A Russian mathematician's claim that recorded history is centuries shorter than believed, that antiquity is the Middle Ages in costume, and that the standard timeline is a copy of itself.
Documented
The statistical argument, such as it is
Fomenko's method, developed from the 1970s and published as History: Fiction or Science? (English editions from 2003), compares lists of reigns across eras and flags correlations as evidence of duplication: the Roman Empire allegedly re-appears as the Holy Roman Empire, biblical kingdoms as Byzantine ones. He re-dates ancient eclipses to medieval skies and concludes antiquity is medieval history recopied. The documented scaffolding behind him is thinner: the nineteenth-century chronologist Nikolai Morozov tried eclipse redating first, and before him the Jesuit scholar Jean Hardouin argued in the 1690s that most classical literature was forged by a monastic cabal.
Assessment: Documented as a publishing phenomenon and a school of thought, mostly Russian. As history it fails at the first checkpoint: his correlations use hand-selected reign lengths and ignore the independent datings, radiocarbon, dendrochronology, ice cores, comet records, that pin antiquity in place. A correlation engine that can redate anything proves nothing.
Stories
The short history of everything
The folk version is pure liberation fantasy: the dark ages never happened, the ancients lived beside our grandparents, all of it is the Middle Ages told twice. It circulates alongside Phantom Time and Tartaria as the big three of compressed history, sharing the same emotional core, suspicion that the past we inherited was curated by the winners.
Assessment: Documented as internet folklore with a real intellectual ancestry. The suspicion has a grain of truth, chronology was built by people with agendas, but the grain is a calibration problem, not a conspiracy. Scaliger and Petavius assembled the standard timeline in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from colliding sources; that the seams show is evidence of method, not forgery.
Interesting claims
The eclipse trump card
The interesting claim is the strongest one Fomenko has: ancient eclipse records, used to anchor the standard chronology, were dated by astronomers who assumed the chronology first. Circular, he says, and on that narrow point some early eclipse-datings were indeed argued partly from king lists. The modern reply is that the anchors no longer depend on them: tree-ring sequences, ice-core volcanic layers, and radiocarbon form an independent scaffold that no amount of scribal mischief can bend by a thousand years.
Assessment: The circularity critique is a documented footnote in the history of astronomy, raised by Robert Newton in the 1970s about Ptolemy's data. The scaffold it supposedly undermines is now independent of it. The claim survives as a warning about bootstrapped evidence, filed under chronology, refuted by trees.
Sources and further reading
Fomenko and Nosovsky, History: Fiction or Science? (English editions, 2003-2007), the claim itself
Hardouin, Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prolegomena (c. 1690s), the forgery-cabal ancestor
Morozov, Revelation in Storm and Tempest (1907), the eclipse-redating method
Robert Newton, The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (1977), the circularity critique
Radiocarbon calibration literature, IntCal, dendrochronology against the thousand-year gap
Worth asking
If a timeline can be stretched by copying and relabeling, how much of what you call the past is original, and how much is a dub of a dub?