. V. It is believed that I. V. was one of the most prominent practicing psychoanalysts of his time.
In the summer of 1939, I. V. with his family he came to the USA to finish work on a book about the figures of the past who were interested in Freud: Moses, Akhenaten and Oedipus. Almost finished, this book was never published, because the study of the phenomenon of collective forgetting that had interested him all his life was irresistibly drawn to I. V. to completely new topics and books. It was these studies that led him to the theory of catastrophism (humanity seeks to forget past catastrophes) and to the themes of ancient chronology (humanity does not particularly carefully deal with memories of its past, prostitutes them and rewrites them depending on the needs of the next elite).
I. V. never served in any research organization and, perhaps, that is why he managed to write his numerous original books and articles. However, this same circumstance became a stumbling block for the recognition of the importance of his work by official science: the latter strives with all its might to protect itself from unorthodox opinions, and even coming from the outside. With rare exceptions, great loners are not recognized by science, they are written off as charlatans and troublemakers, rejected by creating a wall of silence, superficial in essence and pejorative in tone of criticism. All these tools were applied in this case. Against I. V. even the apparatus of corporate pressure was applied to the McMillan publishing house, which planned to publish his books: under the threat of stopping the publication of textbooks by members of leading scientific organizations,this one of the leading American publishers was forced to terminate the contract with I. V. about the publication of his first book "Worlds Clash". The book, which became a bestseller after being published in another publishing house.
The bestseller "Worlds Clash" was already published in Germany in 1951 by the well-known Koolgammer publishing house, and was greeted with great interest by the readers. And then the same story repeated itself as in the USA. This time, theologians associated with the publishing house revolted. The publishing house, under the threat of a boycott, was forced to transfer its rights for subsequent editions of the book to the Swiss publishing house EUROPA, known for its anti-Nazi views. The latter interpreted the persecution of the Jewish author as a continuation of anti-Semitism and published all the books of I. V. until the end of the 60s.
In the late 70s and early 80s, the books of I. V. began to be published again in Germany in well-known publishing houses. This new stage is associated with the activities of the representative I. V. in countries with the German language of Christoph Marx, on whose activities we will dwell below.
Fortunately, in recent years (with a delay of 25-45 years) the books of I. V. [r1] - [r7] were also published in Russia. The only detailed biography known to me [r8] of the remarkable scientist-encyclopedist was also published there. The list of his books below shows their Russian translations in square brackets. I do not know whether his posthumously published book [r9] "Astrologers and Gravediggers" has been translated into Russian. At the same time, it is useful to pay attention to the books [г10] - [г14], in which the research of I. V.
THE DIFFICULT LIFE OF THE THEORY OF CATASTROPHISM
The main merit of I. V. before science consists in the fact that in his two books [g1], [g2] he collected a huge geological, paleontological, stratigraphic and - in the first of them - mythological, legendary and literary material from different parts of the world in support of the almost forgotten theory of the catastrophic past the earth. This theory was widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries and was used to explain many geological facts. In the early 19th century, Baron Cuvier formalized it into a theory in which a new act of creation was used to explain the rebirth of life after each major catastrophe: divine or by bringing life from space.
This last circumstance became the weak side of the theory of natural disasters, and it gradually gave up its positions under the onslaught of evolutionary theory. N. A. Morozov in his "Christ" repeatedly emphasizes that science "overcame" catastrophism. Darwinism and geological evolutionism believed that they could well get by with the concept of slow evolution to explain the entire past of our planet and its geological and biological history.
VELIKOVSKY AND CHRONOLOGY
Critical studies of the history of contemporary critics of chronology in the West are based on Velikovsky's views on the catastrophic past of the Earth. However, directly from the point of view of this article, the most interesting is a series of four books [г3] - [г6] by I. V., devoted to the proof of the existence in the history of the Middle East (primarily Egypt, Greece and Palestine) of an artificial insert with a length of more than five centuries. The corresponding hypothesis was the result of identifying the catastrophic natural phenomena described by the Bible (10 executions of the Egyptian) of the time of the exodus with similar descriptions of the events of the times of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt. Realizing that both stories describe the same natural disaster (its uniqueness served as the basis for I. V.'s identification of the two disasters described by the named stories), I. V.was forced to take up the question of the mistakes of historians who scattered these two descriptions of the same phenomenon over the centuries.
Found I. V. the explanation for the appearance of this artificial stretch in time is extremely simple and serves as a standard for subsequent revelations of this kind. Namely, he discovered that the Egyptian chronicles (historical sources) and sources describing the same period from Palestine, Syria, etc. were erroneously interpreted by subsequent generations of historians as describing completely different events, and even different historical periods. As a result, the history of the ancient Near East of the considered period "doubled", ie. was artificially increased approximately two times due to the inclusion, following the years and decades described by the Egyptians, descriptions of the same years and decades by chroniclers from the Asian part of the Middle East.
I. V. nowhere, in any of his books or articles, does he refer to the much earlier works of N. A. Morozov. Therefore, contrary to my initial opinion about the impossibility of I. Velikovsky's complete ignorance of the books of the great Russian critic of chronology [r16], today I am inclined to the opinion: I was not familiar with them, and if I heard about them, I perceived them in my youth as an unworthy curiosity … I know about the possibility of such a reaction from my own experience: as a graduate student of Moscow State University, in the late 1960s, I refused to “waste time” on reading N. A. Morozov, whom my classmate admired, having considered after a short retelling that books that deny the existence of antiquity cannot be serious.
After all, the first book of N. A. Morozov "Revelation in a Thunderstorm and a Storm" was most popular in Russia in 1907-1910, when I. V. was still a boy. The second book of Morozov - "Prophets" appeared in 1914, when 19-year-old I. V. there were other concerns. In addition, the chronology of the ancient world I. V. became seriously interested in the late 40s - early 50s, when Russia’s cut off from the West reached its climax. Therefore, it is not only possible to assume with high probability that I. V. I have never seen the seven-volume "Christ", but even knowing his scrupulousness in questions of quotation, one should, unfortunately, recognize this as a fact.
Unfortunately, because one of the weaknesses of the chronological considerations of I. V. is his belief in the truth of the biblical stories and in the chronology of those centuries that he did not erase from the history of the ancient Near East. And the point is not even that such a belief contradicts his own scientific experience: if historians made one series of gross mistakes, then where is the guarantee that such mistakes will not be made in subsequent historical epochs? The main trouble, in my opinion, is that I. V. did not even consider the possibility of his erroneous dating of the two great catastrophes, which he considered the last in the history of mankind and which he dated to the 13th and 7th centuries BC.
I. V. died on November 17, 1979. His books [g7] and [g9] were published posthumously. Unfortunately, interest in his work, largely associated with interest in his extraordinary personality, in his numerous lectures at American universities and in his brilliant articles (he collaborated in several leading American press organs), began to fade, and today his name is only known relatively narrow circle of his admirers.