Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (6 page)

The technique required was very straightforward. A circle had to be constructed from a centre pole using a rope before dividing the perimeter into 366 sections. This could be done by trial and error or by using a trick of geometry: making the diameter 233 units across (any unit will do) and then measuring off 2 units on the circumference. The pendulum bearer would then stand in the middle of the circle while a colleague erected a square frame that had an internal dimension equal to one Megalithic degree. The square was adjusted until the pendulum bearer confirmed that its top and bottom were aligned with the passage of Venus.

The bearer then started swinging the pendulum when Venus appeared inside the square and stopped when it disappeared again. There was no likelihood of error since it is clear that these sky watchers knew to check Venus on a regular basis. Because Venus sometimes moves faster within the zodiac than at other times, the very longest half Megalithic Yard pendulum achievable within the Venus cycle was the one they were looking for.

If the bearer had been able to count exactly 366 swings, they knew they had confirmed their pendulum as being a half Megalithic Yard. If the count was short, they repeated the process after reducing the length and, conversely, the length would be increased if too many swings had occurred.

There is no doubt about it. Our Megalithic ancestors calibrated their half Megalithic Yard pendulum not using a star, but the planet Venus. We berated ourselves for not hitting upon the Venus method earlier because both of our respective earlier researches have involved this planet. Chris had already shown that, in a ritualistic sense, Venus had been of stunning importance to the Megalithic peoples as well as later groups such as the Babylonians, the Canaanites and latterly, the Jews.
⁶

Working with Robert Lomas, Chris has published findings that demonstrate the huge importance of Venus to the builders of the Megalithic sites in the British Isles. The gigantic and very beautiful 5,000-year-old observatory at Newgrange was painstakingly designed to let the light of Venus into the central chamber for only minutes once every eight years on the winter solstice.
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This and other sites would have enabled the Neolithic astronomers to maintain a completely accurate calendar. Chris had also argued that there was reason to believe that the light of Venus was considered to be involved with birth and resurrection. This is because the internal design of Newgrange appears to have been constructed to emulate female reproductive organs and the light of Venus penetrates the passageway like a celestial phallus. Such mating between heaven and Earth was not an uncommon concept in ancient traditions and according to the Roman historians the later Celts are said to have conducted copulation rituals at the spring equinox and women gave birth at the winter solstice – just as a shaft of light from Venus exploded into the centre of the huge structure. At that very point is a lone carving depicting three interlaced spirals, which represented nine months – the gestation period of a human female.

Meanwhile, we both knew just how important Venus had been to a range of ancient civilizations, not least because the orbits of Venus act as a natural calendar reference for the Earth itself. There is a relationship between Earth and Venus that was always seen as being deeply mystical, in that five periods of Venus are the same as eight Earth years.

From Alan’s point of view, the realization that Venus could act as the necessary pendulum-setter came as direct proof of the validity of his own earlier discoveries regarding the Phaistos Disc. The Phaistos Disc is a 6 centimetre baked clay disc, found in the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Phaistos in Crete. It dates back to the Minoan civilization (circa 2000
BC
). Appendix 5 gives a great deal more information about the Phaistos Disc and includes drawings of the artefact. For the moment it is sufficient to say that this amazing little disc is a multifaceted calculating machine, based on the Megalithic 366-day year. One of the jobs it performs is to indicate to those using this year when to compensate for the difference between the ritual year of 366 days and the true solar year of 365.25 days. However, the disc does more than this because it also provides the mathematical framework for establishing the position of Venus in the zodiac on
any
day –
ever.
It does this in a very simple way, explained in Appendix 5, but the fact remains that Venus tracking is an essential part of the abilities of this little calculator.

When the Venus experiment was undertaken in Orkney, Scotland, where some of the most magnificent of the Megalithic monuments are to be found, the size of the resulting pendulum was very significant. The pendulum would prove to be a half Megalithic Yard, the full length of which would deviate from Alexander Thom’s findings by a staggering 1 part in 2,700. Allowing for the human factor (that someone has to hold the pendulum and decide when to start and stop it) the Venus-based half Megalithic Yard pendulum was perfect. Our result was within the very fine margin of error identified by Professor Thom.

This method of reproducing the Megalithic Yard was so simple it was not even necessary for the master mason to count the number of beats in any modern sense. Counting does not have to be part of a tiered system such as the base ten method used today, in which we add up in multiples of ten by adding a nought after the digit. A nursery rhyme or a sea shanty is a good way of counting out a set number without understanding arithmetic. For example, reciting the following passage while pointing at a sheep for each word will tell you whether your flock of 20 is still intact:

‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mow, catch a monkey by the toe. If he squeals let him go. Eeny, meeny, miney, mow.’

It follows that measuring something as simple as this could be as old as language itself. Indeed, the words ‘eeny, meeny, miney, mow’ are thought to be an ancient British counting technique from more than 4,000 years ago.

There is no doubt that the Megalithic Yard is a superb integer of the polar circumference of the Earth – right down to a second of arc that is an incredible 366 Megalithic Yards in length. Once this unit had been defined by obviously gifted astronomers, these early scientists appear to have created a foolproof method that every master mason could use to generate an accurate Megalithic Yardstick.

This whole process is brilliantly simple, memorable and unerringly accurate. Of course there will have been errors of judgement when transferring the length from the pendulum to a measuring stick but that is the kind of distribution of error that Alexander Thom found. Because there was a physical reality behind the process, all errors deviated from a central point of 82.96656 centimetres. Pure Neolithic genius!

After several years of intense investigation we had come to a point where there were only three basic possibilities for Alexander Thom’s Megalithic Yard:

1. The unit that Thom thought he had detected at hundreds of Megalithic sites was an error of statistical manipulation. The fact that the unit he defined, to within a 10,000th of a millimetre, just happened to so precisely fit the Earth’s circumference and was reproducible using the astronomically key number of 366 were both coincidences. It followed that the hypothetical 366-degree geometry system outlined was not real and the precise fit of 366 Megalithic Yards and 1,000 Minoan feet to an assumed second of arc was a further coincidence.

2. Thom’s Megalithic Yard was real in some still unknown way and our interpretation only fitted the facts by sheer coincidence.

3. We had rediscovered the wonderful system that was used to define and recreate the Megalithic Yard.

It is up to each reader to come to their own conclusion as to which option is most likely to be correct. At this stage we were fully convinced that the first two options were not correct because of the number of outrageous coincidences required to sustain either view. However, little did we know that we had barely scratched the surface of a system that makes all modern approaches to measurement look simply crude. We had just begun on a journey that was to tap into the very fabric of the universe.

In solving the riddle of the Megalithic Yard we believe we have made it easy for archaeologists to at last accept Thom’s findings without any fundamental contradiction of their existing views on the abilities of the builders of the Megalithic structures of western Europe. But now it looked as though there was a far deeper understanding of astronomy behind the creation of the Megalithic Yard than anyone could have imagined and the world of academic archaeology is likely to resist the idea that the Neolithic astronomers could have achieved so much. We share their surprise, but the balance of probabilities makes the continued rejection of Thom’s conclusion unscientific and merely the result of personal prejudice.

One leading academic was brave enough to be generous about our early attempt to solve the mystery of the Megalithic Yard. In September 2000 Chris and Robert Lomas attended the Orkney Science Festival where they shared our first, albeit slightly flawed explanation of the Megalithic Yard with Archie Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University. Professor Roy is not only a distinguished astronomer but he had also worked with Professor Thom in identifying the archaeoastronomy present in Megalithic sites. He spent the evening checking the mathematics involved in our original model, based upon the movement of stars, and the next morning he announced that the method did work in principle. He then joined Chris and Robert in a public demonstration of how the Megalithic Yard might have been created. Professor Roy added that he believed we had opened up a new chapter in the understanding of Megalithic Man.

Alexander Thom had never attempted to justify his findings in cultural terms. He did not believe it was for him to explain how or why the Neolithic inhabitants of western Europe developed the Megalithic Yard – like the true engineer he was he simply reported what the data showed. Those who wanted to construct a smooth model of prehistory were not happy because of the consequences of accepting that the Stone Age builders were actually very sophisticated. It was simply too inconvenient to even consider a re-evaluation of the standard credo concerning human development.

The result is that few people of reputable scientific standing have looked afresh at the late Stone Age and early Bronze Age cultures in and around the British Isles. The archaeologists gaze at their recovered physical artefacts and they see a consistent picture – but maybe it is only consistent because they ignore evidence that does not suit their model. Now we have established that the Megalithic builders were, beyond all reasonable doubt, using a highly sophisticated system of measurement despite the fact that every other piece of evidence suggests that they were not generally very advanced.

There seemed to be two possible scenarios: either these Neolithic people were very accomplished surveyors and astronomers or they had accidentally stumbled upon some important natural phenomenon when they based their common unit of linear length on the dimensions of the Earth. Perhaps they did not understand what was happening – but then how could the Minoans have employed the same principle in a different application if the whole thing was an accident?

A very strange picture was beginning to emerge and it seemed sensible to search for any other evidence that might be available. If the Megalithic people were smart enough to develop a complex system of geometry, we had to assume that they could have done more. Having created their unit of length from a unit of time, the next obvious steps would have been to create units of weight and capacity. Such a move would have been an important building block towards trade, which was in turn a key step towards true civilization.

It seemed to us that if an integrated system of weights had once existed around the ‘366’ concept, the best route forward would be to continue to use Thom’s principle of asking the question, ‘What would I have done to achieve the assumed goal?’ Taking this simple philosophy Chris began a series of experiments that gave results that were to be as shocking as they were totally perplexing.