A lunar second of arc that is 100 Megalithic Yards long
A solar second of arc that is 40,000 Megalithic Yards long
A good scientific theory is one that makes a prediction that is subsequently proven. These findings were not directly predicted by us but we had predicted that there was a Great Underlying Principle that was a physical reality for our human environment. The circumferences of the Moon and Sun are 10,927 and 4,373,097 kilometres respectively, which are perfectly meaningless numbers – until they are converted into Thom’s Megalithic Yards and the principles of Megalithic geometry applied. For all three of the solar system’s main bodies (from a human perspective) to conform to such total accuracy proves the existence of the pattern.
How did the ancients come to possess such knowledge?
Finally, we must confront our greatest challenge: it is now time to attempt to make sense of all we have discovered. We must try to reconcile the existence of such miraculous knowledge with everything else that is known about the Neolithic peoples of western Europe and the early dynasties in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
No matter how hard we try, we find it impossible to believe that the Megalithic 366 system and its close 360 relative from Sumer were invented in isolation. There must surely be a connection – and a very direct connection at that. While it is entirely possible that both the Megalithic and Sumerian peoples could have estimated the circumference of the Earth using simple geometry and careful observation, we do not believe that they could have calculated the planet’s mass or accurately assessed the dimensions of the Moon and the Sun.
The available archaeological evidence paints a picture of the Neolithic population of the British Isles as being very primitive, without a written language, metals or any kind of wheel. The pottery left by the Grooved Ware people is very crude and everything we know about these people points to short, hard lives. Despite these undeniable facts, this is the culture that built robust structures, durable enough to have survived more than 5,000 years. The existence of the Megalithic Yard at the sites surveyed by Thom confirms an ability to work to fine tolerances and indicates that the people concerned were aware of the concepts that we label pi and phi today.
But how did they arrive at the Megalithic Yard, that fascinating, and to many archaeologists, extremely frustrating unit of 0.8296656 metres?
We have described in detail how the individual builder could create a rule of a known length by following a relatively simple procedure and we have explained why this length was seen as so special in terms of the Earth’s polar circumference. The Megalithic Yard can be accurately determined by any artisan with a knowledge of the prescribed technique of observing the turning Earth and swinging a pendulum. It takes no more than an average IQ to learn to reproduce a Megalithic Yard – but what can we deduce about the individuals who originated this unit that so beautifully fits the Earth, the Sun and the Moon?: that when applied to cubes, creates weights and capacities that are part of the modern imperial system. Surely, no Megalithic astronomer cum stonemason knew any of this?
Being as open-minded as it is possible to be, we cannot believe that the Megalithic builders could have defined the Megalithic Yard either by accident or design. And yet someone did.
Then there is the kush, the Sumerian/Babylonian unit that does not have any obvious connection to Earth’s dimensions but which does define the second of time and produces astounding decimal/sexagesimal integers when used to describe the speed of light and the speed of the Earth’s motion around the Sun. Again, we simply cannot believe that the Sumerians had any more ‘true’ understanding of the implications of the kush units than an African bushman has regarding the innermost workings of his clockwork radio. So, how did these ancient civilizations come to possess such knowledge?
Civilization One
For all the world it feels as though both Megalithic Man and the Sumerians shared the same teacher. The sudden development of brilliant cultures after more than 5,000 generations of humanity and the absence of any audit trail strongly suggests the intervention of a third party that is no longer known.
The principle of formal logic known as Occam’s Razor states that ‘entities are not to be multiplied without necessity’. This means that that elaborate solutions should not be created where simple ones will do. And we can think of no simpler solution than to accept that the contemporary records of the first civilizations actually mean exactly what they say!
Unfortunately there are no documentary records of Neolithic traditions – but we know that the Sumerians and ancient Egyptians specifically stated that a group of people with, what appeared to them to be, god-like powers arrived from somewhere unknown to instruct them in the sciences and teach them skills in manufacturing. These ‘Watchers’ were thought of as gods, but it is said that they looked like normal people and they lived and died just like everyone else. While it is fashionable today to dismiss old myth and legend as little more than fairy stories, we believe that this explanation holds more water than any other.
Is this solution so preposterous that we have to overlook the obvious? Stepping back from the arrogance of the belief that our current civilization simply has to be the pinnacle of all human achievement leaves us wondering, ‘Why on Earth do we have to accuse our forebears of writing down nonsense?’
The first response of any archaeologist to this thesis will be, ‘So where is the archaeological evidence to support the notion of such a group of advanced people?’ This is an entirely fair and reasonable question but our answer lies in information that we have brought forward from our forensic examination of measurement systems. The evidence outlined in this book appears to have demolished the standard idea that there was a slow, incremental improvement of humankind’s understanding of science and nature from Stone Age to Internet Age.
Like Charles Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind, we love facts, and we set out to find more facts than had previously been available. The whole idea of a ‘Civilization One’ is not going to appeal to many academics – and we fully understand why. This kind of notion has to be treated with great caution. Yet it does explain how these fantastically sophisticated units existed in cultures that were otherwise rather unsophisticated.
Could it be that there was once a single, highly-advanced group that virtually kick-started the world’s first civilizations? If so, it appears that it failed in the case of the Megalithic culture because it seems to have died out. And yet in a way it never will, as long as any person on the planet orders a pound of apples or downs a pint of beer.
Others may identify a different solution, but in our estimation it would be impossible to create this interrelated Megalithic/Mesopotamian measurement matrix from a cold start. In other words, the Earth, Moon and Sun as well as the speed of light and the orbiting Earth would have to be measured using some arbitrary units before it would be possible to create units that produced such wonderful integer results. If we are correct regarding this point, the inference has to be that Civilization One was as advanced as the modern world, though far, far back in time during the period we refer to as prehistoric.
Another important point to consider is the way that the numbers we have found work. Everything about the Megalithic system hinges on the value of 366 and the Sumerian/Babylonian system works on their sexagesimal principle. But there are many instances where the integers fall out in decimal terms:
1,000 Minoan feet to an Earth Second of arc
100 Megalithic Yards to a lunar second of arc
40,000 Megalithic Yards to a solar second of arc
We are well aware that some people will say that we have found meaning because we have seen big round numbers in base 10. They might argue that despite the bizarre ‘coincidence’ of all three solar system objects producing these results when using ancient measures, all numbers are equally valid and that they would not look anything special if we used another base. The number 100, for example, would read as 144 in base 8. This point is valid – but our whole argument is that some huma
n beings in the very distant past realized that the Earth was precisely 3.66 times larger than the Moon and that the Sun was 400 times larger. Having 10 digits on their hands they had naturally worked in base 10 and saw the relationship as follows:
Moon
–
100
Earth
–
366
Sun
–
40,000
Having observed and understood this remarkable relationship these people also recognized that the value 366 was important to the Earth because that was the number of rotations it had on its axis in the course of one solar orbit. And a 366th part of the day was the difference between the solar and sidereal day. Furthermore, there was a reciprocal relationship because the Earth had 10,000 days to 366 lunar days. Having digested these facts it is little wonder that these early astronomers considered the Earth to be a 366 phenomenon and then proceeded to work out a unit of measure that unified this knowledge.
But these people, whoever they were, also understood the mass of the Earth in great detail and realized that the ‘366ness’ of our planet goes even deeper. They used a pendulum to beat 366 times during Venus’ movement across a 366th part of the horizon, and produced a pendulum length that corresponded precisely to the units that describe the circumferences of the Earth, Moon and Sun. This surely verges on the magical.
Everything here must be the result of some very smart calculations by the surveyors from Civilization One. Equally, the Sumerian decimal/exagesimal results for the speed of light and the orbiting Earth could have been carefully and deliberately calculated. Nevertheless, no matter how bright the theoretical scientists of Civilization One might have been, there are some issues arising here that transcend any human power.
The speed of light is believed to be a fixed phenomenon and anyone clever enough can certainly use it to define multiple integer length against time. But no-one can have influenced the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun – it is what it is. So, the following has to be a coincidence:
Earth’s orbital speed = one 10,000th of the speed of light
Furthermore, using NASA data, we found that the diameter of our planet’s motion around the Sun is almost exactly 600 x 106 kush per Sumerian second. This is a perfect Sumerian sexagesimal number yet again and it means that light travels across the disc of the Earth’s orbit in a strangely neat 1,000 seconds.
Factors like these must be coincidences – they are all such human numbers, as though the very ‘blueprint’ of our solar system was saying, ‘Recognize that all this has been designed for you 10-fingered humans.’
Under any normal circumstances these kinds of fit would not be dismissed as a coincidence. But here the conclusion may be too unsettling for many because, if they are not random, then maybe our work does not really concern archaeologists at all. Add these observations to the other well-known improbability of the Moon’s very existence and perhaps we should be speaking to a scientifically-minded theologian! The consequences of these truths have certainly shaken our previously rather agnostic worldview.
We have discounted the idea that the Neolithic inhabitants of western Europe could have created the so-called Megalithic system or that the Sumerians could have devised the kush/second system. It has been necessary to assume that a highly-developed civilization must have existed in prehistory – just as the world’s oldest history books state. But how clever is it possible for any human to be?
We have agonized over this for many months. We are not religious people and we know that to invoke a deity is normally a lazy ‘cop out’ – a way of ignoring a problem by sticking a ‘God’ label on anything we cannot explain. While neither of us would ever have denied the possible existence of a creative force that permeates the universe, turning chaos into order, we would never previously have seen any basis for anything approaching a deliberate plan. Now we are a great deal less sure. Maybe everything we have found can be explained in terms of physics – but that would not change anything. Freemasons use the term ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ and ‘Grand Geometrician of the Universe’ so that people of all religions can come together without having to fall out about the mythical name. These masonic designations appear to be particularly appropriate.
We have resisted the idea for as long as we can but we have had to concede that it does look as though our place in universe has been designed, and that the designer has laid down some very deliberate clues so that we will recognize the plan. Such thoughts amount to a form of ‘blasphemy’ to the atheist, whose worldview requires absolute, cold rationality. But what happens to the ultra-pragmatist when the evidence suddenly points the other way?
Consider this: if the ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ had a special place for mankind – as most world religions believe – and that Architect wanted to reveal their actions to a 10-fingered creature, they would surely communicate in base 10. That would be a way of saying, ‘Pay attention – I’m talking to you’.
When the chosen species had developed sufficiently it would begin to understand its environment and measure it using units derived from the Architect’s chosen order and counted in base 10.
These ‘chosen ones’ would realize that the message was timed, because the Moon has not always been one four-hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, although it has always been one four-hundredth the size of the Sun. It would dawn on them that the Earth orbits the Sun at one-tenth the speed of light and that the circle of the orbit takes 100 seconds for light to traverse it.
We can hear the grinding of scientific teeth as we dare to print these observations and that is excusable, if not reasonable. But we are equally sure that some who hold firm religious convictions will be outraged by these notions. They will still want to believe in the ancient myths, but for them the Creator’s direct involvement in human matters only happened in some distant past when Moses, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus Christ or Muhammad walked the Earth.
It seems to us that there must have been a Civilization One; an advanced people who trained the rest of the world in science and technology, thereby leading it out of the Stone Age. But surely these forgotten people understood the message that was calling to them from the very fabric of nature. The people that are spoken of in ancient records taught the world about God and the great plan of nature. But the message became jumbled and almost lost as modern humankind began to believe in its own importance as the pinnacle of all intellectual achievement. Perhaps fortunately, the essence of the message has never been totally lost. By some mechanism, units such as the pound and the pint live on, and the giant stones of the Megalithic builders stood sufficiently upright to be read by at least one engineer with the genius to unravel their hidden secret. There is infinitely more to all this than we have touched upon as yet.
So far, we have not discovered how or why Megalithic units of length should define weights and measures that match imperial units such as the pound and the pint. We are particularly interested in the families and institutions involved in the emergence of these medieval French units and we have a great deal more research to conduct, though there are tantalizing clues that offer a whole new line of enquiry for the future.
We believe that this closing chapter of our first investigative book together is the beginning of our next great challenge. The real work begins now.
APPENDIX 1
Earth Days and Proving the Megalithic Yard
The Earth spins on its axis (relative to any star) just over 366 times in one orbit of the Sun, one sidereal year, as against the solar year, which is shorter. Therefore, each rotation of the Earth also represents one degree of the great circle of the heavens that is the planet’s solar orbit. From an earthbound perspective it appears that the Sun moves just under one degree along the plane of the ecliptic each day.
Most people understand that there are 365.2564 days in a year, but many do not appreciate there are 366.2564 turns of the Earth on its own axis during the same period
. This apparent contradiction comes about because a full rotation of the Earth does not take the same period of time as that between one sunrise and the next. Most of the angular movement of the Sun that we see as it passes across the sky is indeed caused by the spinning of the Earth on its axis but a small part is caused by the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. If the Earth was turning on its axis but not revolving about the Sun, the Sun would appear to remain in a fixed place relative to the background stars and a day on Earth would be exactly the same as one spin of the planet.
Conversely, if the Earth was not revolving on its axis, but simply travelling round the Sun, while facing the same direction in space, the Sun would then appear to go round the sky exactly once a year – and we would have one day per year. As this apparent movement goes in the opposite direction to the spin of the Earth it takes exactly one day off the ‘real’ year of 366¼ spins of our planet giving us the familiar 365¼-day year.
The earth turns once on its axis for each Megalithic degree of solar orbit.
In summary, according to our earthbound view of the Sun, there appear to be just over 365 solar days of 86,400 seconds but, according to the stars, there are just over 366 sidereal days of 86,164 seconds each. It follows that a 366-degree circle is a very logical invention for an early culture that is interested in astronomy, as the Neolithic people of western Europe are known to have been.
The Method for Establishing the Megalithic Yard
When viewed from Earth, the movements of the Venus within the zodiac are extremely complex yet, with an appropriate technique, an accurate unit of linear measurement can be achieved by appropriate observation of this planet’s movements.
Night 1 A star aligns with a fixed point before moving west
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 19