Venus is known to have a very special place in Sumerian culture. The planet was first known to the astronomer-priests or ‘baru’ as ‘Inanna’, which meant ‘Queen of Heaven’. Later, Venus was also known as ‘Ishtar’. Here was further evidence to support our original hypothesis of the Megalithic technique. Having applied a methodology from Megalithic Britain we had arrived at a matrix that interweaves the second of time, the Sumerian kush, the Sumerian base 60 system, the Sumerian 360-degree circle and the gesh (the basic Sumerian division of the day). The chances of all this happening with such perfection are as close to zero as anything could ever be!
The Sumerian calendar
The existence of the second and the gesh of 240 seconds made us think more closely about the whole structure of Sumerian timekeeping. All experts are agreed that the Sumerians invented the 360-degree circle, which matched the number of days in their ritual year. The Sumerian calendar is known to be lunar in origin and had probably sprung from roots so old they are lost to us completely. But we can be sure that the astronomer-priests of Sumer knew perfectly well that there was a significant discrepancy between 12 lunar months of just over 29½ days and the true solar year of 365¼ days.
The most important festival for the Sumerians was the barley festival, at which time Christians now celebrate Easter. Then, as now, it was symbolic of death and resurrection and it was calculated in the same way as Easter – as the first full Moon after the vernal equinox (one of only two times a year that the Sun rises due east and sets due west, and the day and night are of equal length) which falls on or around 21st March. The Sumerians called this festival ‘Barag-Zag-Gar’, and it represented the start of their year. The 12 months were then counted off into lunar months, rounded up to 30 days each, giving them a 360-day year. The problem of the difference between the 360-day year and the true solar year of 365 days was solved by allowing the spare days to accumulate until there were enough of them to add an intercalary month to the calendar. This extra month the Sumerians called ‘Itu-diri’. This procedure ensured that the first full Moon after the barley harvest was that of Barag-Zag-Gar, as it should be, and the balance between solar and lunar years was periodically restored.
Just as the Sumerians had 360 days in a year, they split each day into 360 units known as ‘gesh’. Contemporary records show that the Sumerian astronomer-priests originally had 12 rather than 24 hours in a day. They did this primarily because they loved ‘wheels within wheels’ and they saw the day as a microcosm of the year – as there were 12 months in the year there should be 12 hours in a day. A further reason relates to the zodiac.
The Sun, Moon and all the planets of our solar system, when viewed from Earth, keep to the same path across the heavens known as the ‘plane of the ecliptic’. From an unknown time in distant prehistory this band of the heavens has been split into 12 sections associated with zodiac signs. Each section is named after groups of stars within it, which have been interpreted as patterns that became memorable to the stargazers over countless generations. The Sumerians, who used the concept of the zodiac, were great Moon watchers. They observed the Earth’s companion planet passing month by month from one zodiac sign to the next, with full Moons occurring in successive zodiac signs. In addition, they would have been aware that the Sun appears to move from one zodiac sign to the next during the period of a month. These same zodiac signs passed over their heads each day as the Earth turned on its axis between one sunrise and the next. Since Sumerians split the year into 360 days and the day into 360 gesh as well as dividing the day and the year into 12 equal units, it follows that there were 30 gesh during each zodiac sign.
The Sumerians were aware that the seasons moved through the full zodiac once each year and the zodiac moved overhead once each day. So here again was a potentially deliberate ‘wheel within a wheel’ effect because they had adopted the following pattern:
The Earth revolves around the Sun once per year. The background stars are effectively stationary and the Sun appears to move by one Megalithic Degree relative to them. After one year the stars will appear to have returned to their starting positions.
year
= 12 months each made up of 30 days
day
= 12 hours each made up of 30 gesh
Our next step was to look at the behaviour of the Moon because it occurred to us that these gesh might also have been considered to be a lunar phenomenon. We know from historical records that the Sumerians judged the period from one full Moon to the next as being 30 days, which is not too far away from its exact period of 29.53059 days and is, in any case, the nearest integer number available. So, here was another ‘wheel within a wheel’.
The turning Earth and the zodiac.
year
=
360 days
month
=
360 hours
day
=
360 gesh
Each of the Sumerian hours represented one degree of the Moon’s journey around the Earth and every degree of the Moon’s journey was split again, by 60, to give minutes of arc and by 60 again to give seconds of arc.
After ten years of research, the answer came to us in a flash. Minutes and seconds of time in the Sumerian 12-hour day were Moon minutes and Moon seconds of arc. We still employ them today, with one exception. The Sumerians are known to have used halves and doubles of all their measuring units and for different mathematical purposes. The astronomer-priests also considered a day to be composed of 12 ‘double’ hours, which ultimately became 24 hours in the Babylonian system. The Egyptians also used a 24-hour day, which is the route by which the 24 hours has passed down to our own times. When the length of the hour was halved, knowledge of the minutes and seconds remained and because there had to be 60 minutes to an hour, these units were also halved.
The Sumerian minutes and seconds of time were originally twice the length of the ones we use today but we can now see that there was a real concept behind the second of time: the purpose of the second was to turn sky time into linear length!
The full Sumerian time system is utterly sensational! Not only is it based on the Sun and the stars of the zodiac, it also takes in the cycles of the Moon.
In an integer sense, the Moon takes 30 days to complete its circle around the Earth. That circle is split into 360 units, which are hours. Each of these hours is split by 60 and 60 again to create seconds of time. All of this fits with everything we know about number usage. The main difference between the Sumerian system and our present decimal system is that the Sumerians used a 60 and 10 base combined, whereas the decimal system employs a 10 base in all cases. The Sumerians recognized that 360 is a very useful number, since it is divisible by so many other numbers. Most importantly it equals 6 x 10 x 6. As a result the Sumerian priests used a counting system that alternated between multiples of 6 and 10 with symbols as shown below:
Sumerian symbols.
Ten small wedges equalled 1 small circle, 6 small circles equalled one large wedge, 10 large wedges equalled 1 large circle, and so on. The numbers worked as follows:
Step
Multiple
Value
1.
1
=
1
2.
x 10
=
10
3.
x 6
=
60
4.
x 10
=
600
5.
x 6
=
3,600
6.
x 10
=
36,000
7.
x 6
=
216,000
8.
x 10
=
2,160,000
9.
x 6
=
12,960,000
10.
x 10
=
129,600,000
Religious c
onnotations
It is surely the case that there was also a deeply religious aspect to both the numbers and the phenomena they measured. Even the second of time (related as the Sumerians believed it to be to the Moon) probably had a ‘mystical’ feel when associated with the magic of the double-kush pendulum. We can get some idea of this when we look at Sumerian mythology. We have already observed that the first and therefore the most important month of the year was known by the Sumerians as Barag-Zag-Gar. This month commenced on the day of the first full Moon, after the barley harvest. This period of the year could have been sacred to only one deity. Her name was ‘Nisaba’, one of the most important deities in the Sumerian pantheon, and a goddess with very special responsibilities. Nisaba was, first and foremost, the barley goddess. We were intrigued to discover, however, that among her many attributes she was said to be the goddess responsible for:
‘The measuring lines to measure the heavens.’2
As we looked more closely at the humble barley seed we were soon to find that it held spectacular properties for the Sumerians. Having looked at the Sumerian civilization in the light of the principles used by the Megalithic builders we could see a clear pattern to their units of length and those of time. We now needed to look at their units of weight and capacity.
Weight and capacity
When we had deduced possible units of weight and capacity from Megalithic units of length, they had turned out to be the same as modern imperial units. Now we needed to apply the same logic to the Sumerian situation. Because the double-kush was so close to the metre, we did not need a calculator to tell us that if the Sumerians had followed the same route of making a cube with sides one tenth of a double-cubit, they must have been using units almost identical to the kilogram and the litre for weight and volume.
Unlike the Megalithic situation, contemporary records of Sumerian weights and measures still exist, so all we had to do was to look up the units that are known to have been used some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Despite our previous discoveries, we were nevertheless stunned to learn that the Sumerians/Babylonians had indeed used units that were effectively the half-kilogram and the litre! The Sumerian unit of mass, the ‘mana’, is consistently described by archaeologists as being ‘about half a kilogram’, while the ‘sila’, the basic unit of volume, has been shown to be very close to a litre.
The double-kush is said to be something very close to 99.88 centimetres in length, so a cube with sides of one-tenth of this would have sides of 9.988 centimetres. The volume of water that such a cube could hold would be 996.4 centilitres, less than 4 centilitres short of a litre of 1,000 centilitres, The sila is therefore equal to the amount of water that would fit into a one-tenth double-kush cube. The weight of the water in such a cube should represent the standard unit of mass. However, the mana weighs around half a kilogram, whereas it is clear that the true weight of one litre of water should be a full kilogram. The Sumerians, like the Megalithic people, regularly used halves and doubles of principal units and we wonder whether the Sumerian texts have been slightly misinterpreted and a mana did originally weigh a kilogram or, more likely, that the Sumerians found this unit cumbersome and so halved it for most day-to-day purposes.
We found that we were not the first researchers to suggest that the Sumerians used cubes to turn linear length into mass and volume. The late Professor of the History of Science, Livio C. Stecchini, remained convinced all his life that it was obvious that theoretical cubes had been used by the Sumerians to create mass and volume measures from the kush and double-kush. Present orthodoxy disagrees with this premise, preferring to believe that these mass and volume weights were somehow tortuously derived from Sumerian units of area. The general argument against Stecchini’s idea is based upon the fact that no cubes of the right size have ever been found in Sumer. The learned professor dismissed this observation by noting that in the case of the metric system, ‘original units for cubing one-tenth of a metre were, and still are, cylinders and not cubes’. In any case, even if the cubes had existed, they would have been very few in number and cannot reasonably be expected to automatically turn up in the archaeological record.
Our research has shown that the Megalithic people of the area around the British Isles used a unit of length that implies that they could have and probably did use the equivalent of the imperial pound and pint. Now, using the same model we had discovered that the people of ancient Mesopotamia used units of length, weight and capacity that have a remarkable correspondence to the metric system. How could this be?
The recorded origins of the units within the imperial system are just about impossible to trace but the metric system was designed ‘from the ground up’ by a team of scientists working in France during the late 18th century. The chances of the pound and the pint surviving for thousands of years seem remote, but did the French deliberately copy the Sumerian units?
Comparison of the Megalithic and Sumerian systems of geometry and the consequences for weight and capacity units.
CONCLUSIONS
The Sumerians/Babylonians used a system of mathematics that used base 60, which is the reason why we still have 60 seconds to the minute and 60 minutes to the hour. They also invented the 360-degree circle, which was also subdivided into minutes and seconds. In addition, they used a standard unit of length that is believed to be 99.88 centimetres – almost exactly equivalent to the modern metre.
The Sumerians’/Babylonians’ double-kush of 99.88 centimetres was reproduced by means of swinging a pendulum with a beat of one second 240 times to define a unit of time they called a ‘gesh’.
The Sumerians/Babylonians also developed an elaborate system of ritual timekeeping based on the movements of the Moon with 360 days per year, 360 hours per month and 360 gesh (240 seconds) per day.
From their unit of length the Sumerians derived units of weight and capacity that are incredibly close to the kilo and the litre. To all intents and purposes it is fair to say that the metric system was in use more than 3,000 years before the French invented it.
1 Stecchini, L. C.: www.metrum.org/measures/index.htm
2 Fryman-Kensky: In the Wake of the Goddesses. Fawcet Columbine, New York, 1992.
CHAPTER 5
The Rebirth of the Metric System
The age of great Megalithic building began before 3000 BC and many of the major sites had been abandoned by the middle of the 3rd century BC. The last remnants of the Megalithic builders seem to have disappeared by about 1500 BC, which means that they certainly overlapped with the Minoan culture that clearly used the same 366 method of geometry. From the Iron Age until the rise of the Roman Empire, much of what is now the British Isles and France was inhabited by the Celts. There is no record of whether the Celts inherited any of the weights and measures that had been used by the Megalithic builders but it is not unreasonable to consider that the old units may have survived in an original or in a modified form.
French weights and measures
Only with the spread of the Roman Empire did these far western regions of Europe gain a recognizable uniformity in terms of weights and measures. Rome held sway over Gaul (France) and Britain until the beginning of the 6th century AD when the Roman legions were recalled and the area fell into that historically murky period known as the ‘Dark Ages’. The withdrawal of the legions led to a power vacuum in both Britain and Gaul which, through the peculiar set of circumstances prevailing, gave way to feudalism, a system under which international trade was not especially desired or encouraged. However, if any country was going to prosper and grow strong, a degree of cross-border cooperation was inevitable. The process was helped somewhat by the development of important sites of commerce, particularly in the area of northern France which eventually became known as Champagne.
In the 12th and 13th centuries the Champagne fairs, held regularly in specific towns and cities in the region, positively encouraged merchants from all over Europe and beyond to exchange goods. These were huge trade fairs (rather than mar
kets for consumers) that were held under the authority of the dukes of Champagne and new, or apparently new weights and measures appeared at this time. Many British people will be surprised to learn that their much-loved pound and ounce made their first known appearance as French units at these fairs.
It is certain that both units of length and weight were created deliberately to serve the fairs in an attempt to offer common measures that everyone could understand and use without confusion. With the gradual demise in the importance of the fairs and with so much fighting taking place between the emerging nation states of the region, units of length and weight often became a strictly local matter, though frequently with underlying aspects of the old Roman system. Britain struggled but somehow managed with a seemingly incomprehensible muddle of different units, though the country we now know as France was in an even worse state.
Prior to the early 14th century, France was a series of different states which had not been united since Roman times. These were only welded together again as a result of conquests and dynastic unions resulting in virtual chaos, with a wealth of different length, weight and volume unit names and sizes existing simultaneously across the new country. Matters were made even more complicated by the fact that some units retained a common name in different regions even though they differed in size. The chaos continued until some new data on the circumference of the Earth was published in 1670 by Jean Picard, a priest and an astronomer living in La Flèche. Picard accurately assessed the polar circumference of the Earth using the distance from Sourdon near Amiens, to Malvoisine south of Paris, as his test area. This gave another priest an inspired thought.
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 8