Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (22 page)

We could draw an infinite series of squares and circles and they would produce an alternating series of cubit and remen dimensions, doubling as they move outwards, and halving as they go inwards.

Squares on the hypotenuse of a royal cubit.

A circle within a cubit.

The power of the circle.

All of this was very basic, although it was beautiful and intriguing. Here we had the power of the circle that could be said to define the two major units of Egyptian measurement. The next obvious question was, ‘What is the length of circles created by a royal cubit and remen series?’ The answer was very interesting.

Taking a square with sides of one quarter-remen (18.526 centimetres) we find that the circle that encloses it is very close indeed to a Megalithic Yard in circumference! At 82.31 centimetres it was 99.2 per cent of Thom’s Megalithic Yard found in the British Isles. The next square has sides of a half-cubit and the next one a half-remen; the circle that encompasses this square is two Megalithic Yards in circumference. There is a small discrepancy between the quarter-remen square and the Megalithic Yard circle around it, but we had to remember that a pendulum swing is inversely proportional to gravity, which reduces towards the equator and causes a pendulum with the same period for its swing to be shorter in length. This boils down to the fact that anyone following the rules for a Megalithic Yard would get a noticeably smaller result at the latitude of the pyramids than they would in Orkney, for instance. Alexander Thom’s Megalithic Yard was an average derived from all of his measurements taken from Megalithic sites from northern Scotland down to Brittany, and the vast majority were derived from northerly sites. Our conclusion is that the tiny variances in the available data are greater than the inaccuracy found in the principle of the royal cubit and the remen defined by a Megalithic pendulum.

A Megalithic Yard made in Egypt according to the Megalithic pendulum method would be 82.7 centimetres long. This shows that the pendulum method of reproduction must originally have been intended to work only in and around the British Isles. At this southern latitude the same process does not produce a correct geodetic unit. However, for the theoretical Egyptian Megalithic Yard to be the circle in the remen/cubit series the royal cubit would have to be 52.648 centimetres – less than half a per cent larger than Stecchini’s estimate.

When our manuscript was being checked for scientific accuracy by Peter Harwood, he had been very surprised and eventually impressed with our findings. Peter was doing a great job for us, pointing out some errors in our calculations and drawing our attention to issues we had missed. When he read this section on the possible use of the Megalithic Yard to define the royal cubit he suggested that we appeared to have
inferred
a significant discovery about the Khufu pyramid that we had missed in fact. He reminded us of John Taylor’s book
The Great Pyramid,
written in 1859, where it is observed that if one divides the height of the pyramid into twice the size of its base, the result is pi. While some people believed this demonstrated that the ratio we now call pi, must have been sacred to the Egyptians, others had a more prosaic explanation.

Critics of the ‘sacred pi’ theory pointed out that if a wheel had been made with a diameter that was a subdivision of the height, and it was used to roll out a certain number of revolutions along the sides, the height and sides would automatically have a pi relationship without the builders even realizing it.

Peter Harwood’s email went on to say:

‘If you have a wheel a foot in diameter, say, then construct a pyramid by making each side of the base square exactly one roll of the wheel long, and the height two diameters of the wheel, you have your pi ratio without actually knowing what pi is. But supposing instead of a foot you use a half cubit diameter wheel. You will end up with a copy of the great pyramid 1 cubit high, with the length of each base side 1 MY! Now that made my pulse race. I can’t believe you’d miss such a sexy result.’

Peter was quite right; we had missed a very significant point. The use of a Megalithic-Yard wheel would explain a very old mystery. We checked out the height of the pyramid and found that it is estimated to be 146.59 metres and the sides are estimated to be 230.56 metres. Because all of the estimates of the royal cubit vary a tiny amount we decided to standardize and make the assumption that the Megalithic Yard principle, used in Egypt, had been the starting point. So, taking a Megalithic Yard as 82.7 centimetres and a half royal cubit as 26.324 centimetres, we found the following for the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza:

All of the measuring units appeared in the same number when used in Khufu’s pyramid. We could only assume that some kind of ancient numerology had made the value ‘279’ deeply meaningful to the architects. Checking other pyramids we found they all appear to have been made to differing requirements, although the other two pyramids at Giza had perimeters that appear to have been measured in Egyptian Megalithic Yards:

Could it be that the Ancient Egyptians created their own units by using the same ‘sacred’ principle as the world’s first workers in stone? They must have known that there is no other way to create a repeatable unit of measure other than to calibrate the spin of the Earth using the apparent motion of Venus or the stars – and the Egyptians were unquestionably fascinated by the heavens. Their use of Venus and stars in hieroglyphs shows how central they were to the priesthood.

The priests of Ra, the Sun god, may have sought an extra layer of encryption to hide the secrets of the master mason from the common man. One can imagine how they considered the length of the pendulum to be the circumference of the sun and then put a square around it. They would here be using the known Egyptian principle of ‘As above – so below’ as well as the ‘Russian Doll’ principle that was central to many early cultures, including that of the Megalithic builders. This meant that the same geometric principle would give them an infinite sequence of ½ MY, 1 MY, 2 MY to reveal multiples of royal cubits and remens.

The hieroglyph for Venus, which literally means ‘Divine Star’

The hieroglyph for the priesthood, showing Venus above the sun

We checked on whether there were any further grounds to believe that the Egyptians had used the principles of the Megalithic measuring system to create their own units. We found them.

In the Egyptian numbering system the circle was used as a hieroglyph to denote the fraction one quarter. In the sequence of circles within squares, the square that contains the circle with a circumference of a Megalithic Yard has sides that measure one quarter-remen. Furthermore, the Ancient Egyptians had a principle unit of area they called the ‘setat’ (later known to the Greeks as the ‘arouna’). This was most commonly used in its quarter form. We were amazed to find that the area of a setat is exactly 4,000 MY
²
and the quarter-setat is therefore precisely 1,000 MY
²
. The chances of this being a coincidence are infinitesimally small.

The theory that there was interaction between the Megalithic builders of the British Isles and the Ancient Egyptians was starting to look extremely probable. It has already been noted by other researchers that the inner edge of the circle, or Sarsen Ring, at Stonehenge in southern England has a diameter of 1162.8 inches (2953.51 centimetres), which means that it has an area exactly equal to an Egyptian quarter-setat. Could the Egyptians also have adopted their units of area from the Neolithic people of Britain?

It appears that the early Egyptians were strongly influenced by the Megalithic builders of the British Isles. Such connections have been mooted before but have been rejected by mainstream archaeology because of the absence of cross-cultural artefacts at archaeological dig sites. The assumption that ancient cultures could not have had contact unless they left evidence appears to be unwarranted. The movement of a small number of master mason/magi priests between the British Isles and the Nile Delta could not reasonably be expected to show any trace of artefacts. The discovery of these interrelated measurement principles is far more conclusive evidence of a deep level of influence of one people on another than the digging up of Megalithic objects in the sands of Egypt.

Hidden within the working practices of all Egyptian mathematicians and builders the Megalithic Yard had been present, probably from the very start of the civilization. Megalithic ‘DNA’ in so significant a place as this surely points to the Egyptian system of measurements also possessing strong traces of the Great Underlying Principle – whatever its origin.