Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (6 page)

Incidentally, it is highly likely that they would also realize that sunrises across the year move exactly like a pendulum. At the spring equinox (currently around 21 March) the Sun will rise due east and then rise a little further north each day until the summer solstice (21 June) at which point it stops and reverses its direction back to the autumn equinox and on to the winter solstice, by which time it will rise well into the south. The Sun’s behaviour across a year, as viewed from the Earth, creates exactly the same frequency model as a pendulum. It displays a faster rate of change in the centre and slows gradually to the solstice extremes, where it stops and reverses direction.

So, Neolithic sky-watchers would clearly have understood that there were two constantly repeating patterns taking place – the day and the year. It is almost impossible that they would have failed to realize that the daily pattern fitted into the yearly pattern 366 times. As far as they were concerned the year was a great circle of 366 days in duration and so the origin of the degree of arc as 1/366th of a circle. By contrast the modern convention of 360° in a circle is as primitive as the ancient Egyptian year of 360 days – it simply isn’t correct. The two errors are entirely historically related, and though we now do at least use a year of 365 days, we never corrected the mistake regarding the number of degrees in a circle.

The 366-day year differs from the modern year of 365 days in three out of four years, as it represents the ‘true’ state of affairs regarding the Earth’s passage around the Sun, as measured against the background stars. In any case, those who first created the megalithic measuring system dealt exclusively in integers (whole numbers), and for good reason since a circle containing 365.25° would be quite unworkable. The later 360° circle had been adopted by the Sumerians as well as the Egyptians, who both celebrated a ritual year of 360 days, which required significant alterations and compensations in order to constantly bring it back to the true state of affairs regarding the Earth’s passage around the Sun. This system of geometry was eventually adopted by other ancient cultures, not least that of the Greeks, and so became the norm across the world.

The ancient system of geometry had greatness running right through it. It divided the Earth’s polar circumference into 366° and then subdivided each degree into 60 minutes of arc, with 6 seconds to each minute. And, amazingly, each second of arc is exactly 366 MY in length. How neat! We call this unit of 366 MY a Megalithic Second of arc (Msec).

The Msec appears to have been adopted by the Minoan culture that existed on Crete around 2000
BC
because they used a 366° circle and a standard unit of length equivalent to 30.36 cm,
¹
which is exactly a 1,000th part of this geodetic subdivision of the planet. The Minoan foot is just a whisker shorter than a modern foot of 30.48 cm – which means that 1,000 imperial feet is itself very close to 1 Msec. But we realized quite early that the modern imperial system, with its feet, pounds and pints, developed from the old integrated megalithic system. This can be demonstrated because a cube with sides that are 1/10th of a Megalithic Yard (4 MI) holds exactly one pint, and weighs one pound when filled with cereal grain.

There are many unexpected correlations between elements that stem back to an ancient integrated system. For example, Thomas Jefferson discovered to his amazement that, for no apparent reason, a cubic foot of pure water weighs precisely 1,000 oz. When he considered this oddity alongside other unexpected connections between measurements in different aspects of the British measuring system Jefferson stated in a report of 4 July 1790:

What circumstances of the times, or purpose of barter or commerce, called for this combination of weights and measures, with the subjects to be exchanged or purchased, are not now to be ascertained. But (they) … must have been the result of design and scientific calculation, and not a mere coincidence of hazard … from very high antiquity.

So, the man who would become the third president of the United States of America correctly spotted that modern British units of measure had come from a common source in the extreme distant past!

It is worth comparing the beautifully integer Megalithic Second of arc with the modern metric system, which is also based on the polar circumference of our planet. Whilst the Neolithic system had a coherent 366 MY to 1 Msec, the current second of arc is a meaningless and arbitrary 30.87 m in length. We have gradually lost the harmony and beauty established by these Stone Age astronomers.

What is more, the power of the megalithic system of measurements extends beyond the Earth. When one applies the megalithic system to the Moon, it can be seen that when the Moon is split, using the same length of Megalithic Yard present on Earth (
see
Appendix 7) there are exactly 100 MY to a Lunar Megalithic Second of arc. As we will discuss later, Jim Russell, an engineer who shares our curiosity and has rebuilt megalithic astronomical apparatus with modern materials, found that the ancient techniques allowed the users to achieve unexpected results. Rather bewildered he asked us in an email:

I have realized the vertical rail could be used to determine the diameter of the Moon, once the Earth circumference is known. Is there any evidence the ancients knew the Moon’s diameter?

The full scope of our discoveries, once we had established the original existence of the megalithic system of geometry, took an entire book to explain and the magnitude of this brilliant concept, from before history began, is still revealing itself at an incredible pace.

We know very well that the fully integrated megalithic system of measurements deals wonderfully with time, linear distance, mass and volume. In terms of the Megalithic Yard, this unit appears to have been created partly because it is perfectly integer to both the Earth and the Moon – to an accuracy that is essentially flawless. The full measuring system was also tied directly to the mass of the Earth. Many modern units of measurement, such as the British pound and pint, developed directly from the megalithic system and are still in use today.

We originally thought that the creation of the metric system of measurement in the 18th century had sounded the eventual death knell of megalithic achievements but as we shall see, even that assumption turned out to be incorrect. In reality there are no mainstream measuring systems in common use today that fail to owe a debt to the original, integrated megalithic system.

We have created a series of appendices at the back of this book so that those with sufficient interest can look at a fuller description of all our findings, since it is our intention to keep as many numbers out of the body of this book as possible. Nevertheless, we do not expect anyone to take our word alone for all we have suggested and every proof of our findings is available to those who wish to check them.

What we had found demonstrated that a pre-literate culture, with little in the way of technological sophistication, possessed a way of looking at the world and beyond it, that makes our present methods of measuring our environment appear clumsy by comparison.

Nobody has ever told us where our logic, evidence or mathematics is wrong, and those people deemed to be experts simply refused even to look at our findings whilst the majority remained totally silent about them. This is not too surprising because for any well-known archaeologist or historian to break with orthodox teaching and to accept the totality of our discoveries without being absolutely certain we are not deluded, could mean professional suicide. This is especially true since much of what we published worked well mathematically and astronomically but could not be proved by way of any physical evidence.

For example, if we were to suggest that ancient man had been in possession of coin-operated slot machines that could dispense espresso or cappuccino coffee on demand, we would be expected to back our claim with datable evidence. We would require the components of such a device to appear in some archaeological dig, not to mention hard evidence that both coffee and coins were in use at the time. The only machine we were suggesting, namely a simple pendulum, could not survive the ravages of time intact. If it was made of twine and clay it would simply disintegrate in the ground, whereas if it was a pierced stone it might be interpreted as a weight for fishing or a loom. Wooden poles used for star and planet sightings could also be expected to rot quickly and, even if they did survive by some miracle, they could just as easily have been the components of some building or boundary fence. The desert climate of ancient Egypt desiccates and preserves organic material – in the damp conditions of the British Isles such materials normally return to earth within a handful of years.

There is certainly plenty of evidence that the Megalithic Yard and Rod were realities, since Thom found them present in just about every stone circle, fan or avenue he measured. However this sort of evidence is easy to dismiss. Thom’s Megalithic Yard has been described as an ‘abstraction’, a ‘mistake’ or the result of plain bad surveying. It was further suggested that once Thom had focused his mind on the existence of the Megalithic Yard he subconsciously searched for it in the decades of surveying that followed. This, though never expressed as such, is an accusation of ‘cheating’ on Thom’s part that we think unjustified and quite out of character with the scrupulous nature of the man. But it does remain a fact that at the time we published
Civilization One
we were heavy on theories – all of which worked perfectly, but light on testable, tangible evidence.

That is no longer the case.

We had suggested the use of the number 366 as being central to the whole megalithic system of measurement, but try as we may we could not find a stone circle in which the number 366 appeared in terms of Megalithic Yards or Rods. We had gone even further, predicting that our ancient ancestors were probably fascinated by circles in which whole numbers of units for both the diameter and the circumference of the circle were possible. In particular we had pointed out that any circle with a diameter of 233 units would have a circumference of 732 of the same units: (732 being twice 366), but once again this was a theory, and without any substantial and tangible proof it could be readily dismissed as some kind of numerology.

It seemed for a while that all our efforts to champion the megalithic system would come to nothing as far as orthodoxy was concerned. True there was a small nucleus of people around the world who were fascinated by our discoveries and who were ready to give us all the assistance they could, but these were not people who were archaeologically influential. But the interest of both mathematicians and engineers has been much easier to find. This is probably because both mathematicians and engineers are fundamentally scientific. The social or historical reasons for two and two making four don’t matter too much to a mathematics teacher – what counts is being able to do the sum. Similarly, to an engineer, evidence shows that a proposed bridge or building will be able to cope with the forces it is likely to encounter. Those interested in mathematics have taken our information on board because it pleased them to exercise their minds, and we can report that, no matter what scrutiny has been brought to bear on any of our findings, we have not been questioned on either our methods or our results.

So we took our case to people who had no axe to grind; individuals who could understand the significance of what we had found and give some sensible assessment of its potential merits. Those people were school teachers – most specifically science teachers.

The British Association of Teachers of Science ran a review of our book
Civilization One
on their website and invited members to read it for themselves. The result was clear:

There is a very well argued description of the process by which the passage of Venus across the sky, passing between two markers at easily standardized distance apart sets a unit of time during which a pendulum is regulated until it swings 366 times. The length of the pendulum string at that point is exactly one half of a Megalithic Yard. It is indisputable, I think, that Venus was a very important sky object to all early civilizations and its use in this way is certainly plausible. They begin by deriving the fact that 366 MY is precisely equivalent to one second of arc of the Earth’s circumference. The number 366 is equivalent to exactly 1,000 Minoan feet. I have summarized very briefly the beginnings of the authors’ thinking but it is this that set them off on the train of investigation which reveals itself so dramatically and, I have to say, convincingly as this easily read book progresses. This book sets out a plausible case for the remarkable connections between systems of measurement – linear, volume and mass – from the dawn of time through to the imperial pint, the avoirdupois and troy systems, the metric system and even the esoteric measurements used today in the United States. Having read this book twice, I am convinced there is something about it – there is definitely a case to answer, so to speak.

So mathematically literate teachers think our evidence stacks up and there is a case to answer.

Meanwhile, engineers who have looked at our work have pronounced our experiments with pendulums and braced wooden frames to be entirely acceptable – irrespective of whether they are historically ‘likely’ or not. The engineer asks ‘could it have been done?’ and he or she doesn’t worry in the slightest that our discoveries and theories might be treading on any professional toes.

Such an individual is Edmund Sixsmith, a civil engineer with degrees from two of the world’s greatest seats of learning – Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edmund first contacted us in August of 2007, during the period we were busy researching this book. To say that Edmund is a ‘character’ is an understatement. At the time he made contact with us Edmund had completed an article on the work of Professor Alexander Thom that he intended to submit to the
Journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers
. He wanted our permission to use extracts from our previous books.