Email from Russia
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1311163/Email-from-Russia.html
HE may be an outstanding grandmaster and possess one of the brightest minds on the planet but Garry Kasparov’s new obsession threatens to eclipse his genius for the game of chess.
With the fervour of a newly converted missionary, Mr #Kasparov has embarked on a crusade to persuade the world that traditional history is bunk and that the past is less ancient than it seems. “If we are correct in ten percent of what we are saying, this will be the most important thing I have been involved in,” he told me last week. “We must prove that ten percent. But if we do, it’s like a house of cards. Remove one and the whole thing collapses.”
After years of mulling over what he calls “hundreds and hundreds of discrepancies, accidents and small gaps” in conventional history, Mr Kasparov has emerged as the most famous supporter of the school of Anatoly Fomenko.
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It is dizzy-making stuff. All classical and mediaeval literature is a forgery produced after the Renaissance, they maintain. Troy, Jerusalem, Constantinople and London were originally one and the same place and King Arthur was a Russian prince.
The Old and New Testaments describe the same events. Jesus did exist but was also the Prophet Elijah and Pope Gregory VII rolled into one and lived in the 11th century in what is now Istanbul. There was no Mongol conquest of Russia in the Middle Ages, but a huge Russian empire which covered the entire Eurasian landmass and the British Isles instead.
My favourite “proof” of their theories was the derivation of the word “Thames”. It supposedly comes from “sound”, as in Bosphorus Sound, its consonants spelt backwards and pronounced Arab-style.
Utter nonsense, you are thinking. But the shelves of the history sections of Moscow bookstores are groaning with this “research”. Slowly, it is acquiring a fringe intellectual respectability, not least thanks to Mr Kasparov.