Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (17 page)

Sumerian mythology has passed into numerous cultures and sacred texts, including the Bible. Over the last decade, Chris has researched these very carefully. In particular, he has made an in-depth study of Enoch, a character who appears in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the 2nd century
BC
document known as The Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch tells us that this great-grandfather of Noah was taught highly-advanced astronomy by a person known as Uriel, apparently at the time that the Megalithic builders were at their peak. In another apocryphal Jewish book, known as The Second Book of Esdras, one section deals with the dead, asking how long they have to wait in their ‘secret chambers’ before they will be resurrected and can be delivered up from their hidden places. Uriel answers them:

‘Even when the number of seeds is filled in you: for He hath weighed the world in the balance. By measure hath He measured the times, and by number hath He measured the times; and He doth not move nor stir them, until the said measure be fulfilled.’

We can be confident that this dates from an extremely archaic period because it is accepted that it was an oral tradition long before it was actually written down. Here Uriel talks of weighing the world and measuring time and quantity.

Barley grains were of great importance to the Sumerians and to all cultures thereafter as a means of measurement – something our newest American associate clearly understood. After some experimentation, we had successfully resolved the potential problem of our ‘disagreement’ with Thomas Jefferson regarding the relative weight of wheat grains.

Thomas Jefferson had identified a relationship between wheat and water that was a ratio of 144:175 – whereby water is just over 21.5 per cent heavier than grain for a known capacity. This was at odds with our practical experiments with cubes which had shown a relationship between wheat grain and water of 4:5, with water being 25 per cent heavier than wheat grain. This was reconciled by the fact that we had used cubes and Jefferson had used cylinders of known volumes. Barley and wheat obviously compact quite differently in the two kinds of container. This indicates that cylinders have been used for establishing capacities and weights for a very long time indeed.

The Sumerians/Babylonians used the barley seed as their smallest unit of weight and of linear measure. Ancient documents talk of the world being measured in barley seeds.

Alan began to feel somewhat haunted by the words of the angel Uriel in the ancient Book of Enoch:

‘… for He hath weighed the world in the balance.’

He began to reflect on the idea of ‘weighing the world’ and decided to run through some rather unusual calculations. He began by looking up the total mass of the Earth and found that this is now generally quoted as being 5.9763 x 10
²⁴
kilograms.
¹
Written as a conventional number this would be: 5,976,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

Alan then converted the number into Sumerian units of weight. We had already established that this unit of weight was arrived at by taking one-tenth of the length of the double-kush or barley cubit and by making a cube with this dimension. The weight is determined by filling such a cube with water. The mass of the water then becomes the Sumerian unit of mass – the double-mana. The double-mana weighed 996.4 grams so there are 5.9979 x 10
²⁴
double-manas in the planet’s mass, which can be seen as 5,997,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 double-mana. This number is as close to 6 followed by 24 zeros as to stand out as being very odd indeed, particularly bearing in mind that we could not be certain as to the ‘exact’ intended size of the double-kush. Of course, it could be a coincidence but it remains a fact that the weight of the world is only one part out in 2,850 from being precisely:

6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Sumerian double-manas.

If it were not for the fact that this number conforms so spectacularly to the Sumerian/Babylonian base 60 system of counting we would not have reported it. But it is a tantalizing thought that this ancient unit may have a relationship to the mass of the Earth, either by some brilliant calculation or due to some practical experiment that produced the result by a mechanism unknown to the originators – or to the modern world. Furthermore, we knew that the Sumerians considered that there were 21,600 barley seeds to one double-mana so we can also venture to say that the entire planet is equal to 1,296 x 10
²⁶
barley seeds – which then gives the following result:

So, a one-second wide section of our planet weighs the same as an incredibly neat 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 barley seeds. Simply astonishing!

Again, all of this is entirely consistent with the numbering system used by the Sumerian civilization.

It looked to us as if this was a system of measurement that was designed with the mass of the Earth as its starting point. We therefore decided to try the process from the beginning, as though we were creating new units from some progenitor measurement system:

Step 1: Divide the known mass of the Earth into 6 x 10
²⁴
units. This gives us a theoretical unit that equals 996 grams.

Step 2: Establish a size for a cube that holds 996 grams of water. Such a cube would have sides of 9.986648849 centimetres.

Step 3: Take the length of the cube’s side to be one-tenth that of a new linear unit. This unit would therefore be 99.86648849 centimetres.

Now we have designed our own new unit of length derived from the exact mass of the Earth and using the Sumerian decimal/sexagesimal principle. How does it compare to reality?

The best estimate of the Sumerian double-kush was taken from studying the rule carved into the statue of King Gudea which gave a length of 99.88 centimetres. The difference between the double-kush and our hypothetical unit of length is therefore 0.1351151 of a millimetre – less than a hair’s breadth! This amazing fit may well say more about the skills of the archaeologists who studied Gudea’s statue than anything else.

We had to remind ourselves that this could still be a coincidence, however wonderful the fit with Sumerian mathematics. But then we tried another oddball calculation: ‘How’, we wondered, ‘would the imperial pound fit into the mass of the Earth?’ – remembering that the pound was produced by a one-tenth Megalithic Yard cube filled with barley seeds.

Starting again with the mass of the Earth at 5.9763 x 10
²⁴
kilograms we converted into modern (avoirdupois) pounds, which gave a figure of 1.31,754 x 10
²⁵
pounds. This was another large and apparently meaningless number, so Alan divided it by 366 to find the number of pounds in a one Megalithic degree slice of the Earth. Alan’s calculator threw up the answer – 35,998,360,655,737,704,918,033 pounds.

This was a startling result. Alan divided again by 60 to get the result for a ‘minute’ slice. The numerals this time read: 599,972,677,595, 628,415,300.

Now he completed the sequence by dividing by 6 to find the number of pounds in a Megalithic-second section of the entire planet (which would be 366 Megalithic Yards wide at the equator). The result was: 99,995,446,265,938,069,217.

Suddenly the entirely random numbers from the metric system had blossomed into beautiful near-perfect integers – whole numbers of extraordinary roundness. The weight of the world is defined by the Megalithic system combined with the imperial pound because the following is absolutely true!

The bottom line is that the modern pound weight is one 100,000,000,000,000,000,000th part of a slice of the Earth one Megalithic second wide at the equator! The accuracy is as good as it gets, since there is a correspondence greater than 99.995 per cent – which boils down to a deviation of one part in 20,000 against science’s modern estimates for the mass of the Earth (5.9763 x 10
²⁴
kilograms). What is more, when the mass of our planet is viewed in terms of imperial pounds, the result reveals an exact fit with the Megalithic geometry we have already established, just as the result for the Mesopotamian calculation was a classical sexagesimal pattern such as the Sumerians devised.

This could still be a double, outrageous coincidence but the odds against both systems fitting like a near-perfect glove and bearing in mind the Sumerian base 60 method of calculation, made it seem impossible. Somebody in the distant past appears to have known the mass of the Earth to a very accurate number.

Taking stock of what we had found was very challenging. Our concerns about the improbability of the Sumerians having been able to create such a holistic and elegant system were becoming very strong at this point. The relationship of the pound weight and the double-mana (virtually a kilogram) to the mass of the Earth did not seem compatible with the level of sophistication of either the Megalithic people or the Sumerians. Could some other unknown group have developed the principles we see in use and then taught them to these fledgling cultures? Is mankind’s leap across the Great Wall of History due to some super-culture that has left no other trace of itself? For the first time we began to theorize about the strange possibility of a group whose existence can only be deduced by the knowledge they left behind. For want of a precise term we began to call them simply ‘Civilization One’.

These may sound like foolish thoughts to some, but we have to wonder whether ancient records are true – because they say that is exactly what did happen! Early Sumerian texts, including the famous poem ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, talk repeatedly of very tall, god-like people who came to live among them whom they called ‘the Watchers’. Ancient Jewish documents, including versions of the Bible, also make references to these Sumerian Watchers who are again referred to as gods, angels and ‘sons of heaven’. The Book of Enoch tells of how these curious people would send teams from unknown points of origin to teach men new skills before mysteriously leaving again. Uriel, the ‘angel’ who taught Enoch about complex astronomy, is described as one of these Watchers.
²

The Dead Sea Scrolls also make many references to the Sumerian oral tradition of the Watchers including an episode where Noah’s father Lamech becomes concerned that his child is so beautiful that his wife, Bitenosh may have had intercourse with a Watcher.
³
Chapter 6 of The Book of Enoch even names some of the Watchers and gives their specialist subjects:

‘Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armarous the resolving of enchantments, Baraquijal astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.’

Could it be that once again these ancient documents mean exactly what they say? Did some unknown group act as a catalyst for the world’s first known civilization?

Throughout our investigation we have tried not to prejudge what is, and is not, possible for an ancient culture to achieve. We have simply tried to let the data lead us to wherever it takes us. But at this point we were starting to get cold feet. We seemed to be uncovering complexities that surely must have come from a highly-developed society with advanced scientific abilities. With this uncomfortable thought in our minds we decided to try the most obvious next experiment involving the most fundamental property of the universe – the speed of light.