Newton’s Chronology

Scott Mandelbrote reviews Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold’s Newton and the Origin of Civilization in the TLS, a study of Newton’s efforts to reconstruct the history of the ancient world and his use of historical astronomy to buttress his biblical chronology.

Mandelbrote summarizes the background of Newton’s project: “Newton’s interest in scientific chronology was initially sparked by the international discussion about setting the date of Easter and about the adoption of the Gregorian reform of the calendar. This was the subject of correspondence between Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the Royal Society in the early months of 1700. Many of Newton’s contemporaries, notably John Graunt and Sir William Petty, were interested in using statistics to estimate the historical speed of population growth in a manner that might confirm the framework of biblical time.”

Newton assumes the accuracy of the biblical chronologies, and tried to determine mathematically if that chronology gave enough time for the growth of the human population. When other ancient chronologies conflicted with the biblical one, he adjusted the former: “The extreme antiquity of the Egyptian dynasties presented a problem, which Newton solved by adopting the identification made by Sir John Marsham in the early 1670s between the historical king Sesostris and the biblical pharaoh Sesac.”

Astronomy played a significant role in Newton’s studies: “For proof of the radical shortening of secular history that this move implied, and to make it conform with the chronology of the ancient Greeks that he proposed, Newton eventually looked to astronomy. He hoped to use the periodicity provided by the precession of the equinoxes to date historical observations of the heavens, reported in the fourth century BC by Eudoxus, in order to control the earliest dates in Greek history. These he associated with the expedition of the Argonauts (which he believed to be historical fact), the Trojan War, and the writings of Hesiod.”

Buchwald and Feingold are not interested so much in Newton’s biblical work as in what his work reveals about Newton’s approach to scientific problems in general. They conclude that “what is distinctive in Newton’s style of reasoning is his use of approximation and repeated averaging to overcome uncertainties in the data provided by the senses through the practice of mathematics.”