Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (18 page)

Could the Sumerians possibly have understood how fast light travels? According to current knowledge light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum, which translates to Sumerian units as 600,305,283 kush. However, we cannot be certain that the Sumerians used exactly the second that we do today. It would only have to have drifted by eight ten-thousandths of a second to give a perfect fit to the speed of light. Here again is a Sumerian-style decimal/sexagesimal construction that fits our modern measurements so incredibly closely. The margin of error was almost exactly the same tiny deviation we had found with the mass of the Earth and the Sumerian unit of weight. We remembered that the Sumerians had originally had a double-second and it followed that the same number of double-kushes would apply to the double-second.

Once again, in isolation this result could be a coincidence and normal logic would demand that it
has
to be a coincidence because the Sumerians simply could not know as much as we do. But we soon found good grounds to accept that this result was no mere happenstance.

We decided to look at what is known of the speed of our own planet as it orbits the Sun and found that the near-perfect circle of the Earth’s path is 938,900,000,000 metres, which is covered in a year of 365.2596425 days.
⁴
These numbers look remarkably unimpressive but the next calculation left us staring at the calculator in disbelief. We were stunned to find that we all travel on our yearly journey at speed of 60,000 kush per second. As a further level of strangeness this speed is a neat one ten-thousandth of the speed of light.

The standard response of mathematicians to numbers that look incredibly neat is to yawn, because they believe that all numbers are equally probable and the actual digits are dependent on the numerical base and the measurement convention employed. They are quite right. But they assume that all measurement units are merely a convention without any underlying physical reality. And that is not the case with either the Megalithic or the Mesopotamian systems.

In this case the second and the kush appear to be very much more than a convenient abstraction because they have all of the characteristics of being fundamental to the realities of the Earth’s environment. They have value at a level never conceived of by modern science. We have come to the conclusion that it is more than reasonable to believe that the Sumerians, or more probably their unknown teachers, understood both the mass of the Earth, its orbital speed and even the speed of light, and they designed units that had an integer relationship with them all.

‘Civilization One’ was moving up our scale of probability from an outside shot to the most reasonable explanation we could imagine.

We had found that the ancient Mesopotamian unit of measure called the se (barley seed) was a 360th of a double-kush, just as Sumerian records claim.

Taking our lead from ancient texts that refer to weighing the world we were amazed to find that the mass of the Earth is almost perfectly 6 x 10
²⁸
Sumerian double-manas. This could be a coincidence but it is a perfect number in the Mesopotamian base 60 system of numbers. This also meant that one second slice of the Earth contains 10
²³
barley seeds.

We next looked at the imperial pound as a potential Megalithic weight and compared it to the mass of the Earth. This produced the astonishingly accurate result where the modern pound weight is one 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th part of a slice of the Earth one Megalithic degree wide at the equator.

For both the Sumarian and the Megalithic systems to produce results like this put coincidence out of the window and for the first time we began to theorize about the strange possibility of an unknown progenitor group of super-scientists we called ‘Civilization One’.

We then looked at the speed of light through the atmosphere and found that it is almost exactly 600,000,000 kush per second. Next we looked at the speed of the Earth in its motion around the Sun and found that it was incredibly close to 60,000 kush per second. Once again, a perfect Sumerian number. The great mechanism of the solar system must have been measured a very long time ago and ancient units were derived from this super-knowledge from prehistory.

Our suspicions about a possible progenitor civilization had to be put aside because we did not want to build up unnecessary scenarios that might colour our data-gathering. At this point we had identified two ancient measurement systems that have remarkable properties but which were both instantly available to any user by simply marking out the turning Earth. The fundamental difference between them was that the Megalithic people employed a 366-degree circle and the Sumerians a 360-degree circle. We now needed to understand better the relationship between the two geometric systems.

There were very strong mathematical links between the two systems, especially the fact that the number 360 is the second most important number in the Megalithic principle because there are 360 Megalithic Seconds of arc to the Megalithic Degree. Although we did not yet have grounds to assume a direct connection between the two systems it seemed highly unlikely that two such similar concepts would have developed independently.

We decided we needed to know whether the systems were two independent entities or whether the Sumerians had designed their approach as an improvement on the Megalithic principle. The only avenue open to us seemed to be a closer examination of the Minoan system of measurement used in Crete. There was every reason to believe that the Megalithic 366-degree circle had been adopted and used as the basis of the Minoan foot.

Minoan Crete is widely acknowledged to be Europe’s first true civilization. The island, which is located towards the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, has given rise to many folk stories of a fabulous culture. Before the beginning of the 20th century, most of these tales were thought to be nothing but myths. It is predominantly down to the efforts of English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans that the Minoans stepped out of the storybook and became a hard and fast historical reality.

Evans was born in 1851 in Nash Mills, England. He was educated at Harrow and then Brasenose College, Oxford, before settling down to a career as a historian and archaeologist. Evans was fascinated by the heroic accounts of Greek literature and was particularly captivated by constant references to a people of obvious intelligence, political influence and economic power who had supposedly flourished in Crete. Evans visited Crete for the first time in 1894 and was able to obtain and study a number of unknown scripts that had come to light in various places on the island. He was told local folk tales about a wonderful palace that had existed near the north coast of Crete, close to the modern capital of Heraklion.

The German-born Heinrich Schliemann was already famous for his discovery of Troy, at Hissarlik, Turkey in about 1870. His appetite whetted, Schliemann was also on the trail of the ancient Cretan civilization.

He attempted to purchase a large area of ground on an important hill not far from Heraklion, but was unable to reach an agreement with the owners. Perhaps it is fortunate for archaeology that this was the case, because the more patient and less destructive Arthur Evans eventually took possession of the site in question and uncovered the Palace of Knossos. The work Evans undertook at Knossos for the remainder of his life was long and hard but slowly and surely he was able to resurrect the lost culture, throwing more light on a generally dim European prehistory. Subsequent discoveries elsewhere in Crete have produced an even greater understanding of the Minoan civilization – a name that Evans had given to this people on account of its fabled king Minos.

We now know that the Minoan culture was thriving during the period that corresponds to the later Neolithic Period in the British Isles and that the civilization reached its peak shortly after 2000
BC
. The archaeological record reflects a strong, vibrant, freedom-loving and fiercely independent people that developed strong international trade and whose sailors were possibly the most accomplished seafarers of their day. The Minoans were also tremendously creative. They made fine pottery and adorned the walls of their palaces with colourful frescoes. They exported honey, pottery, wine and craftwork in great quantities, establishing settlements in many places along the north coast of the Mediterranean and into the Aegean. Imports included copper, tin and other metals not available on Crete itself.

Life on the island was good, with a populace that seems to have supported a religious and civil elite that held its power through common consensus rather than through military strength. Although the Minoan navy swept the seas around its shores free of pirates, Crete never seems to have had a standing army and none of the excavated buildings from the period possessed any form of fortification. Most of the Minoans appear to have been free and independent, merely paying a tribute in goods to the several palaces where vast magazines (store houses) have been excavated, indicating storage of all the necessities of life on a grand scale.