The ‘Watchers’
Taking stock of what we had found was very challenging. Our concerns about the improbability of the Sumerians having been able to create such a holistic and elegant system were becoming very strong at this point. The relationship of the pound weight and the double-mana (virtually a kilogram) to the mass of the Earth did not seem compatible with the level of sophistication of either the Megalithic people or the Sumerians. Could some other unknown group have developed the principles we see in use and then taught them to these fledgling cultures? Is mankind’s leap across the Great Wall of History due to some super-culture that has left no other trace of itself? For the first time we began to theorize about the strange possibility of a group whose existence can only be deduced by the knowledge they left behind. For want of a precise term we began to call them simply ‘Civilization One’.
These may sound like foolish thoughts to some, but we have to wonder whether ancient records are true – because they say that is exactly what did happen! Early Sumerian texts, including the famous poem ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, talk repeatedly of very tall, god-like people who came to live among them whom they called ‘the Watchers’. Ancient Jewish documents, including versions of the Bible, also make references to these Sumerian Watchers who are again referred to as gods, angels and ‘sons of heaven’. The Book of Enoch tells of how these curious people would send teams from unknown points of origin to teach men new skills before mysteriously leaving again. Uriel, the ‘angel’ who taught Enoch about complex astronomy, is described as one of these Watchers.2
The Dead Sea Scrolls also make many references to the Sumerian oral tradition of the Watchers including an episode where Noah’s father Lamech becomes concerned that his child is so beautiful that his wife, Bitenosh may have had intercourse with a Watcher.3 Chapter 6 of The Book of Enoch even names some of the Watchers and gives their specialist subjects:
‘Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armarous the resolving of enchantments, Baraquijal astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.’
Could it be that once again these ancient documents mean exactly what they say? Did some unknown group act as a catalyst for the world’s first known civilization?
Throughout our investigation we have tried not to prejudge what is, and is not, possible for an ancient culture to achieve. We have simply tried to let the data lead us to wherever it takes us. But at this point we were starting to get cold feet. We seemed to be uncovering complexities that surely must have come from a highly-developed society with advanced scientific abilities. With this uncomfortable thought in our minds we decided to try the most obvious next experiment involving the most fundamental property of the universe – the speed of light.
The speed of light
Could the Sumerians possibly have understood how fast light travels? According to current knowledge light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum, which translates to Sumerian units as 600,305,283 kush. However, we cannot be certain that the Sumerians used exactly the second that we do today. It would only have to have drifted by eight ten-thousandths of a second to give a perfect fit to the speed of light. Here again is a Sumerian-style decimal/sexagesimal construction that fits our modern measurements so incredibly closely. The margin of error was almost exactly the same tiny deviation we had found with the mass of the Earth and the Sumerian unit of weight. We remembered that the Sumerians had originally had a double-second and it followed that the same number of double-kushes would apply to the double-second.
Once again, in isolation this result could be a coincidence and normal logic would demand that it has to be a coincidence because the Sumerians simply could not know as much as we do. But we soon found good grounds to accept that this result was no mere happenstance.
We decided to look at what is known of the speed of our own planet as it orbits the Sun and found that the near-perfect circle of the Earth’s path is 938,900,000,000 metres, which is covered in a year of 365.2596425 days. 4 These numbers look remarkably unimpressive but the next calculation left us staring at the calculator in disbelief. We were stunned to find that we all travel on our yearly journey at speed of 60,000 kush per second. As a further level of strangeness this speed is a neat one ten-thousandth of the speed of light.
The standard response of mathematicians to numbers that look incredibly neat is to yawn, because they believe that all numbers are equally probable and the actual digits are dependent on the numerical base and the measurement convention employed. They are quite right. But they assume that all measurement units are merely a convention without any underlying physical reality. And that is not the case with either the Megalithic or the Mesopotamian systems.
In this case the second and the kush appear to be very much more than a convenient abstraction because they have all of the characteristics of being fundamental to the realities of the Earth’s environment. They have value at a level never conceived of by modern science. We have come to the conclusion that it is more than reasonable to believe that the Sumerians, or more probably their unknown teachers, understood both the mass of the Earth, its orbital speed and even the speed of light, and they designed units that had an integer relationship with them all.
‘Civilization One’ was moving up our scale of probability from an outside shot to the most reasonable explanation we could imagine.
CONCLUSIONS
We had found that the ancient Mesopotamian unit of measure called the se (barley seed) was a 360th of a double-kush, just as Sumerian records claim.
Taking our lead from ancient texts that refer to weighing the world we were amazed to find that the mass of the Earth is almost perfectly 6 x 1028 Sumerian double-manas. This could be a coincidence but it is a perfect number in the Mesopotamian base 60 system of numbers. This also meant that one second slice of the Earth contains 1023 barley seeds.
We next looked at the imperial pound as a potential Megalithic weight and compared it to the mass of the Earth. This produced the astonishingly accurate result where the modern pound weight is one 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th part of a slice of the Earth one Megalithic degree wide at the equator.
For both the Sumarian and the Megalithic systems to produce results like this put coincidence out of the window and for the first time we began to theorize about the strange possibility of an unknown progenitor group of super-scientists we called ‘Civilization One’.
We then looked at the speed of light through the atmosphere and found that it is almost exactly 600,000,000 kush per second. Next we looked at the speed of the Earth in its motion around the Sun and found that it was incredibly close to 60,000 kush per second. Once again, a perfect Sumerian number. The great mechanism of the solar system must have been measured a very long time ago and ancient units were derived from this super-knowledge from prehistory.
CHAPTER 9
The Missing Link
Our suspicions about a possible progenitor civilization had to be put aside because we did not want to build up unnecessary scenarios that might colour our data-gathering. At this point we had identified two ancient measurement systems that have remarkable properties but which were both instantly available to any user by simply marking out the turning Earth. The fundamental difference between them was that the Megalithic people employed a 366-degree circle and the Sumerians a 360-degree circle. We now needed to understand better the relationship between the two geometric systems.
There were very strong mathematical links between the two systems, especially the fact that the number 360 is the second most important number in the Megalithic principle because there are 360 Megalithic Seconds of arc to the Megalithic Degree. Although we did not yet have grounds to assume a direct connection between the two systems it seemed highly unlikely that two such similar concepts would have developed independently.
The Minoan civilization
We decid
ed we needed to know whether the systems were two independent entities or whether the Sumerians had designed their approach as an improvement on the Megalithic principle. The only avenue open to us seemed to be a closer examination of the Minoan system of measurement used in Crete. There was every reason to believe that the Megalithic 366-degree circle had been adopted and used as the basis of the Minoan foot.
Minoan Crete is widely acknowledged to be Europe’s first true civilization. The island, which is located towards the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, has given rise to many folk stories of a fabulous culture. Before the beginning of the 20th century, most of these tales were thought to be nothing but myths. It is predominantly down to the efforts of English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans that the Minoans stepped out of the storybook and became a hard and fast historical reality.
Evans was born in 1851 in Nash Mills, England. He was educated at Harrow and then Brasenose College, Oxford, before settling down to a career as a historian and archaeologist. Evans was fascinated by the heroic accounts of Greek literature and was particularly captivated by constant references to a people of obvious intelligence, political influence and economic power who had supposedly flourished in Crete. Evans visited Crete for the first time in 1894 and was able to obtain and study a number of unknown scripts that had come to light in various places on the island. He was told local folk tales about a wonderful palace that had existed near the north coast of Crete, close to the modern capital of Heraklion.
The German-born Heinrich Schliemann was already famous for his discovery of Troy, at Hissarlik, Turkey in about 1870. His appetite whetted, Schliemann was also on the trail of the ancient Cretan civilization.
He attempted to purchase a large area of ground on an important hill not far from Heraklion, but was unable to reach an agreement with the owners. Perhaps it is fortunate for archaeology that this was the case, because the more patient and less destructive Arthur Evans eventually took possession of the site in question and uncovered the Palace of Knossos. The work Evans undertook at Knossos for the remainder of his life was long and hard but slowly and surely he was able to resurrect the lost culture, throwing more light on a generally dim European prehistory. Subsequent discoveries elsewhere in Crete have produced an even greater understanding of the Minoan civilization – a name that Evans had given to this people on account of its fabled king Minos.
We now know that the Minoan culture was thriving during the period that corresponds to the later Neolithic Period in the British Isles and that the civilization reached its peak shortly after 2000 BC. The archaeological record reflects a strong, vibrant, freedom-loving and fiercely independent people that developed strong international trade and whose sailors were possibly the most accomplished seafarers of their day. The Minoans were also tremendously creative. They made fine pottery and adorned the walls of their palaces with colourful frescoes. They exported honey, pottery, wine and craftwork in great quantities, establishing settlements in many places along the north coast of the Mediterranean and into the Aegean. Imports included copper, tin and other metals not available on Crete itself.
Life on the island was good, with a populace that seems to have supported a religious and civil elite that held its power through common consensus rather than through military strength. Although the Minoan navy swept the seas around its shores free of pirates, Crete never seems to have had a standing army and none of the excavated buildings from the period possessed any form of fortification. Most of the Minoans appear to have been free and independent, merely paying a tribute in goods to the several palaces where vast magazines (store houses) have been excavated, indicating storage of all the necessities of life on a grand scale.
In a religious sense, it is clear that the people of Crete had adopted the nature-based beliefs that seem to have been commonplace in Europe and parts of Asia since the Neolithic dawn. The predominant deity appears to have been an ‘Earth goddess’ whose place in religion was paramount, though she had a consort who was first her son and then her husband. The god was born, grew and died in a cyclic way, whereas the goddess was perpetual. Perhaps as a response to this form of religion, Minoan women seemed to have had some power in their society and it has even been suggested that the civil administration was geared in their direction rather than in that of men. It is now recognized that Minoan Crete was the cradle of the religious thinking that would eventually predominate on the Greek mainland, though by that time it had changed its nature to a much more male-dominated belief pattern.
How far Minoan civilization might have come and the part it could have played in building the modern world is somewhat academic, because tragedy struck this culture. About 60 miles to the north of Crete was an important Minoan settlement on the small, volcanic island of Santorini, also known as Thera. In approximately 1450 BC the island exploded with such ferocity that much of it simply ceased to exist. Undoubtedly the explosion led to catastrophic tidal waves and also to a fall of ash that would have rendered the fields of at least northern Crete barren for as much as a decade.1
It was at about this time that Crete fell under the influence and ultimately the rule of a very different culture which had been developing on the Greek mainland. This was a civilization that would come to be called Mycenae. The Mycenaeans were far more warlike than the Minoans and, over a prolonged period, they had captured a number of cities around their own base at Mycenae. Eventually their dominance of Crete changed the gentle and more creative Minoan way of life into something far more aggressive. Influence worked both ways, however. Minoan sensibility is readily obvious in Mycenaean culture, art, building techniques and religion. Since the Mycenaeans offered much to what would become the people we know as the Ancient Greeks, it is now taken for granted that Minoan ideas lasted long after the civilization itself had fallen into decay.
During the 1960s, Canadian archaeologist J. Walter Graham conducted a series of experiments at the ruins of the Minoan palaces of Crete. These were at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia, where Graham was trying to establish whether or not the Minoans had used a basic unit of linear measurement in their buildings. As we have already discussed in Chapter 2, Graham was able to show that the Minoan builders had used a standard unit that was 30.36 centimetres – a unit he dubbed the ‘Minoan foot’.
The Phaistos Disc
Alan had become particularly interested in the Minoans due to a small clay disc found in the ruins of one of the Minoan palaces, which was dated as circa 2000 BC. This artefact, known as the Phaistos Disc, was carefully analysed by Alan and it was the results of this study that had led to his first observation regarding the use of a 366-day year and 366-degree circle. The disc is a rather sophisticated ready-reckoner with a primary function that seems to have been to synchronize the ritual year of 366 days with the true solar year of 365.25 days. There are drawings of the Phaistos Disc and a longer explanation of Alan’s findings in Appendix 5.
Alan had already seen a potential connection between the mathematical principles evident in the Phaistos Disc and those associated with the Megalithic Yard before he came across Graham’s work on the Minoan foot. It was a startling revelation when we realized that 366 Megalithic Yards was the same thing as 1,000 Minoan Feet.
Megalithic, Minoan and Olympic measurements
Since 366 Megalithic Yards also represents 1 Megalithic Second of arc of the Earth’s polar circumference, it seemed safe to suggest that the Minoans had used Megalithic geometry when creating this unit. That the culture had contact with their Megalithic contemporaries to the west, is not a contentious point as there are many artefacts that point to a trading relationship between the two lands. A number of artefacts have been found in the south of England, some on Salisbury Plain close to Stonehenge, which include cups, rings and other examples of jewellery which were originally identified as being Mycenaean in origin. Later investigations showed that the Mycenaean culture had not existed in the period to which these artefacts were dated. Since much if not all Mycenaean art is Minoan
in origin, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that these artefacts were made in Crete during Minoan times.
The Minoans would have had very good reason to visit the shores of Britain, most particularly the tin mines of Cornwall. It was one of the very few sources of tin available to them, and they needed significant quantities of the metal in order to create bronze. But even without the evidence of contact between Britain and Crete, the fit between 366 Megalithic Yards and 1,000 Minoan feet is highly unlikely to be a coincidence.
The culture we now simply call ‘the Ancient Greeks’ began to form circa 700 BC, following what is often called ‘the Greek Dark Age’ that had occurred after the destruction of the Mycenaean Empire. Both the Minoan and the Mycenaean civilizations were large components of the foundation blocks for the religious and general cultural heritage of the Ancient Greeks, which in turn has always been seen as perhaps the greatest influence on our own Western culture of today. By the time the Ancient Greek civilization reached maturity its scholars had also been influenced by both Babylonian and Egyptian mathematical thinking. As a result, their experiments into mathematics and geometry were based on the same 360-degree geometrical models favoured by both Babylon and Egypt. It might therefore be expected that all traces of the Megalithic-influenced Minoan system would have vanished from Greece completely. However, a close look at Greek units of weights and measures strongly suggests that this was not the case.
We discovered that there were several forms of foot and cubit in use during the period of the Ancient Greeks. However, one example stands out above the rest, not least because it was the basic unit used in architectural measurement; even today its true nature cannot be doubted. This unit was known as the ‘Olympian’ or ‘Geographical’ foot. By general consent, the Olympian foot measured what might at first seem like a meaningless 30.861 centimetres. We immediately noticed something special about the relationship between the Minoan foot and the later Greek foot. To an accuracy of an extremely close 99.99 per cent, a distance of 366 Minoan feet is the same as 360 Greek feet! This was incredible, and we felt certain that it was not a coincidence. The two units did not need to have any integer relationship at all – yet they relate to each other in a Megalithic to Sumerian manner:
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 12