We know what these people ate, with whom they traded, as well as when and against whom they went to war. One 5,000-year-old Egyptian mace head contains a record of a great victory in which no less than 120,000 prisoners were taken, together with 400,000 oxen and 1,422,000 goats that were liberated from the enemy.3 King Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid, was even kind enough to leave us a dismantled boat that has now been rebuilt. As a result, we can be sure that the Egyptians used only wood, rope, reeds and the like for their craft, which contained no metal.
These people also left detailed records of their gods and their religious practices. The famous Book of the Dead is a large collection of funerary texts from various dates, containing magical formulae, hymns, and prayers believed by the ancient Egyptians to guide and protect the soul of the deceased on its journey into the land of the dead. The texts tell us of a belief that happiness in the afterlife was dependent on having led a life in keeping with a principle known as ‘Maat’ – which meant doing good to all others.
The dark side of the Wall
These examples make the point that our knowledge of the Ancient Egyptian people on this side of the Great Wall of History is very extensive – but we know only very limited amounts of what happened on the dark side of the wall. For example, the Greek historian Herodotus, referred to as the ‘father of history’ for his nine-volume work written in the early 5th century BC, observed of Egypt that ‘there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description’. Herodotus is considered to be the starting point of Western historical writing, although the accuracy of his facts has often been doubted by modern scholars because they seemed to be laden with exaggeration. However, archaeological finds have begun to show that this Greek chronicler was extremely accurate. For example, Herodotus had described the great city wall of Babylon as having buildings placed on top of it and yet still having ‘enough space between for a four-horse chariot to turn’. This seemed unlikely to experts but remains have been discovered indicating that the wall was of such a width.
Thanks to early scribes and historians like Herodotus we have a rich knowledge of the last 5,000 years, but what do we know of cultures that blossomed before this time?
After 100,000 years of what is assumed to be virtual stagnation, humans began a completely new way of life in what is known as the Neolithic Revolution. It began approximately 12,000 years ago when people across the Middle East, Europe and Asia quite suddenly abandoned their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence and began to opt for permanent settlements. They began to cultivate rice, wheat, rye, peas, lentils and other plants, and to domesticate animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats. Technology also began around this time with the manufacture of pottery vessels for cooking and storing food, stone sickles, and grinding stones to turn grain into flour.
The term ‘Neolithic’ means new Stone Age, and it refers to the time when the first farmers tilled the soil, planted, watered and harvested their crops and cared for their newly-domesticated animals all the year round. In the British Isles the Neolithic Period can be said to span from approximately 6000–1500 BC. This new lifestyle was more labourintensive than hunting and gathering but also more certain, and it may be the case that the Neolithic Revolution was caused by the need to produce more food as a result of an increase in population. According to standard interpretations of the available evidence, the world had created the platform upon which civilization would eventually be built, but from our perspective these early farmers were still very crude and unsophisticated because they existed on the dark side of the Great Wall of History. However, there was one Stone Age culture that appears to dramatically upset such a neat paradigm.
Builders and artists
On the western fringes of Europe there was a culture that left tens of thousands of structures that still stand today. From parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic, down to northern Spain and especially throughout the British Isles these long-departed people built with enormous stones and are therefore remembered as the Megalithic builders – a name that literally means ‘giant stones’. The terms ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Megalithic’ tend to be used interchangeably because it was these new Stone Age people who built the giant stone monuments. In the fifth and fourth millennia BC these supposedly primitive builders created huge circles and other structures using stones weighing up to 350 tonnes, such as the 20-metre-high ‘Le Grand Menhir Brisée’ in Brittany. On the banks of the River Boyne in Ireland they left a beautiful circular construction now known as Newgrange, a massive structure and 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. But these people left very little else to tell us about their lives and beliefs. They had no writing as such, while most of their artefacts that were not stone or pottery have long since rotted to nothing in the damp European climate.
Particular and highly important members of the Megalithic builders have been named after the pottery fragments found around their encampments. They are sometimes simply called the ‘Grooved Ware People’ on account of the grooved patterns they chose to etch into the wet clay of their cooking utensils.
For thousands of years the massive stone structures these people so painstakingly created stood in silence. They were known as ‘fairy mounds’ by rural folk or sometimes uprooted by more pragmatic farmers to clear the land or to use the stone for their own building requirements. Few people gave any thought to the age or purpose of these giants in stone, until archaeology evolved as a serious discipline in the late 1800s. Even then, most early archaeologists were more interested in the exciting potential offered by excavations in places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia than in the British Isles and Europe.
The heavenly architects
It is now known that these mysterious people from the other side of the Great Wall of History had a significant interest in astronomy, and many of the larger Megalithic sites have been shown to have solar, lunar and stellar alignments. From the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney in the far north of Scotland, to Stonehenge in southern England and to the stone rows of Brittany in France, specialists have come to recognize that these people spent a lot of time observing the movements of the heavens. Newgrange in Ireland, for example, has a single shaft that was carefully constructed to allow the light of Venus to penetrate a central chamber once every eight years on the winter solstice, shortly before dawn.4 Venus moves in such a way that it has a predictable 40-year cycle, made up of five patterns of eight years, giving the engineers who designed and built the Newgrange observatory a calendar so accurate that it can only be beaten today by the use of atomic clocks.
Alexander Thom and Archaeoastronomy
So, it is possible to understand something of the abilities and interests of the Neolithic culture, even without the benefit of writing. One man above all others was the pioneer of a discipline that is now known as ‘archaeoastronomy’ – his name was Alexander Thom.
Alexander Thom was born in Scotland in 1894. He became a student at Glasgow University and later returned as a lecturer in engineering. During the Second World War he worked for the British government but in 1945 he moved to Oxford University, where he became Professor of Engineering, a post he held until his retirement in 1961. His investigations into Megalithic sites spanned 50 years and did not end until very close to his death in 1985.
Thom’s interest in Megalithic structures began in his native Scotland, where he noticed that such sites appeared to have lunar alignments. In the early 1930s he decided to study some of the sites and began a process of careful surveying that was to take him almost five decades. In addition to his lecturing, Alexander Thom was a highly-talented engineer in his own right and he taught himself surveying, which enabled him to look at more Megalithic sites – and in greater detail – than anyone before or since.
From his first survey at Callanish, in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, Thom realized that far from being crudely erected these structures had been carefully designed. He began to appreciate that the prehisto
ric engineers had an advanced knowledge of geometry and astronomy and must have been highly-skilled surveyors.
Thom continued his careful surveying before publishing an article in 1951 in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association entitled ‘The solar observations of megalithic man’. The results of his careful measuring of Megalithic sites were also published in three articles over several years in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the first appearing in 1955 and also in his three books.
The approach taken by Professor Thom was entirely different to that adopted by any archaeologist. Looking at the scale and obvious planning involved in Megalithic sites, Thom had been forced to conclude that the planners and builders must have been very able engineers – just like himself. He knew that their level of knowledge was far below his own but he had no reason to doubt their intellectual ability and ingenuity. He therefore carefully analyzed what remained of each site and then tried to imagine what it was that the builders had set out to achieve. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem. Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to his own blueprint.
Mind-set and vision
This simple yet radical approach was a stroke of genius. Thom quickly developed a total empathy with the Megalithic builders. After all, who else can better understand the mind-set of an engineer than another engineer? Here was a leading academic who had changed his thinking to look at the other side of the Great Wall of History. Thom did not assume anything about the Megalithic builders other than to acknowledge that they must have been skilled engineers. Unlike the archaeologists of the day he was not searching for more clues to confirm existing theories and he had gathered data for many years before he even attempted to make sense of it.
Thom developed an understanding of the Megalithic mind and found that he could predict the location of missing stones; on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that confirmed his expectation. This engineer had a view of the landscape beyond the Great Wall of History that was denied to standard archaeologists who were limiting themselves to increasing numbers of similar excavations. Reassembling broken pots and analyzing discarded food items in rubbish heaps can indeed be very revealing about the realities of day-to-day life in the Neolithic Period, but it tells us virtually nothing about the aspirations of the builders and sheer enthusiasm for knowledge that appear to have emanated from the souls of these people.
The Megalithic Yard
Thom made detailed studies of every site he explored and developed a new statistical technique to establish the relative positions of the stones. Slowly, something totally unexpected emerged from the amassed data. It appeared that the vast majority of these prehistoric sites, from the islands off northern Scotland down to the coast of Brittany, had been constructed using a standard unit of measurement. According to Thom, the units he discovered were extraordinary because they were scientifically exact. Virtually all known units of measurement from the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians through to the Middle Ages are believed to have been based on average body parts such as fingers, hands, feet and arms, and were therefore quite approximate. Thom identified a unit that had been used in an area that stretched from northern Scotland to western France, and appears in Neolithic structures built during the 4th–2nd millennia BC. His definition of this unit of length was that it was equal to 2.722 feet/82.966 centimetres.5 He named this unit a ‘Megalithic Yard’ because it was only a few inches less than a standard yard. He found that this Megalithic Yard had been used in multiples, including half and double forms as well as being divided into 40 sub-units that he called ‘Megalithic Inches’.
In 1955, after analysing the data from the surveying of 46 circular stone rings, Thom concluded that they had been laid out as multiples of a standard unit of measurement that had been used throughout Britain.6 Alexander Thom and his son Archie, who had begun to assist him in his work, eventually arrived at a definitive length for the Megalithic Yard of 2.722 feet +/– 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +/– 0.061cm).7
Thom found small variations in the length of his Megalithic Yard but the distribution of error was utterly consistent, centring on a tiny range – not a fuzzy zone as would be expected from an ancient measure. The distribution graph of variations kept powerfully centring on a single point.
The engineer was utterly perplexed, since he could not begin to explain his own findings. He was well aware that even if there had been a priesthood that cut poles to the required length and then passed them on over the tens of thousands of square miles involved and across many generations, such uncanny accuracy could not have been the result. In 1968 he wrote:
‘This unit was in use from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any differences between the values determined in the English and Scottish circles. There must have been a headquarters from which standard rods [a rod could be of two types, but in this context they are pieces of wood cut to represent the Megalithic Yard] were sent out… The length of rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than 0.03 inch [0.762 mm] or the difference would have shown up. If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod from its neighbour to the south the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.’ 8
At that time Thom’s data could not be explained by any mechanism known to be available to the people of the late Stone Age other than to assume that all rods were made at the same place and delivered by hand to each and every community across Scotland and England. Eventually he would find the unit in use from the Hebrides to western France, which makes the central ruler factory theory look most unlikely. He also found it impossible to imagine why these early communities wanted to work to an exact standard unit.
Although he could not explain it, Thom stood by his data. While he was puzzled, many people within the archaeological community were not. For most archaeologists it was a simple case of an engineer playing with something he did not understand and getting his facts wrong. This was not an unreasonable response because the culture that produced the Megalithic structures had left no other signs of such sophistication. Thom’s data was accepted but its interpretation was almost universally rejected. However, when the Royal Society under the auspices of Professor Kendal was asked to check his work in order to find the error, it responded by stating that there was one chance in a hundred that Thom’s Megalithic Yard had not been employed on the sites surveyed.
Despite the fact that a number of leading archaeologists has subsequently identified accumulations close to whole number (integer) multiples of a unit of approximately 0.83 metres.9 Thom’s work is still largely ignored on the basis that it is wholly inconsistent with scholarly opinion of the abilities of Neolithic Man. A failure to explain how this culture could have achieved such an accurate system of measurement has caused the archaeological community to disbelieve Thom’s findings and put them down as some kind of statistical blunder. A suggestion was put forward that Thom’s extensive data might reveal nothing more than the average pace or footstep of all the people involved in the building of these structures. After all, if enough data is collected and examined it is bound to produce an average, assuming that people paced out large distances and used their palm-widths for smaller ones. At first this explanation sounds very reasonable, even probable. But Professor Thom was not a fool – and he would have been a very poor mathematician to make such a basic mistake. The reality is that the ‘human pace’ theory is not a possible solution to the finding of a standard unit for two reasons. First, because the human stride varies far more than the small deviations found and second, because the distribution curve would be an entirely different shape. This ‘solution’ to the data is simply wrong.
The difference in approach between Thom and the general archaeological community is fundamental. In simple terms, archaeologists are experts in the recovery and cataloguing
of manufactured artefacts that allows them to understand rates of development and influences between groups. They dig up the remains of human settlements and piece together some idea of the community involved from written records and from lost or discarded items. This process works well in places such as Egypt where there is an almost boundless supply of artefacts and documents to give us an insight into the lives of its people. However, the procedure is less than satisfactory when considering the structures of Megalithic Europe because there are few artefacts to be retrieved and no written records at all.
Dr Aubrey Burl, the highly respected archaeologist whom Thom quoted extensively, confirmed to us that he did not believe in the reality of the Megalithic Yard, stating that he had excavated many Megalithic sites but had never found the measurement. This statement reveals a collision of techniques since it is difficult to itemize one specific Megalithic Yard at any ancient site. This is because the unit in the sense Thom often found it only reveals itself from the careful gathering of huge amounts of data extracted from every site.
Although individual standing stones have been shown by Thom to have moved very little over the centuries, an entire site must be meticulously catalogued before the Megalithic Yard really makes its presence felt.
Douglas Heggie of Edinburgh University gives the arguments against the validity of the results claimed by Thom in their most complete form in a book, where he questions the validity of the statistical approach.10 Heggie suggested that having ‘found’ what he thought was the Megalithic Yard, Professor Thom, particularly in his later work, might have had his findings coloured by the expectation of certain results. He also questioned how Thom had decided on the point on any given stone in any structure from which to take his measurements. From his own approach to assessing Thom’s work Heggie came to the conclusion that if the Megalithic Yard existed at all it probably only did so in Scotland, and even then to a much less accurate degree of tolerance than Professor Thom had claimed.
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 2