The origin of the word ‘Easter’ is thought to come from Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon name of a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility. Her festival was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox which now falls around March 21st when the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and the day has twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. Traditions associated with this pagan festival survive in the idea of the Easter rabbit, a symbol of fertility, and in brightly decorated Easter eggs, which were a symbol of rebirth.
Chapter Two
The Science Of The Ancients
‘The important thing is not to stop questioning.Curiosity has its own reason for existing.’
Albert Einstein
In the early 1930s a young Scottish engineer noticed that several of the widely ignored, prehistoric Megalithic sites near his home appeared to have lunar alignments. He decided to study some of the sites and he began a process of careful surveying that was eventually to lead him to make a discovery of staggering importance.
As a young engineer at Glasgow University, Alexander Thom visited a number of prehistoric stone structures near to his home in Scotland during the early 1930s. He marvelled at the grandeur and admired the way so many of the giant stones had survived the weathering of more than 5,000 years, as well as proving resistant to the thieving tendencies of croft and road builders across dozens of centuries. As he contemplated the various sites he mused over their purpose and as he looked to the horizon he could imagine how the stones might have been used as sighting stones for astronomical purposes. When he checked out the rising and setting points of the Sun and the Moon across the year his hunch appeared to be born out.
His first survey was at a site known as Callanish, on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. This complex of standing stones revealed many astronomical alignments and is today often referred to as a ‘Moon temple’. Thom went on to spend nearly half a century carefully surveying the so-called Megalithic (the word means giant stones) structures that lay scattered across the countryside from the islands off northern Scotland down to the French region of Brittany. Along the way he became a highly respected professor of Engineering at Oxford University until his retirement in 1961.
Thom had quickly realized that these prehistoric builders were engineers like himself and that they had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of geometry and astronomy. The approach taken by this talented engineer was to assess what he believed the site had been intended to do – and then redesign it himself. He quickly gained an empathy with the Stone-Age builders that gave him a real insight into the purpose of each site that would possibly be lost on a conventional archaeologist. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem. Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to his own blueprint. Through this process he could predict the location of missing stones and, on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that confirmed his theory.
Thom developed a new statistical technique to establish the relative positions of the stones and, over time, something spectacularly unusual emerged from the amassed data. These prehistoric builders had not been lugging huge stones willy-nilly; they had manufactured these structures working with a standard unit of measurement across a huge area of thousands of square miles of what was then dense forest and barren moorland.
It was amazing that these supposedly primitive people could have had an ‘international’ convention for a unit of length, but the mystery deepens because Thom was eventually able to describe the supreme accuracy of a unit he called the Megalithic Yard. This was no approximate measure taken from paces or body parts; it was equal to 2.722 feet +/- 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +/- 0.061cm). Thom was also able to demonstrate that the unit was frequently used in its double and half form as well as being broken down into forty sub-units for use in design work that he designated as ‘Megalithic Inches’.
Most archaeologists refuted the finding on the basis that the idea that a unit of measurement that was more accurate than a modern measuring tape was absurd. Thom admitted that he could not suggest how it could have been achieved but he stood by his evidence that simply said it ‘had’ been done. In our previous book, Civilization One, we described how we set out to investigate the concept of the Megalithic Yard. Our initial hypothesis was that if the unit was not an error of Thom’s data analysis it logically should have two properties:
It should have an origin in something meaningful, rather than just being an abstraction that was adopted by everyone.
It should have a means of reproduction that could be used by anyone without reference to any sort of standard measuring rod, that would have been difficult to manufacture and impossible to keep accurate across centuries.
We realized that our assumption could be wrong on either or both counts but as it turned out, we were correct on both. Thom had not made an error.
As we describe in Civilization One, the Megalithic Yard is a geodetic unit, in that it is integral (has a whole number relationship) to the polar circumference of the Earth. We found that these early Megalithic builders viewed a circle as having 366 degrees rather than the 360 degrees that we use today. We realized that there really should be 366 degrees in a circle for the very good reason that there are 366 rotations of the Earth in one orbit of the Sun – the most fundamental of all circles in human existence.
One solar orbit is, of course, a year but there is a very slight difference between the number of rotations of the planet and the 365 days in a year. This is because the mean solar day is based on the time between the Sun being at its zenith on two consecutive days (86,400 seconds) but an actual rotation or ‘sidereal day’ takes 236 seconds less. All of those ‘saved’ seconds add up to exactly one more day over the year. A sidereal day can be easily appreciated by observing a star returning to the same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights. This is one spin of our planet because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
Wheels within wheels
Early cultures frequently took their lead from nature and they were fond of ‘wheels within wheels’. If the circle of the heavens had 366 parts, why should every circle not follow the same rule? We were able to confirm this hypothesis by a variety of means including evidence from later cultures that appear to have adopted the 366-degree principle.
The approach our Megalithic ancestors took, we argue, was to hypothetically divide the circle of the Earth into 366 degrees with sixty minutes per degree and six seconds per minute. It was reasonable to assume that these ancient builders used the polar circumference of the Earth that passed through the area around the British Isles. Our planet is nearly spherical but it does have a bulge in the centre between the poles, so the equatorial circumference is a little longer that the polar. There are varying estimations of the Earth’s polar circumference, with NASA, for example, quoting an average figure of 39,941km, whilst other sources regularly quote 40,006km or 40,010km – but the most frequently used figure appears to be 40,008km. Undoubtedly much depends on where the measurement is taken or if an average of them all is calculated.
Interestingly, the shortest polar circumference (one that has least landmass) is the one that passes through the British Isles and is now considered as the zero line of longitude.
But there is also another possibility.
Just for interest, we looked at the flattest possible circumference achievable on the globe, i.e. a line that equally bisects the planet that has most sea and least land. We were amazed to discover that a person standing in the middle of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England (where Stonehenge and the Megalithic circle at Avebury were built) is in the absolute centre of such a line. This means that if we consider Stonehenge to be the ‘top’ of the world, the imaginary equator from that point is almost 98per cent sea – more than any other point on Earth. This line passes across the South Atlantic, skims
just below Africa, moves up across the Indian Ocean, clips small pieces of land at Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Thailand and Vietnam, over the South China Sea and then more than 20,000 kilometres across the Pacific to pass over a section of South America.
As far as we know such a line has not been measured, and we cannot imagine how it could have been measured without the aid of modern satellite technology. However, just because we do not know how it could have been done does not mean that it was not done. Without further evidence we have to assume that it is pure coincidence that Stonehenge stands on the only place on Earth to be equidistant from the optimum and near perfect sea-level circumference of the globe.
We can only assume that a polar circumference was used and taking the 40,008km figure it translates to 48,221,838 Megalithic Yards using Thom’s central value for the unit. It was then subdivided as follows:
Polar circumference = 48,221,838 MY
1 Degree (1/366th) = 131,754 MY
1 Minute (1/60th) = 2,196 MY
1 Second (1/6th) = 366 MY
So, this brilliant system of geometry starts with 366 degrees and finishes with seconds of arc that are 366 Megalithic Yards long. Self- evidently, an amazing set of ‘wheels within wheels’!
We knew that the system must work this way because we found that the later Minoan culture, which developed on the Mediterranean island of Crete around 2000 BC, also used the Megalithic second of arc. However, the Minoans sub-divided it into 1,000 parts to become their standard unit of measure that was equal to 30.36cm. This unit was dubbed the ‘Minoan Foot’ by the Canadian archaeologist, Professor Joseph Graham who first detected its use in the palaces of ancient Crete.6
We went on to demonstrate how any person could generate a highly accurate Megalithic Yard by measuring the movement of Venus in the evening sky using a rope, some twine, a blob of clay, and a few sticks. The secret was to take one 366th part of the horizon and time the passage of Venus across it, and then to cause a piece of twine with a blob of clay on the end to swing like a pendulum 366 times during that period. From fulcrum to the centre of the blob was a mathematically perfect 1⁄2 Megalithic Yard or twenty Megalithic Inches. The process was simple to carry out and works on the fact that a pendulum is responsive to only two factors: the length of the pendulum and the mass of the Earth. If the pendulum beat 366 times during the transit of Venus across a 366th part of the sky – you had your measure! (See Appendix 1 for a more detailed explanation of the pendulum method.)
It is doubtful that these ancient stonemasons realized the fact but the period of time that they watched Venus and elected to subdivide into 366 beats, is equal to the difference between a mean solar day and a sidereal day.
Our starting point had been to search for all possible sources of reliable measurement available from nature. And we found that there was only one: the turning of the Earth on its axis as seen by watching the movement of the heavens. It was possible to time the passage of a star, or in this case the planet Venus, with reliable accuracy using a pendulum. The pendulum then turned a unit of time into a unit of length because the timed beat will always produce a fixed length – with tiny variations due to latitude and altitude.
It was then a simple matter to turn a unit of length into a measure of volume and capacity by creating cubes and filling them with liquid or dry goods such as barley or wheat. However, we were not prepared for the shock we received when we created a cube with sides of four Megalithic Inches and found that it held a pint that was accurate to a staggering one part in 5,000 against the standard laid down in the year 1601. Doubling the sides to eight Megalithic Inches produced an accurate gallon and doubling again produced the old dry measure known as a bushel. The mystery was compounded when we filled the ‘pint’ cube with barley and found that it weighed exactly one pound!
Things turned from the sublime to the ridiculous when further experimentation showed that a sphere with a diameter of six Megalithic Inches held virtually one litre and one ten times the size weighed a metric tonne when filled with water; all to an accuracy of better than 99 per cent.
The fact that Thom’s apparently meaningless Megalithic Yard, extracted from surveying hundreds of prehistoric ruins, produces these cubic and spherical feats is not debatable. No one, no matter how sceptical they might be, can deny the simple maths. Neither can they deny that the odds of such compounded apparent connections being coincidence are very high. Yet, the pound and the pint are thought to be Medieval and the litre and the tonne were invented at the end of the eighteenth century.
A connection seemed impossible.
Then we looked at the Sumerian people who lived in the region we now call Iraq some 5,000 years ago. They are attributed with inventing writing, glass, the wheel, the hour, minute and second of time as well as the 360-degree circle with its subdivisions of 60 minutes and 60 seconds of arc. Quite amazing people.
As we probed the achievements of this civilization we found that the unit of length the Sumerians had used was virtually a metre at 99.88cm and that they had also used weights and capacities that were as equally matched to the kilo and litre of the French metric system created thousands of years later. Quite a coincidence we thought – but it was nothing of the kind, for when we applied the principles of the pendulum to the Sumerian unit of length called the ‘double kush’ we found that a pendulum of this length beat at the rate of one per second. This meant that the Sumerian’s key unit of length and their key unit of time were two sides of the same coin when used as a pendulum. A double-kush pendulum would always beat out a second and a pendulum that beat at the rate of a second would always be a double kush in length. This demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that the Sumerians used pendulums to define their measurements. The question was, had they used the same Venus-watching principle as the Megalithic builders of the British Isles to reproduce their units?
Sumerian written records tell us that the planet Venus was considered to be the goddess Inanna, who was of central importance to their culture, so it seemed entirely plausible. If they had used the same principle it seemed logical that they would have employed their own values; essentially keeping the same ‘software’ but inputting their own data. Instead of the 366 degrees of the Megalithic system we would have to use the more familiar 360 degrees first used by the Sumerians. And when we checked out the results for such a process – it worked perfectly.
When the horizon was divided into 360 parts and Venus was timed across that part of the sky at the appropriate time of year the double-kush pendulum metres out exactly 240 seconds. And the period of 240 seconds is recorded as being so important to the Sumerians it had its own name – a ‘gesh’. It therefore seems certain that these people followed the Megalithic idea of creating a unit of length from timing the movement of Venus across the evening sky.
The American connection
Later in our research we came across a letter written by the great American statesman, Thomas Jefferson and sent to the House of Representatives on July 4th 1776. In this letter Jefferson laid out a recommendation for a new system of weights and measures for the new United States that he had helped to establish. He gave his reasoning and described some unusual facts he had uncovered whilst developing his intended units.
He explained how he had realized that there was only one aspect of nature that gave rise to any reliable unit of measure – which he named as the turning of the Earth. So, like ourselves and the Megalithic builders of five and six millennia before him, he used the heavens to provide a basis for all measurement. In his letter he stated that he had come to realize that the imperial system of measurement used in Britain was not an accumulation of unrelated units as generally imagined. On the contrary, he said that their harmony indicated to him that they were members of a group of measurement units ‘from very high antiquity’.
He gave a number of reasons for this belief including his astonishment that the foot, made up of twelve inches, was directly related to the ounce weight through the use of cubes. He said: �
��It has been found by accurate experiments that a cubic foot of rain water weighs 1000 ounces avoirdupois (Imperial).’
It could be coincidence that a cubic foot holds 1,000 ounces of rainwater, not 999 or 1,001, but exactly 1,000 – or that the cube has sides that are a perfect 10 x 10 x 10 one-tenths of a foot. But Jefferson did not think so. And nor do we. However, it was Jefferson’s proposed units that fascinated us. They were never adopted but their properties are amazing.
Jefferson’s logical mind also caused him to use a pendulum to convert time into a linear unit. He decided that he should use a pendulum that had a beat of one second as the basis for his measuring system. Of course, Jefferson had no idea that the second had come from the Sumerian culture or that it had been created by the use of a pendulum in the first place. Jefferson added one improvement suggested to him by a certain Mr Graham of Philadelphia – that he use a rigid pendulum of very thin metal without a weight on the end because it is more accurate than a conventional type of pendulum. The rules change with such a pendulum (known as a rod). A rod has to be exactly 50 per cent longer than a pendulum to produce the same time period. Jefferson’s timing piece, that beat once per second, is known as a ‘seconds rod’, and is 149.158145cm in length.
The world knew nothing of the Sumerian culture in Jefferson’s time and he could not possibly have been aware that his rod that beat once per second was essentially three kush in length – just a whisker less than one and a half metres (remembering that the metre had not been invented at that time).
Who Built the Moon? Page 3
