Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery Read online

  There is a second and even more surprising method, and in this case the absolute position of the middle henge relative to its companion henges is included. To achieve this we believe they erected a long vertical pole on flat ground with an unobstructed horizon and then stood at a point a little way to the north of where the stars of Orion’s Belt could be obscured by the pole when the stars were at their culmination (highest point) in the south.

  The stars at this point are at the top of their arc and therefore briefly moving almost perfectly horizontally to the ground. They then waited for the instant that the first star of the trio to appear from behind the pole – and began the pendulum swinging. They counted the beats until the moment the second star emerged and then the third star appeared. The time taken for each swing would have been around 1.002 modern seconds, and the pendulum length would therefore have been as close to a modern metre as makes no difference

  We did the experiment using astronomical software, which is obviously calibrated in minutes and seconds. Mintaka to Alnitak took 366 seconds and Alnitak to Alnilam took 360 seconds.

  This result was immediately compelling.

  We had no need to translate the findings into Megalithic Yard pendulum swings because the numbers were already perfect. We already knew that there are 366 Megalithic Rods between the first and second henge, and 360 Megalithic Rods between the second and third henge. Somehow the henge builders had translated a second of time in the sky to a Megalithic Rod on the ground. What is more 366 + 360 = 732, so the first method that had indicated 732 ‘somethings’ between henge A and henge C was also correct.

  We immediately suspected that we had found an explanation for the apparent use of the metre, as the second and the metre are two halves of the same thing. And they were both in use 4,500 years ago – so it is far from impossible that they might go back another 1,000 years to the building of Thornborough.

  A Super-science from Deep Prehistory

  The Sumerian civilization developed in the region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. Prehistoric peoples known as the Ubaidians had originally settled in the region, establishing settlements that gradually developed into the ancient city-states of Adab, Eridu, Isin, Kish, Kullab, Lagash, Larsa, Nippur, and Ur. As the region prospered, Semites from the Syrian and Arabian deserts moved in, both as peaceful immigrants and as raiders. Then, around 3250 BC, a new group called Sumerians arrived and began to intermarry with the native population. These small, dark-haired newcomers were intellectually and technologically highly sophisticated, and they spoke an agglutinative language that is unrelated to any other known language. No one knows where they came from.

  As the Sumerians gained control, the country grew rich and powerful. They invented glass-working, the wheel, and writing; their language eventually became the language of the intellectual, just as Greek and Latin did at later dates. They also are credited with devising the second of time.

  We have shown in our book Civilization One that the Sumerians had also been pendulum users. However, the Sumerians did not use the 366° geometry we find in Western Europe. Rather, they are credited with having invented the 360° with which we are familiar today. Because they were apparently divorced from the 366° system, neither did they use the Megalithic Yard or Rod. Instead they opted for a linear length that was equal to a pendulum beat for a tiny part of the day they did recognize – namely the second of time.

  Using exactly the same astronomy-based method of observing the turning of the Earth, the Sumerians were able to keep the length of their 1-second pendulum accurate across their entire history. In their case, the length of such a pendulum was, to all intents and purposes, a metre long, being 99.88 cm – a unit they called the ‘double-kush’.2

  This unit was confirmed by the late Livio Stecchini, a distinguished professor of metrology, who has also argued that the double-kush had been used by the Sumerians to produce units of capacity and weight that were almost identical to the litre and kilogram. In his work ‘A History of Measures’, Stecchini concluded that all ancient measures are, by definition, related. He used numerical analysis of data to confirm the idea to his own satisfaction but his ideas are rejected by most academics today on the basis that his proof is not of the kind they prefer or even understand. Like Alexander Thom, Livio Stecchini had a first-class brain and he has made a major contribution to a better understanding of the past.

  Although history credits the Sumerians with the creation of 360° system and with an advanced counting system, we have long doubted that they had actually been responsible for its origination.

  The evidence of the apparent use of the metre and the second at Thornborough has strengthened our previous impression – namely, that these units predate the Sumerians. But we soon realized that there was a strong in-dication that the metre predated even the building of the henges at Thornborough.

  Henges were a new innovation in around 3500 BC, and the structures that predated them were rather mysterious earthworks known as ‘cursuses’. The term is believed to have been coined by William Stukely (1687–1765) and was based on the Latin for ‘course’ because Stukely, and others at the time, thought these earthworks had been Roman athletic courses. We now know that the cursuses of Britain predate the Romans by several thousands of years, and though the idea of them being anything to do with athletics is now redundant, the name stuck.

  Most cursuses are parallel banks and ditches, forming generally, but not always, straight tracks. The smallest of the cursuses are only around 50 m in length but the largest ones, so far identified, stretch to 10 km. The width of each cursus also varies from a few metres up to 100 m. Archaeologists are aware that the cursuses were not simply roads or tracks because they have deliberately closed ends. Some of them may well have been used as a means of getting from one place to another, but they clearly also had some more important and most likely ‘ritual’ purpose. Nobody knows what cursuses were for.

  Chris was reading an article about the Greater Stonehenge cursus, which planted an idea. It reported how a team from the University of Manchester, led by archaeologist Professor Julian Thomas, has dated the cursus as being contemporary with Thornborough and some 500 years older than the Stonehenge circle itself. They were able to pinpoint its age after discovering an antler pick used to dig the cursus. When the pick was carbon dated, the results pointed to an age between 3600 and 3300 BC – which caused something of a sensation among archaeologists.

  Professor Thomas was reported as saying: ‘The Stonehenge cursus is a 100-metre wide, mile-long area which runs about 500 metres north of Stonehenge.’ Now, it could easily be that Professor Thomas was rounding up the dimensions for sake of easy communications or, just conceivably, he might be accurately reporting dimensions. Obviously he would not make anything of the round numbers in metres because he ‘knows’ that the Neolithic builders had no units of measure and, anyway, the metric system was invented by the French in the late 18th century, so any correspondence must be a meaningless coincidence.

  But we have different information and, just maybe, there could be more to it than simple chance.

  Chris went to his shelf of books on Neolithic archaeology and lifted down Inscribed Across the Landscape – The Cursus Enigma by Roy Loveday. This is an excellent book from a man who has spent several decades studying these curious earthworks. Skimming quickly through the pages he came to a couple of graphs that told an amazing story.

  The first one showed the size variation of cursuses up to 800 m in length. The graph showed a hugely disproportionate number of cursuses with integer lengths in metres. The ones that were 100, 200, 300, 400 and 750-m lengths accounted for the majority of them. Of course Loveday could be rounding these up, but he had not done so for all of them. However, the next graph was even more telling.

  This graph showed the distribution of both henges and cursuses by average monument width. Again, the cursuses show an overwhelmingly integer distribution of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 100-m width
s. But, importantly, the henges do not follow any pattern in terms of metres. Of the 23 cursuses, 20 display these integer widths.

  Roy Loveday would have no reason to round his dimensions up or down just for the cursuses and not for the henges. It looks as though the metre, or more precisely, the seconds-pendulum length of 99.55 cm was used as the standard measure before the henge builders began using the Megalithic Yard. Some of the cursuses are 6,000 years old, so the second and the metre are almost certainly extremely ancient indeed.

  Where could the second/metre have come from? We had an impression that we were looking at something that was probably already ancient when these cursuses were constructed. It felt as though this was a reconstruction, not an origin. For a start, we know that light travels at 600,000,000 half-kush per second in a vacuum, and that the oldest known method of counting is the Sumerian system of using 60 and 10. So it seems highly likely, if somewhat surprising, that the originator of the metre and second knew about the speed of light.3 This seemed crazy but we do not allow our preconceived ideas to block facts or blunt investigation. Later, we were to come across a scientist who has a potential answer to this vexing question. A completely stunning solution!

  Yet we also knew that the apparently later megalithic system was also the result of a fantastic level of scientific awareness that is inconsistent with the apparent abilities of the Neolithic people of the British Isles. It was clearly based on knowledge of many special relationships involving the physical nature of the Earth – and even the Moon and the Sun. In addition, the 366 system indicates an awareness of other marvellous harmonies in both light and music.4 And it even suggests a stunning scale of temperature where the freezing point of water is zero degrees, boiling point is 366 degrees and absolute zero (the lowest temperature in the universe) is exactly minus 1,000 degrees. All too neat to be an incredible series of coincidences.

  We realized that we had accidentally tripped over something utterly remarkable – something that was far more important than the niceties of Neolithic archaeology. Our civil engineer friend, Edmund Sixsmith, has drawn together all of the powerful workings and correspondences that we have found within the 366 system. He calls them the ‘Knight and Butler Symmetries’. But we have been far from the first to find evidence that contradicts the traditional view of the past. The ‘chaos to order’ theory that believes that the evolution of societies has been a fairly smooth upward curve from ignorance to excellence, is ridiculous and obviously wrong. The distant past is obviously far more complex than archaeology claims.

  Thomas Jefferson carefully studied all known British measurements in the 18th century and concluded that they were the result of scientific knowledge from somewhere in deep antiquity. Like his colleague, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson was a polymath, with a truly first-class brain, who took a macro view of his subject. Alexander Thom and Livio Stecchini were metrologists of the 20th century who were not frightened to investigate the facts on a macro level and cold-bloodedly report inconvenient facts.

  Thanks to the aid of modern technology we have been able to put the fabulous work of these men into a context – and provide many new facts that amount to the evidence that standard archaeology claims is not there.

  It is time for a rethink. Facts can only be ignored for so long.

  Chapter 7

  •

  OVERTURNING OLD IDEAS

  A Wall of Silence

  We have been openly critical of archaeologists and the way that archaeology is run – but we do have considerable respect for the good work that is done by so many people. At various stages of our separate and mutual researches we have made contact with many world-class scholars in the fields as varied as biblical studies, geology and astronomy. Most have been highly cooperative and some have become great personal friends. Archaeology has proved much harder to penetrate.

  We are aware that the whole topic of ‘mysteries of the past’ has always attracted some odd people and there are some rather weird theories flying around. Academics cannot take the time to assess every new idea that is put before them – but some theories can quickly be seen to have more merit than others. Neither of us set out to form a new paradigm of ancient history but we were taken to it by evidence that presented itself.

  When were working on our first joint book we contacted the world’s first professor of archaeoastronomy, now professor emeritus at the University of Leicester. We received a reply that he had read and enjoyed one of Chris’ previous books, Uriel’s Machine which, with significant contributions from Alan, first introduced the idea of the pendulum origin of the Megalithic Yard. This was a great start but unfortunately that was the end of the short relationship. All future attempts at correspondence with this particular expert have failed to solicit any kind of response. We even wrote to him pointing out that his important position surely made it a duty to respond at some level – even if it was to disagree.

  We wrote to Aubrey Burl, a much-published digger of megalithic sites who, before retiring, had been a principal lecturer in archaeology at Hull College of Higher Education in the East Riding of Yorkshire. We received a polite reply, which stated that he had never ‘seen a Megalithic Yard’ as if it were a simple matter of taking out a tape measure.

  Having had a very positive response from a range of mathematicians, a leading astronomer and a number of engineers after Civilization One was published, we wondered about approaching someone who had a generic interest in science and was used to reviewing new and challenging ideas. As previously mentioned, we asked the British Association of Teachers of Mathematics to look at the evidence we had uncovered and received a very positive response. We then decided to contact Michael Shermer, the American who founded the Skeptic’s Society, and is Editor in Chief of its magazine, Skeptic. Here was a man and an organization that specialized in challenging new ideas.

  We sent a brief outline to Shermer and asked if he would like a copy of the book. The response came back quickly enough but it was rather strange. He sounded like a bored aristocrat, mentioning that he was rather enjoying sipping his fine tea on the lawn. The next thing we knew was a review of our book in Skeptic magazine.

  Shermer had passed the copy of Civilization One to a junior freelance writer called Jason Colavito, a young man who, we believe, had become a born-again Christian before rather rapidly losing his newfound faith – causing him to be deeply resentful of all new ideas. The review was nothing short of witless and rather hysterical. He described the book and the ideas in it as follows:

  Superficial and often unreadable because of a dense number of mathematical equations, the book commits the lust sin of popular literature: it is no fun to read. Crammed into just over 250 pages are so many unbelievable assertions and unproven speculations that it would take a book-sized rebuttal to do adequate justice to this triumph of numerology over science.

  In other words, he had not been able to follow the basic sums (no equations except for technical appendices) and had found the subject matter too hard to get his head around. There were neither assertions nor unproven speculations in our book, as we had been especially careful to provide very solid evidence for everything we said. It was a pity that Colavito did not provide one single example of where we made unwarranted claims or where we had made an error.

  Sad really – we are hungry for objective criticism and reasoned debate, but reviews of this variety achieve nothing but a diminished reputation for a publication that allows such poor journalism to exist within its pages.

  In the summer of 2008 Chris was in northern Scotland in the company of Malcolm Sinclair, the Chief of the clan Sinclair and the Earl of Caithness. Malcolm has many henges and megalithic structures on his estates and he was very interested to hear about the work we were involved with. He suggested that we should make contact with Richard Bradley, a professor of ancient archaeology at Reading University, as he himself has a number of new ideas concerning henges. We duly prepared a briefing paper and sent it to Richard Bradley.

&
nbsp; The reply was polite but less than encouraging. Professor Bradley pointed out some mistakes that Alexander Thom had made due to his inexact understanding of archaeology, but also gave the engineer some credit for opening up the subject. Bradley did not agree that Thom had been entirely ignored, saying that few archaeologists would now dismiss the idea of ancient metrology entirely. He confirmed that some re-analysis of the megalithic sites he had surveyed had vindicated a number of Thom’s claims.

  But he did feel unqualified to comment on the calculations that are the basis of our argument, saying:

  But you must appreciate that my grasp of the maths is rather tenuous, so I cannot comment on that aspect of your work.

  We are very grateful for the response from Professor Bradley, and his admission that he is not especially numerical is fair enough – but if mathematics is a part of understanding the past, is it not time to extend the range of tools available to the discipline? Our challenge to find someone with the blend of skills necessary continues.

  Highly Civil Engineers

  Because our civil-engineer friend, Edmund Sixsmith, believes that the work of Alexander Thom has been unwisely ignored – and he considers that the ‘Knight and Butler Symmetries’ deserve recognition and serious examination, he has invested a goodly amount of time in trying to correspond with the anti-Thom experts and seeking well-placed allies to take them on.