Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery

by Christopher Knight

  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 …7

  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.8 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.

  Chapter 3

  •

  THE SILENT STONES SPEAK

  An Engineer Makes a Breakthrough

  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 r
ecognize 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.

  The Wisdom of the Ancients

  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).

  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 me
an 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.