Civilization One
Previous books by Christopher Knight
(co–authored with Robert Lomas)
The Hiram Key The
Second Messiah
Uriel's machine
The Book of Hiram
Previous books by Alan Butler
The Bronze Age Computer Disc
The Warriors and the Bankers
The Templar Continuum
The Goddess, the Grail and the Lodge
Christopher Knight has worked in advertising and marketing for over thirty years, specializing in consumer psychology and market research.
His writing career began almost by accident after he had invested seven years conducting research into the origins of Freemasonic rituals and he has written four books to date, co-authored with Robert Lomas. His first book, The Hiram Key was published in 1996 and it immediately went into the UK top ten, best-seller list and remained in the chart for eight consecutive weeks. It has since been translated into 37 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide, becoming a best seller in several countries. He now divides his time between marketing consultancy and historical research for writing books.
Alan Butler qualified as an engineer, but was always fascinated by history, and made himself into something of an expert in astrology and astronomy. Since 1990, he has been researching ancient cultures, pagan beliefs and comparative religion and has published four successful books on such topics as the Knights Templar and the Grail legend. He is also a published playwright and a very successful radio dramatist.
CIVILIZATION
ONE
THE WORLD IS NOT
AS YOU THOUGHT IT WAS
Christopher Knight
and Alan Butler
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Great Wall of History
Chapter 2 The Turning Earth
Chapter 3 The Harmony of the Spheres
Chapter 4 Sumerian Degrees
Chapter 5 The Rebirth of the Metric System
Chapter 6 The Jefferson Report
Chapter 7 Grains of Ancient Truth
Chapter 8 The Weight of the World
Chapter 9 The Missing Link
Chapter 10 Widening the Search
Chapter 11 Music and Light
Chapter 12 Sun, Moon and Megalithic Measure
Chapter 13 A New Paradigm of Prehistory
Appendices
1 Earth Days and Proving the Megalithic Yard
2 The Formula for Finding the Volume of a Sphere
3 More about Megalithic Music
4 Music and Light
5 The Phaistos Disc and the Megalithic Year
6 The Amazing Barley Seed
7 The Megalithic Principle and Freemasonry
DEDICATIONS
For my grandchildren Sam, Isabelle and Max (plus others yet to arrive). May your childhood wonder and questioning stay with you for life.
CK
For my Father, John Butler, and in memory of my Mother Mary.
AB
A CD of Megalithic music has been composed and performed by De Lorean to accompany this book. Samples of Civilization One – The Album can be heard and copies bought at www.civilizationone.com.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Kate Butler, for her invaluable help with the index.
Fred Cameron, for his important comments regarding the Sumerians.
Fiona Spencer-Thomas, for efforts above and beyond the call of duty.
Michael Mann, whose close cooperation and advice was essential to this book.
Penny Stopa and the Editorial team.
Tony Crerar, for his welcome contributions.
Hilary Newbigin, for her most welcome advice.
Peter Harwood, our technical expert.
Introduction
The super-culture
Was there a super-advanced culture in prehistory? If not, how can it be that the supposedly unsophisticated people of Stone Age Britain possessed a fully-integrated system of measurement based on a deep understanding of the solar system?
The history of human development from hunter-gatherer to city dwellers once seemed comfortable and predictable. All of the available evidence supported the accepted picture of a smooth social evolution largely driven by the ingenuity of people living in the Middle East. But then, over several decades, an eminent professor of engineering, Alexander Thom, annoyed the world of archaeology by making a startling claim. He maintained that he had found that the structures left by late Stone Age man had been built using a standard unit of measure that was so precise that he could identify its central value to an accuracy that was less than the width of a human hair. The idea that these simple people from prehistory could have achieved such accuracy flew in the face of all the worldview of most archaeologists. Not surprisingly, Thom’s findings were almost universally dismissed as some kind of mistake.
Professor Thom called his discovered unit the ‘Megalithic Yard’, but he died (in 1985) without ever being able to explain why people from the Neolithic Period, or late Stone Age, circa 3500 BC might have been motivated to establish such a measure or how they could have consistently reproduced such incredible accuracy.
Even today there are many tens of thousands of these Megalithic stone structures strewn across the British Isles and the western fringes of Europe. Our initial quest was simple: we wanted to find out if Thom really had found a prehistoric measure or if he had been deluded by the huge amount of data he collected from his surveying of sites from the islands of northern Scotland down to Brittany on the west coast of France. We reasoned that if Thom’s Megalithic Yard was imaginary, it should be a meaningless value, but if it was indeed a genuine Neolithic measure, it should have some physical reality behind it and some kind of scientific means of reproduction.
The consequences of knowledge
Our investigation led us to a rediscovery of the science behind this prehistoric unit: we can now demonstrate both its mathematical origin and its means of reproduction, using the mass and spin of the Earth. In identifying the precise origin of Thom’s Megalithic Yard, however, we soon found that we had nudged open the door of a virtual treasure chest of lost knowledge.
Our approach has been to apply forensic techniques to archaeology across a span of cultures from prehistory (before 3000 BC) and the earliest times of written history (after 3000 BC). We have found that there is a completely identifiable ‘DNA’ associated with the oldest and purest system of science that appears in the most unexpected places. Even units of measure that are believed to be relatively modern, from the pound and the pint to the gram and the litre, turn out to be thousands of years old and linked to the very dimensions of the solar system.
We have tried to keep our story as short and as clear as possible. A basic knowledge of arithmetic is all that is required to follow our investigation in detail, so please have your calculator to hand if you wish to check our findings step by step. Additional information, frequently asked questions and new developments are available on our website: www.civilizationone.com.
If you feel comfortable with the old idea that human development was a smooth evolutionary journey from ignorant caveman to urban sophisticate, be prepared to be shocked. The world is not what you thought it was.
CHAPTER 1
The Great Wall of History
The invention of writing
Forget the wheel – it was the invention of writing that changed our world forever.
The first wheels were used for turning clay pots and were later attached to axles to improve the ef
ficiency of moving across dry ground for agriculture and warfare. This certainly helped in the production of food and aided its distribution to the growing communities that became the earliest cities, but major movements of people and goods relied mainly on sea lanes and inland waterways for thousands of years. The use of writing, however, had an immediate effect on commerce. Some of the earliest documents created were concerned with ships’ manifests and other documents of trade. Lunar calendars existed from as early as 20000 BC, carved on bone or antler, but ‘real’ writing developed extremely quickly in Sumer and Egypt circa 3000 BC. It was this ability to record information without relying on the honesty and memory of others that really drove mankind forward to begin an age that we define as the beginning of civilization, circa 3200 BC.
The first great breakthrough in communication had happened nearly two million years earlier when our distant ancestors, Homo erectus, developed a larynx position lower in the throat than other primates. This piece of evolution cost these creatures their ability to breathe and drink at the same time, but it allowed them to generate a far wider range of sounds than had previously been possible. With a vocabulary of thousands of discernible sounds, spoken language is thought to have developed very quickly.
The simplest form of vocal communication may have been a hunting ploy, for example to imitate the sound of an animal and then point to its direction. Over time true language developed as abstract sounds were used to represent objects and actions and then assembled into sentences to express complex issues such as human emotions. Language allowed for information to be passed on from one person to another but the next stage of development was to make a record of human knowledge and experience by drawing a representation of the subject matter. We can see that the drawings on the walls of prehistoric caves are a kind of proto-writing. Any mark that records a specific meaning, either to the originator or to others, can fairly be called basic writing. The first writing systems were made up of hieroglyphs, which were used like a cartoon strip of pictures to contain information. These early writing methods came into use just over 5,000 years ago and slowly developed into abstract notation where the marks have a meaning that can only be understood by those people trained in the process of encodement and decodement – reading. But it seems that sophisticated meaning has been communicated by ‘writing’ for a great deal longer than has been thought.
Dr Michael Rappenglueck of the University of Munich has shown how a 16,000-year-old drawing of a horse in the caves at Lascaux in France is actually a carefully recorded lunar calendar.1 What, at first view, looks like a very attractive drawing of horse, is now thought to be a means of keeping track of the phases of the Moon. This surely qualifies as writing.
This level of intelligence in Palaeolithic Man is hardly surprising. As a species, Homo sapiens has not changed significantly either mentally or physically, for well over 100,000 years. We may have moved from the Stone Age to the Internet Age but each human being is no different today to their forebear 500 generations in the past. We must also remember that while most of us have lives that have been shaped by the technological revolution, there are some groups of people around the world who still live as simple hunter-gatherers in a genuinely Stone Age existence, for example some Australian Aborigines and tribes in some parts of South America.
The remarkable Sumerians
Given that speech has been around for so long, it would be surprising if communication through drawn symbols only arrived so very recently. The earliest form of writing that is generally accepted as such emerged more or less at the same time as the wheel. Both were invented by the remarkable Sumarian people, who arrived in the land now known as Iraq from an unknown location more than 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians devised their earliest hieroglyphic system very shortly afterwards (probably within 200 years), just when Upper and Lower Egypt were united into a single kingdom.
The so-called cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus meaning ‘wedge’) characters developed by the Sumerians were made by pressing wedge-shaped sticks into wet clay. These Sumerian tablets may look rather unimpressive to us today but these ‘talking’ patterns were thought to have powerful magic by ordinary people. At first, the content of these documents was very basic, but as time went by improvements added layers of sophistication until around 800 BC when the Greeks created a full alphabetic writing system that finally separated consonants from vowels. The period immediately before these early records were left by the Sumerians and the Ancient Egyptians has become a virtual wall, separating what we call ‘history’ from everything that happened before – which we label ‘pre-history’. Everything that occurred before the advent of true writing is now considered to be myth and legend because every piece of human knowledge had to be transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation.
The Great Wall of History
This ‘wall’ effect actually says a great deal more about current thinking than it does about the people who occupied our world before history began. Being human, we tend to view ourselves, and our society, as being somehow definitive – the measure of ‘rightness’ by which to gauge others. During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, there was an egocentric worldview in academia whereby white, Christian, male explorers would travel to see the ‘inferior’ races who did not live ‘properly’. One English naturalist wrote of his disdain for a group in Tierra del Fuego who shouted at him from a canoe:
‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. We often try to imagine what pleasures in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same questions may be asked concerning these barbarians.’
These were the words of the young Charles Darwin, a man who went on to realize how all humanity has sprung from lower animals.
Today, academia is much more objective and less judgemental than in previous generations, but the ideal of anything approaching real empathy is frequently as distant as it ever was for much of archaeology. But, we would argue, if we really want to bring into finer focus the landscape that lies beyond the Great Wall of History, we must undergo something of a fundamental shift in our mind-set.
The subject matter of this book requires readers to open their minds to a softer, more yielding worldview that dissolves preconceptions and temporarily allows the mind to roam freely over the subject matter, thereby allowing consideration of possibilities that might otherwise be missed. The principle that appears to underpin standard academia these days can reasonably be called ‘stepping stone’ logic, where deductions are often only encouraged in a strictly linear fashion. By this mode of reasoning one can only proceed by confirming each step before looking for an incremental way forward. While it sounds entirely sensible, it can blind the researcher to factors that are outside their expectations. Albert Einstein is famously said to have observed that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. Surely the great man has to be right: true insights come from thinking outside the box rather than simply ticking procedural boxes in a neat row.
A very famous archaeologist once said to Alan that all of his findings must be dismissed because his starting point was, in his opinion, wrong. How foolish. Even if someone does start with an error it is entirely possible that subsequent discoveries could be right if validated without reliance on the original premise.
The mode of reasoning that we invite you, the reader, to adopt while reading this book is one we call the ‘tepee method’. This is a multi-dimensional approach to logical deduction rather than a classical linear ‘stepping stone’ process. It simply requires that each piece of evidence is seen in its own right and is not forced to conform to any preconceived notion of what should be. Even where different elements of evidence appear to be mutually exclusive, we suggest that they should be allowed to coexist until the time comes for a final analysis. With the tepee method each strand of evidence is considered to be a potential supporting stick – and only if there are eventually enou
gh of them that work together does the argument stand. We believe that this is the only approach to examining the distant past that is likely to produce a cogent picture, one that does not pick and choose which facts it prefers to accept as ‘real’. As we conducted our research there were many occasions where we felt the urge to reject a finding as a coincidence because it did not fit with what we expected to see. We suspended our judgement and eventually, as a new picture emerged, we were very glad that we had not tried to force our preconceptions on the evidence.
Any readers who feel unable to open their minds right up at this point should close the book now.
The Ancient Egyptians
The Great Wall of History has distorted the way most people view the past by telescoping events so that the Ancient Egyptian civilization is often thought of as being extremely distant, whereas in terms of the span of the existence of our fully-developed species, it was actually extremely recent.
The huge array of artefacts and records left by the Ancient Egyptians provides a wonderfully strong picture of their lives and achievements. We know the names of kings right back to King Menes who unified the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt in approximately 3100 BC and ruled from the capital of Memphis at the head of the Nile Delta. This great civilization left us beautiful structures such as the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx – and we can even medically examine the physical remains of Egypt’s rulers and leading citizens, carefully preserved by skilful mummification. Archaeologists have estimated that the Egyptians embalmed huge numbers of bodies. Though seeming to be a massive number, some claim that as many as 730 million people may have been mummified between the time of King Menes and the 7th century AD, when the practice was ended.2 Although many mummies have not survived the scorching heat of northern Africa, it is believed that several million are preserved in yet-to-be-discovered tombs and burial places. As recently as June 1999 a burial ground containing almost 10,000 mummies was discovered near the town of Bawiti, southwest of Cairo.
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