Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (12 page)

It was highly unlikely that two key dimensions could be in metres by random chance – yet how could these Stone Age henge builders have possibly used metres to lay out their henges?

It was very strange, but far from impossible because metres are far more ancient that most people believe.

Careful measurement of the distance between the third star in Orion’s Belt (Alnilam) and Sirius, as they appear in the sky, gave us the probable distance on the ground between Thornborough henge C and a hypothetical Sirius henge. As best as we could estimate a scale on the ground, the distance between Thornborough C and a Sirius henge should have been a little over 11 km. The actual distance between Thornborough C and Cana Barn henge being 10,000 m suggested to us that its positioning was of ritual importance.

We also noticed on the sky maps that, although the stars of Orion’s Belt point more or less in the direction of Sirius, the ‘arrow’ is not exactly in line. When we transposed both Orion’s Belt and Sirius onto an aerial map of Thornborough and Cana Barn, we realized that, although the distance between Thornborough C and Cana Barn was not exactly proportionate with the stars, the offset alignment of the Cana Barn henge was in tune with the star pattern. In other words, there seemed no real doubt that Cana Barn super-henge was part of the same complex as Thornborough, and had been a definite – and quite startling – attempt to place Sirius on the landscape.

As we have already recounted, thanks to the intervention of Edmund Sixsmith we were able to visit the site of the Cana Barn henge. And it was here that our thoughts drifted towards the Giza Plateau. Could the ancient Egyptians have copied this Orion’s Belt layout when they built the pyramids some 800 years after Thornborough? And could the Giza pyramids have a counterpart to Cana Barn henge?

Although archaeologists have suggested that the Thornborough henges could well be a representation of Orion’s Belt, what they have not done is to make any suggestion as to how the arrangement came to be so incredibly accurate. In the night sky the three stars cover a distance roughly equivalent to a human fist held at arm’s length. The slight difference in distance between Mintaka and Alnitak, as opposed to the gap between Alnitak and Alnilam is barely visible with the naked eye and, even if it were perceptible, how on earth could anyone using naked-eye astronomy get these relative gaps correct when recreating the stars on the ground at such a grand scale?

It appears that archaeologists have not considered
how
anyone with Stone Age technology could have mapped out such a huge, yet accurate, representation of Orion’s Belt on the ground. Perhaps they imagine that the builders made an artist’s impression of the star pattern and then scaled it up. Perhaps the astronomers looked up at the sky and then held up a big piece of slate with a scribe putting chalk marks to represent the stars.

The relative position of the outer two stars would be easy to mark out – because they could not be wrong. It is only the positioning of the middle star that matters, with its offset to one side and the slight off-centre gap between the outer stars. One can image the scene as the man with the chalk followed orders to place the third dot. ‘Left a bit, down a bit. No not that much. Now right a little – yes that’s it … I think.’

Having created a scale drawing that satisfied the astronomers as a good representation of the stars, they would then have to scale it up. Assuming they had a large piece of slate that allowed them to draw the outer two stars say, 1 m apart, they would have to scale it up 1,500 times to get the distance we find at Thornborough. Given that a metre representation would have to be split 504.132 mm and 495.868 mm to copy the stars – it would be utterly impossible to get anything near an accurate result across 1.5 km of land.

However, we do know the method they used.

Using sight alone this simply is not tenable, and if anyone stops to think about the situation for a while they are surely going to arrive at the conclusion that either the Stone Age astronomers had access to accurate optical measuring devices, or that they used some other technology to achieve such stunning accuracy. The first of these suggestions is certainly not within the realms of what we know of the period, and it turns out that the answer to this puzzle once again confirms our previous suggestions about the use of pendulums.

As we have already said, these devices are the oldest machines known to mankind. We have experimented with many potential techniques, and we believe that these henges were specifically designed to incorporate as much ‘magic’ as possible – which meant building in all kinds of layers of astronomical values.

They must have taken a variety of data into account before they started. It is known that there were originally earthworks called cursuses (
see
page 79) on the site before they built the first henges that slightly predate the ones we see today. The cursuses were probably used to conduct the measuring of the heavens required for the task. As we have said, the outer star can be in any position they wanted and only the middle henge mattered. They therefore needed to understand the relative distance between the stars.

There were two separate ways this could have been achieved, and it is likely that those planning Thornborough used both methods to check and double-check their results. The first method would have found them not at Thornborough but at its companion henge in the south at Dorchester-on-Thames. Since the henge there is a single structure, it is likely that it was built before the more grandiose Thornborough array. Around 3500
BC
we envisage that an astronomer-priest, holding a pendulum with a length of a half Megalithic Yard stood at the centre of the henge, looking to the east and waiting for Orion’s Belt to start its climb over the bank top. When the first star appeared above the bank, at 3° to 4° altitude relative to the true horizon behind the banks, he or she would start the pendulum swinging. By the time the third star appeared the pendulum would have beat 1,452 times. Translating the pendulum string length to actual linear measurements would have produced 1,452 half Megalithic Yards, which when halved makes 726 full Megalithic Yards. So those carrying out the experiment must have suspected that according to the will of the gods the two outer henges had to be 726 ‘somethings’ apart.
¹

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.

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.