This important new book presents Newton’s historical researches on the origin of human civilization, or, to be more specific, of the history of the ancient world after the Great Flood. This is not Newton the lone genius, revolutionizing physical science and laying the foundations for the modern world; rather, it shows Newton deeply enmeshed in the intellectual agendas of his time, coming to an intellectual position that is doubtful at best, even to contemporaries, and finally abandoned.

Buchwald and Feingold present the first systematic account of Newton’s works on chronology, the now largely extinct historical study attempting to assign dates to events from the Judeo-Christian Bible and Greek mythology. Newton’s earliest work in chronology concerned the corruption of religion by idolatry and the parallel corruption of the earliest, pristine knowledge of the cosmos, which he believed included both heliocentrism and atomism. As an ancillary he created a theory of the development of civilization. The growth of the human population after the flood led to the appearance of towns, initially governed by elders, whose pronouncements were codified as the first laws. But codes of law created a need for judges and their attendant courts, which gradually extended their (inevitably male) authority beyond their cities to surrounding villages, and they became the earliest kings. These early kingdoms then grew by conquest or merger to become empires. Newton was a consistent, even ferocious, euhemerist. Every one of these stages was connected to biblical events, mythological figures, or both.

The mature Newton used general methods developed in physical science and novel astronomical arguments to establish a unique chronology on an unusually short timeline. From his earlier work in physical science Newton transferred a general method for finding the actual value of a physical quantity from divergent measurements to establish dates that reflected all the information available. One consequence was his recalculation of generation times to a maximum of thirty years in the period he studied, with a consequent compression of the timeline. Newton, for example, dated the flood 680 years later than Bishop Ussher, and insisted that there had been no Egyptian or Chinese empires before 1000 BCE.

In support of his new chronology, Newton used passages from Hesiod to establish the position of an important astronomical reference circle — the colure — which changes position slowly over time, and may thus be used to establish an absolute date in the past if its earlier position is accurately known. As Buchwald and Feingold show, Newton’s work here lacks the authority we might expect from the author of the law of universal gravitation. Newton nonetheless clung tenaciously to all his principles and results, but did not authorize their publication during his lifetime, although an unauthorized summary appeared in France. When his chronology appeared in full, shortly after his death, it was immediately attacked at home and abroad. Buchwald and Feingold close with a detailed examination of these responses to Newton’s work, and the demise of chronology as an intellectual agenda. Although it received positive attention, Newton’s chronology was abandoned, along with the general enterprise it represented, in favor of less circumscribed approaches to history.

This book is a major step forward in understanding one of the main strands in Newton’s intellectual life. Buchwald and Feingold show extensive relationships between Newton and his peers, and also borrowings from his scientific work in his historical work. They have only occasional things to say about Newton’s unorthodox religious ideas or alchemical researches, and they also tell us little about whether Newton’s historical studies exerted an influence on the development of his scientific work. But this is an already large book, and these are historical questions for which its authors have provided a solid foundation for the first time. Buchwald and Feingold honestly describe the published version of Newton’s Chronology as “stupefyingly tedious,” and the most extensive attack in English, by Whiston, as “wearying” and “accessible only to the most dedicated and heavily caffeinated reader of the day.” Their own efforts are also challenging in length and occasionally in technical detail, but overall this is an exemplary presentation of a key figure in the midst and at the mercy of the intellectual currents of his time.