Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (9 page)

A sequence of 40 – 6 – 4 – 10 – 8 looked far more logical than the standard explanation and it required only a tiny adjustment to the modern definition of the rod to achieve it. This was highly speculative thinking but it was producing some very interesting results. Next Chris tried introducing his theoretical Megalithic Rod into the metric system:

The hypothetical Megalithic Rod was amazingly accurate in its fit and entirely logical. Nevertheless, we had to remind ourselves that its relationship with the metre could not be real because the metric system was not invented until the closing years of the 18th century. Or so we thought at the time!

The results suggested that the mile and the kilometre could both be units that developed from the hypothetical Megalithic Rod:

So both the modern mile and the kilometre are related to each other by the use of the Megalithic Yard and an assumed Megalithic Rod. (Not to be confused with the length that Alexander Thom called a Megalithic Rod. Alexander Thom had identified a unit of 2.5 Megalithic Yards, used on many of the sites he surveyed. He had christened this the Megalithic Rod.) According to standard conversions there are 1.6093 kilometres to a mile and this Megalithic approach gives a relationship between the two that is almost perfect.

Next Chris considered the imperial unit of area – the acre, which is defined as 4,840 square yards. He quickly found that it made a great deal more sense when viewed in Megalithic terms because it represents 5,760 square Megalithic Yards which is a very logical 4 x 40 Megalithic Rods. It can also be expressed as 360 packets of land each 4 x 4 MY.

Looking into now obsolete imperial units Chris also discovered that until recently there was something known as a ‘square rod’ which is defined as being a rather oddball 30¼ square yards. The Megalithic Rod once again made sense of it because it was an exact 36 square Megalithic Yards.

Suddenly the imperial method was looking like a specially designed system based on the Megalithic Yard, not the inch, foot and yard. He looked closer at metric units of area and the same patterns emerged. The hectare is made up of 10,000 square metres or 100 ares, each being 10 x 10 metres. In Megalithic terms these could be seen as:

Studying other obsolete units proved to be very interesting. The old Irish acre of 7,840 square yards is a strange measure of land that turns out to be 40 Megalithic Yards x 40 Megalithic Rods to an accuracy greater that 99 per cent. Next, the old Scottish acre of 6,150.4 square yards appeared particularly bizarre until Chris considered it in Megalithic terms and found that it is actually 75 Megalithic Yards x 100 Megalithic Yards to an accuracy greater than 99.6 per cent.

Was the Megalithic Yard really the underlying key to a lost reality behind the modern measurement systems – both imperial and metric? We got together to digest this new information and asked ourselves whether there was a possibility we were beginning to see patterns that were not really there. The next procedure was to assess whether the relationships we had found using the assumed Megalithic Rod were really as remarkable as they seemed. The starting point had been to consider whether the rod of 16½ feet (198 inches) had originally been defined as six Megalithic Yards. We then noticed that the metre also fits into the pattern. We looked again at all three potential versions of the rod in metric terms:

They were close – very close – but any observer could be forgiven for dismissing them as a coincidental fit. The way that the assumed Rod made sense of so many old units such as the Irish and Scottish acres was enough to stop us throwing away the notion. But for the moment, we could only view these observations as being of potential interest if future findings were to lend them further support. If not, even at this stage we were quite prepared to dismiss the whole idea.

We remained somewhat sceptical about the validity of the Megalithic Rod but we now had no doubts regarding the Megalithic weights and measures we had recreated. Perhaps the best way forward would be to look at another, better-understood culture, to ascertain whether Megalithic techniques were being used elsewhere in the world, either at the same time as the western European farmers, or more recently.

A cube with sides of one-tenth of a Megalithic Yard holds one imperial pint of water and one imperial pound of grain to a very high level of accuracy. Doubling the length of the sides produces a capacity of one imperial gallon and doubling again produces a weight of one dry bushel.

Spheres with diameters of six Megalithic Inches hold a litre and weigh a kilo, while a sphere that measures one and a half Megalithic Yards across holds one cubic metre of water and weighs a metric tonne. It seems, at first view, that the imperial and metric correspondence must be coincidence because both systems are relatively recent conventions.

Investigation into the old unit of length known as the rod shows that it is extremely close to being equal to 5 metres and 6 Megalithic Yards. As such it appears to unite the two systems across all units of length and area, even making sense of peculiar, obsolete units such as the Irish and Scottish areas.

The mathematics are easy to check and the pattern that emerges is powerful and simple yet, according to standard histories, it should not exist. All of this may be a coincidence of an unbelievably huge kind but we were not prepared to make that assumption at that stage.

¹
Mackie, E.:
The Megalithic Builders.
Phaidon Press, London, 1977.

We had detected a very surprising system of weights and measures that stemmed directly and logically from the Megalithic Yard and could have been in use in and around the British Isles during the late Stone Age. This hypothetical system uses a common-sense approach and very simple technology. If these units were known to the Megalithic builders it means that pounds and pints were known and in use 5,000 years ago. Of course, we can never know for certain whether these units existed because the Megalithic people had no writing. However, it would have been very strange for a group of people to have used very accurate units of length for over 1,000 years and never to have adapted such units to establish weight and volume.

Without a means of gauging weight and volume, trade remains at a bartering level where each transaction has to be assessed by visual evaluation alone. The ability to identify a known quantity makes buying and selling a much more scientific process since it can be accurately repeated time after time. Using mutually accepted units of weight meant deals could be done at long range because it would be unnecessary to see the merchandise first to assess its quantity. For example, two pounds of deer meat can be agreed to have a value of one pint of beer.

Information is power, and it rarely just disappears. Indeed, the fact that the Megalithic units have an almost perfect relationship with modern measurements strongly suggests that there has been a continuity of this knowledge across the Great Wall of History. We therefore decided to bring our investigation back across that wall, to the first major civilization, to establish whether we could detect any connection with the Megalithic way of thinking. That brought us to the inventors of writing and the first known nation of international traders, the Sumerians, who lived in a number of powerful and historically important city states.

The region occupied by the Sumerians was between the Tigress and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq/Kuwait and, until recently, has always been known as Mesopotamia. Prehistoric peoples known as the Ubaidians had originally settled in the area establishing settlements that gradually developed into the important Sumerian cities of Adab, Eridu, Isin, Kish, Kullab, Lagash, Larsa, Nippur and Ur. As the land prospered, Semites from the Syrian and Arabian deserts moved in, both as peaceful immigrants and as raiders. Then circa 3250
BC
the Sumerians arrived and began to intermarry with the native population. These small, dark-haired newcomers were intellectually and technologically sophisticated and spoke an agglutinative language that is unrelated to any other known language. (Agglutinative languages contain words formed through the combination of smaller morphemes [units that cannot be further divided] to express compound thoughts.) As the Sumerians gained control the country grew rich and powerful, and art and architecture, as well as religious and ethical thought, flourished. The Sumerian language was adopted by those in the region and even in other lands it was considered the language of the intellectual. The cuneiform system of writing that the Sumerians invented evolved into the basic means of written communication used throughout the Middle East for the next 2,000 years. It is also believed that the Sumerians invented the wheel.

The first recorded ruler of Sumer was Etana, King of Kish, who reigned in approximately 2800
BC
. The various city states frequently fought among themselves and by the 23rd century
BC
the power of the Sumerians had declined to such an extent that they could no longer defend themselves against foreign invasion. The Semitic ruler Sargon the Great conquered the entire area and founded a new capital at Agade, in northernmost Sumer, which became the wealthiest and most powerful city in the world. The indigenous people of northern Sumer and their conquerors gradually merged to become an ethnic and linguistic group known as the Akkadians.