Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (5 page)

So, if we put the ‘establishment’ view that the ancient Egyptians were not very skilled at astronomy to one side we can, for the moment, accept the evidence of the stellar-aligned pyramid shafts and the possibility of the Giza trio being a deliberate model of the stars of Orion’s Belt. The next question to ask is: where could the star-based ideas and beliefs behind the culture that built the pyramids have come from?

We have to admit a bias in asking this question because our interest in the pyramids was initiated by a finding that would answer this question. At this stage of our researches we strongly suspected a connection between Neolithic Britain and ancient Egypt – but, assuming that we were right, we did not know whether the Egyptians influenced the Britons or vice versa. We needed to find out more about the origins of the Egyptian culture. Whilst we had a hypothesis to investigate we remained entirely open to what we might find, and open to changing our minds – as we have had to do on many occasions.

To gain an insight into the thinking behind the creation of structures as special as the Giza pyramids it is essential to understand the theological and mythological heritage of a civilization. As they say, ‘there is little new under the Sun.’ New religions are hardly ever invented – rather they are improvements on older cults or an amalgam of the best bits of the rituals and beliefs from various sources.

It is from the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians that the later gods of the Greeks, Romans and the Jews ultimately sprang. Later, Christianity and Islam arrived as reworked versions of older ideas. Abraham, the pivotal figure from the earliest annals of the Old Testament, was from the Sumerian city of Ur and went into Egypt talking about his ‘God of our Fathers’ – meaning that the deity was the god of that specific city. Meanwhile Judaism claims to date back to Abraham and his son Isaac, and the Old Testament carries other Sumerian legends such as Noah’s Flood and the story of Enoch.

When the story of Jesus Christ was found to be valuable to the Roman state it was changed to include the key aspects of Mithraism, a cult of Persian origin, which was already very popular in Rome and the wider empire. St Paul had been brought up as a follower of Mithra and the idea of the death and resurrection of a man-deity made immediate sense to him, whereas the Jews of the Jerusalem Church must have been horrified by this alien concept being grafted onto their heritage. For them the long-anticipated Messiah was a king to lead them into battle against oppressors – not some physical aspect of their God, Yahweh, who would take responsibility for their individual wrongdoings.
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The powerful icon of the dying and rising god stems back to ancient Egypt and, no doubt, long before that. And the main festivals of Christianity, including Christmas and Easter, were thousands of years old when Jesus Christ was born. Ancient astronomy lies behind these modern religious celebrations – Christmas being the winter solstice, when the rising Sun reaches its most southerly point on the horizon and Easter, the springtime of rebirth, is calculated by the Western Church as being the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.

So what influences did the ancient Egyptians have to form their early beliefs? This is difficult because writing was only invented around the time that the Egypt we call ancient Egypt was created by the unification of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt, which is thought to have taken place around 3100
BC
during dynasty ‘Zero’. One of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions is the Narmer Palette, which dates from about that time. It is thought by some to depict the unification of the two lands by King Narmer. On one side of the palette the king is depicted with the white crown of Upper Egypt and the other side depicts him wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt.

The indications are that the time before history began in Egypt, agriculture had developed around the Nile by the so-called ‘Badarian’ people. They were essentially semi-nomads who appear to have had a belief in the afterlife as they buried their dead in small cemeteries on the outskirts of their temporary settlements. Bodies were interred in the foetal position and they were always laid facing west, towards the setting Sun.

Archaeologists have been able to track subtle changes in the habits and lifestyles of the Badarian people which started to take place around 4500
BC
. The culture in Upper Egypt from this period is referred to as Naqada 1, after the town of Naqada on the west bank of the Nile in the region of Qena. The Naqada people would prove to be the most significant culture to emerge in Upper Egypt. Instead of simply accepting the bounty of the annual Nile flood the Naqada embraced it, building irrigation ditches and canals and creating a form of agriculture that was far more sophisticated that that practised during the Badarian period. The nomadic lifestyle ceased and true towns began to emerge, which opened the door for trade and a diversification of skills.

Despite the apparent evolution from nomads to farmers and then to city builders over a period of 1,500 years, ancient Egyptian texts recall a lost period in deeper history when there had been an advanced civilization which, for some reason, regressed. They called this lost golden age Zep Tepi, meaning ‘The First Time’. The Egyptians associated the first appearance of the phoenix, the mythical bird that regenerated from its own ashes, with this distant epoch. R T Rundle Clark, former professor of Egyptology at Manchester University, commented on the meaning of this First Time:

Anything whose existence or authority had to be justified or explained must be referred to the ‘First Time’. This was true for natural phenomena, rituals, royal insignia, the plans of temples, magical or medical formulae, the hieroglyphic system of writing, the calendar – the whole paraphernalia of the civilization … All that was good or efficacious was established on the principles laid down in the ‘First Time’ – which was, therefore, a golden age of absolute perfection …
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Why did the Egyptians have to invent Zep Tepi? Maybe it is simply a romantic attempt to explain how they came to exist – or possibly it really is a cultural memory of some previous period of advanced development that crumbled for some reason. We would later come across new evidence that points, very powerfully, to the second of these options.

But what about the possibility of input of astronomical knowledge from a source other than the Egyptians’ own abilities? A nation that lacks technical ability can always buy in special skills. According to tradition, Solomon, the second Jewish king of Jerusalem, had to bring in Phoenician expertise to build his famous temple. He paid Hiram, King of Tyre to provide an architect who could design this edifice as a functioning astronomical observatory that connected Earth with heaven.
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Could the ancient Egyptians have done something similar 1,500 years before Solomon’s time? And, if so, where could they have gone to get the skills required?

The inspiration for our journey to Egypt had begun nearly 4,000 km away, in the quiet fields of northern England. We definitely had an answer that begged a question.

•

From the gaunt and impressive standing-stone circles of the island of Orkney in the far north of Scotland, right down to the giant avenues of stones in their frozen march across the fields of Brittany in France, Alexander Thom (1894–1985) spent each and every summer for almost five decades carefully measuring and making notes. Together with family members and a small but staunch group of interested friends and associates, he gradually built up a greater database, regarding megalithic achievement in building, than anyone before or since.

It is thanks to the tenacity of this quite extraordinary individual that we have been privileged to embark on an adventure that has taken up well over a decade of our lives. It remains one of our primary objectives to encourage supposed experts in ancient British archaeology to accept, as we are convinced they must do one day, that Thom’s findings regarding megalithic measurements are absolutely correct. The evidence we have amassed over recent years makes it certain that Thom was right all along and only ignorance of the available facts is holding back the development of a new paradigm of understanding regarding Western Europe in the Neolithic period.

Thom identified the use of a standard unit he called a ‘Megalithic Yard’ (MY), which he specified as being equal to 2.722 ft +/- 0.002 ft (0.82966 m +/- 0.061 m). He claimed that there were also other related units used repeatedly, including half and double Megalithic Yards and a 2.5 MY length he dubbed a Megalithic Rod (MR). On a smaller scale he found that the megalith builders had used a fortieth part of a Megalithic Yard, which he called a ‘Megalithic Inch’ (MI) because it was 0.8166 of a modern inch (2.074 cm). The system worked like this:

    1 MI = 2.074 cm

  20 MI = ? MY

  40 MI = 1 MY

100 MI = 1 MR

Thom was a first-class engineer and he was therefore perfectly qualified to analyse the structures created by other engineers – albeit 5,000 years before his own time. He would survey a megalithic stone circle or lines of stones and estimate, from the general layout, what the builders had set out to achieve. So good was his intuition in this matter that he could often deduce a missing standing stone in a plan – and predict the socket hole that would be found when the ground was examined.

The lifetime work of Alexander Thom and his rediscovery of the Megalithic Yard resulted in a stunning conclusion that created an immediate paradox – how could an otherwise primitive people build with such fine accuracy? Why did they do it and how did they do it? Thom made no attempt to answer these questions. He reported on his engineering analysis and left the anthropological aspects for others to explain. He did comment that he could not understand how these builders transmitted the Megalithic Yards so perfectly over tens of thousands of square miles and across several millennia and he acknowledged that wooden measuring sticks could not have produced the unerring level of consistency he had found.

Thom’s mathematical ability was called into question by archaeologists who could not reconcile such amazing levels of measurement perfection from a culture they considered to be primitive. We read as much as we could of the criticisms of Thom’s findings and found that, to a large extent, people would refer to his errors by quoting each other, without much in the way of substance at the root of the repeated claims. Today there are people who set themselves up as expert on megalithic sites and who refute Thom without apparently having even a basic grasp of the statistical analysis used to verify Thom’s findings.

Ten years has passed since we first set out to try and find if Thom was a genius or simply a deluded eccentric who wasted his life’s work. As non-mathematicians ourselves we could not hope to gain any new insight from delving deeper into Thom’s published data, so we set out with a much simpler and more direct hypothesis. Our premise was that if the Neolithic people of the British Isles had established a universal unit of measure it is likely to have been derived from nature rather than a complete abstraction.

After a great deal of delving and thought we eventually came to realize that there is only one way that any unit of measure can be repeatedly and reliably derived from the natural world. This is through measurement of the passage of time as expressed by the Earth spinning on its axis, and perceivable by the apparent movement of stars in the night sky. Appendix 4 explains the process in detail for those who want to delve deeper, but the principle relies on using a pendulum to measure the passage of a star or planet across a predefined gap.

We think it is fair to suggest that the first machine ever invented by man was the plumb-bob/pendulum. A small ball of clay on the end of a piece of twine or long strand of straight hair is a wonderful device that interacts with the Earth in a very predictable way. Held stationary, it will always point downwards to the centre of the planet, which allows the user to check verticals during construction of any sort. Verticals are also necessary for good observational astronomy. When the device is swung gently to and fro in the hand it becomes a timekeeper, like a modern metronome (which is only an inverted pendulum).

But the real beauty about pendulums is that the frequency with which they swing is only determined by their length, so if you count a set number of beats for a given period of time (such as the period it takes a star to traverse a known gap), you will always end up with the same pendulum length.

We found that a half Megalithic Yard pendulum was the origin of the whole measurement system rediscovered by Thom.

By the time we published
Civilization One
in 2004 we knew that it wasn’t only the megalithic measurements Thom had rediscovered that were unexpected realities from the past. We had also come to realize that the Megalithic Yard, Rod and Inch were merely components of an integrated measuring and geometry system the like of which the world has not seen since – even including measuring systems we use today.

In particular we came to recognize the existence of a system of time measurement and geometry that had relied on circles of 366°, as opposed to the 360° convention we use today. We showed that the adoption of this system was entirely logical because there actually
are
366° in an Earth circle.

Let us explain briefly. The Earth goes around the Sun once per year, which is a circle of around 940 million km. Even if prehistoric sky-watchers did not know about the movement of the Earth around the Sun, they would quickly realize that patterns formed by the Sun and stars on the horizon are repeated after two consecutive winter solstices (a year). The same individuals would also note that the stars repeat their performance on a daily basis due to the Earth’s spin on its axis (a sidereal day).