Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (23 page)

The plan of Stonehenge is designed on an area of a quarter Egyptian setat.

Many leading linguists accept that there was a single global language approximately 15,000 years ago. Our findings are showing that many cultures shared an approach to measurement and geometry that comes from an apparently single source more than 5,000 years ago.

The Indus Valley civilization or Harappa culture of the Indian subcontinent dating from about 2800
BC
had a unit of length called the gaz that is very close indeed to the Megalithic Yard. We dismissed this as a probable coincidence until we became aware of the cube-shaped stone weights that this culture used. These weights correspond almost perfectly to the imperial system. The largest weight weighed 3 pounds and one of the smallest weighed just one four-hundredth of a pound. This was especially interesting as we had already identified that the pound weight is derived from a cube with sides of one-tenth of a Megalithic Yard (4 Megalithic Inches).

The Spanish vara is very close to being a Megalithic Yard as is the old Japanese measure known as the shaku. This is believed to have been imported from China more than 1,000 years ago and is almost indistinguishable from a Minoan foot. It follows, therefore, that 366 Megalithic Yards is the almost the same as 1,000 Japanese shaku, with a fit accuracy of 99.8 per cent.

Looking at Ancient Egypt, we noted that the basic unit of linear measurement, in use for nearly the whole of its history was the royal cubit. A related unit of length was the remen which had a Pythagorean relationship to the cubit. This was based on the square root of 2, which the Sumerians/Babylonians wrote down as 1, 24, 51, 10 (in their base 60 notation) but would be written today as the decimal number 1.414212963.

We found that the Great Pyramid of Khufu was built using a measuring wheel with a circumference of one Megalithic Yard and a diameter of a half royal cubit. All of the pyramids main dimensions are a combination of Megalithic Yards, royal cubits and remens, all to the value of‘279’.

The Ancient Egyptians also had a principal unit of area called the setat that was most commonly used in its quarter form. The area of a setat is exactly 4,000 MY
²
and the quarter-setat is therefore precisely 1,000 MY
²
. The chances of this being a coincidence are minutely small. Further, it has already been noted by other researchers that the inner edge of the circle, or Sarsen Ring, at Stonehenge in southern England has a diameter of 1,162.8 inches, which means that it has an area exactly equal to an Egyptian quarter-setat.

¹
Ruhlen, M.: ‘Linguistic Evidence for Human Prehistory’.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal,
5/2, 1995.

²
Mackie, E.:
The Megalithic Builders.
Phaidon Press, London, 1977.

³
Kenoyer, J.M.: ‘Uncovering the keys to the lost Indus Cities.’
Scientific American.
Vol. 289, No.1, July 2003.

⁴
http://www.harappa.com/indus/21.html

⁵
http://unicon.netian.com/unitsys_e.html#france1

⁶
Davis, P.J. and Hersh, R.:
The Mathematical Experience.
Penguin Books, London, 1990.

⁷
http://www.metrum.org/measures/dimensions.htm

We had found that Megalithic ‘DNA’ is present in measurement systems spanning a broad period from the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians through to those devised at the end of the 18th century. The first cultures to compile records of their civilizations have made it relatively easy to understand much about their lives and knowledge but the Megalithic builders left us little to puzzle over except their magnificent structures.

Generations of investigators have assumed that stone circles and other prehistoric monuments were built for some unknown pagan ritualistic purposes by otherwise unsophisticated Stone Age tribes. People with a more romantic bent have sometimes confused matters by speculating on what little is known of the much later Celtic peoples and attributing all kinds of inappropriate magic and mystery to the Megalithic monuments. These romanticists assume that great wisdom was held, almost instinctively, within the minds of a lost cult of nature worshippers. The evidence of Thom’s Megalithic Yard has demolished any notion of the naivety of its creators assumed by most archaeologists. We have to respect these forgotten people for the great astronomers and geometricians they certainly were.

The level of science achieved by the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians and the Greeks is well understood, but the knowledge of the Megalithic builders of the area around the British Isles can only be reconstructed from a forensic investigation of their artefacts. Sadly, we can never know what myths and legends they handed on down the generations and we will never hear the music they played or the songs they sang.

As we have seen, however, it is entirely possible to reconstruct the mathematics these people understood and used, and this in turn might just give us some clues as to their other accomplishments. We have established that the number 366 was central to the Megalithic system because it is the number of Earth revolutions in a single orbit around the Sun (a year) and because one 366th part of a day is the difference between a solar and a sidereal day. The second important number in the system was 360, which was the number of seconds in a Megalithic Degree. Megalithic geometry works on a combination of these two numbers.

Alexander Thom had observed that those who built the stone circles and other monuments he studied seemed to have understood the concept that we call pi, the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. The length of the diameter of a circle fits approximately three and one-seventh times into its circumference. To be more exact we can express the number as 3.14159265, although the string of digits after the decimal point appears to be infinite.

Thom described how some stone rings were made up of carefully calculated parabolas that appeared to be designed to have a ratio of 3:1, instead of pi, for their principal diameter. In other cases, the builders of the circles had ‘flattened’ the sides of circles or had created ‘egg shapes’ in an apparent attempt to force pi into an integer relationship of 3:1 that it really cannot possess.

In order to explore more fully the long-dead builders’ knowledge of such matters, we decided to look closer at the key Megalithic number of 366 to see if it had any relationship with pi. Rather to our surprise, we quickly found a very important link. Imagine the following scenario:

1. A circle with a circumference of 366 Megalithic Yards is constructed.

2. The perimeter of the circle is then divided into half Megalithic Yards, giving 732 units around the circle.

3. The diameter of the circle will therefore be 233 half Megalithic Yards (732 divided by pi).

A surprising fact about such a circle is that it comes just about as close as possible to having both an integer number of units for its circumference and for its diameter. The difference between a truly integer circumference and diameter in this case is one five-thousandth of a millimetre, across a circle with a circumference of over 260 metres. This tiny fraction is far less than the human eye can discern. To any mathematician from the algorithmic school, this would constitute a perfect fit for all real-world purposes.

We found it fascinating that these Megalithic numbers could produce such near-perfect integer numbers for the circumference and diameter of a circle. So is this resulting diameter of 233 special in any way?

The answer is that it is very special indeed. While the Greek letter pi is used to denote the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, the letter ‘phi’ is used to denote the ratio found in a number sequence known as the Fibonacci Series. Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci (1170–1250) studied the mating patterns of rabbits and almost accidentally discovered the amazing ratio we now know as phi. The series is where each ascending number is equal to the value of the proceeding two numbers added together: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, etc. The sequence quickly settles down to the ratio scientists call phi, which is 1.618033989.