The only real relationship between sound waves and light waves is that they possess frequency and wavelength, which is why they are measured in the same way. However, as we demonstrated in Chapter 11, the relationship may exist at a physiological level, rather than as a fact of physics. Our suggestion is that any biological entity, for example ourselves, that develops a sense such as hearing, which operates across a given range of frequencies, may develop other senses, such as sight, across frequencies that have a resonant relationship with the sound waves.
Resonance is simply explained by a person walking into a room while carrying a tuning fork, set to vibrate at, say, 440 Hz. If the tuning fork is struck and the room contains a multitude of other silent tuning forks, some of these are likely to begin vibrating, apparently of their own accord. Let us suppose that there were tuning forks in the room set to vibrate as 220 Hz and 880 Hz. Each of these bears a frequency relationship to the 440 Hz fork. Musically speaking, the 440 Hz tuning fork would create the sound we know as the A below middle C on a piano; 220 Hz is also the note A, but an octave lower, and 880 Hz is A again, though this time one octave higher. This doubling or halving of frequency, at least in Western music, is called ‘an octave’. The tuning fork we struck set up a ‘sympathetic resonance’ with other tuning forks in the room, which is why they too began to sing.
There are two significant factors regarding visible light that seem to ally it at some level with sound, and specifically music. First, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum covered by visible light runs from about 4 x 1014 Hz to 8.1 x 1014 Hz. This represents a doubling of frequency, so in musical terms it can be called an octave. The second association occurs when one considers the difference in frequency between musical notes and the frequency of visible light. The note we have designated as Megalithic C, which is 558 Hz, when doubled 40 times, brings us to a frequency within the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Forty doublings or octaves up in terms of frequency, 558 Hz becomes 6.13527 x 1014 Hz, which represents the colour blue and appears right in the middle of the human visual spectrum in terms of frequency.
There may be no tangible connection between the musical note of Megalithic C and the colour blue that can be tied down by physics, but it is possible that within the brain sound and light are dealt with in a similar manner. It may therefore be no coincidence that we have evolved to see in colours that have frequencies that maintain a resonant relationship with the sounds we hear.
APPENDIX 5
The Phaistos Disc and the Megalithic Year
In Chapter 2 we explained the method by which we believe our Megalithic ancestors replicated the half Megalithic Yard pendulum, in order to validate the geodetic Megalithic Yard, which they had already established.
All the available evidence points to the fact that rather than using a star and a pendulum, as we had first considered, the astronomer-priests of the Megalithic Period had used a pendulum and the planet Venus. However, such a technique relies on a certain knowledge of which ‘days’ during the complex movements of the planet Venus are appropriate for the procedure.
It might occur to some readers, as it did to us, that the smallest irregularity in the calendar could lead to great mistakes in such a system when establishing the correct days to use in any Venus cycle, because unregistered drift of the cycles of Venus across time could lead to the wrong result. Within the very small tolerances he observes, Alexander Thom showed that the Megalithic Yard remained remarkably consistent, probably across as much as 2,000 years. In our estimation the Megalithic builders had two answers to this problem, the first being the knowledge that the longest half Megalithic Yard pendulum achieved from the Venus observations was the one they were looking for. However, of just as much importance would be a very good understanding of the ‘real’ year, together with some knowledge of the Venus cycles themselves.
The way the Venus cycle meshes with that of the Earth was of great significance to these early calendar creators. They would certainly have noticed that for every five ‘apparent’ full cycles of Venus, eight Earth years pass. However, this could only be fully appreciated if the actual length of the earth year was understood. Even using the modern calendar, this can be somewhat misleading.
We presently use a fairly hotchpotch system of corrections that have gradually evolved since Roman times. Our first course of action is to add an extra day to the civil calendar every four years – which then becomes known as a leap year. However, this procedure is not accurate enough and because it over-compensates, we don’t add a leap year in century years – unless they are millennium years. Although this system is fine for routine purposes and sorts itself out over a long period of time, it is capable of being quite wrong at any given point, certainly by more than a day.
Such a state of affairs could have caused real complications to a culture that simply had to keep a tight rein on the true year and this fact alone tends to suggest that our Megalithic ancestors had built themselves a very accurate calendar. In fact there is evidence that this was the case.
Our hypothesis suggests that the Megalithic civil year was 366 days in length, which in terms of the real year would appear to be even further adrift than our year of 365 days, but what really matters is the compensation techniques that were made to bring the civil year and the true year together.
Alan’s time spent studying the Phaistos Disc strongly suggested that it had been designed for a year of 366 days. The Phaistos Disc was created by the civilization on Crete that we now know as the Minoan culture, and was manufactured about 2000 BC. It was found in the ruins of the Minoan palace of Phaistos, in the south of Crete, and it is now kept in the nearby Heraklion Museum.
The Phaistos Disc, side A.
The Disc is made of fired clay. Prior to firing, each its sides was given incised spiral lines, inside of which stand groups of hieroglyphic characters pressed into the clay using stamps or dies. The two sides of the Phaistos Disc are shown above.
The Phaistos Disc, side B.
Linguists and other interested parties have for years tried to translate the message of the Phaistos Disc and despite some valiant efforts, the general opinion is that all of them have failed. The reason is quite simple. We have no knowledge of the language spoken in Minoan Crete and without that, or some sort of Minoan ‘Rosetta Stone’, interpretation of the characters would seem to be impossible.
It was not so much what the characters might say that interested Alan, however, but rather the number of them on each side of the Disc, and how those numbers might relate to each other. The first fact of note is that the characters fall within spirals. Many researchers now think that there are occasions when spirals are meant to indicate the passing of the Sun throughout the year, as is suggested to be the case of the spirals carved at Newgrange in Ireland’s Boyne Valley. This was the first clue that the Phaistos Disc might be some sort of calendar.
It took several years of research and a whole book to explain what Alan discovered, partly because the Phaistos Disc is, in fact, a multi-faceted aid to calculation, though there is one particular job it does quite brilliantly. Side A of the Disc contains 123 hieroglyphs, and side B has 119. If these are viewed as simple markers, irrespective of what they might say, then the Disc can be shown to comprise a ‘second calendar’ specifically manufactured to run alongside the 366-day calendar and to identify the times when compensations need to be made in order to reconcile the 366-day year and the true year.
The procedure for using the Disc as described above is very simple. Every symbol on side A is counted, most likely from the centre out and one for each day, until the end of the spiral is reached. All of these symbols, 123 in total, relate to the centre symbol in side B of the Disc. Now all the symbols on side A are counted again, this time relating to the second symbol on side B. The procedure is repeated time and again until 123 days has elapsed for each of the 119 symbols on side B. The total number of days indicated by the Disc is 14,637. This is extremely close to 40 years of 366 d
ays, which would total 14,640 days. Probably the Disc is perpetual, and so simply continues a new series of cycles, but as if to premeditate this important 40-year period, those creating the Disc added three dots at the end of the spiral to indicate the missing three days necessary to make the full 40-year cycle of 14,640 days. (The dots were present to ‘demonstrate’ the full 40-year cycle but were not used in the calendar round explained below.)
The ingenuity of this system is that it told those using the Disc when it was necessary to compensate for the inaccuracies that were accruing between the ritual year and real year. The vital period is 4 x 123 days (492 days), at which time one day would be literally removed from the ritual 366-day calendar. It would be as if that day never existed. For example, and in our terms, the calendar might jump from 1st March to 3rd March.
We can find no better method of compensating for a 366-day year than to remove 1 day every 492 days. Such a procedure would keep the civil calendar and the real calendar in harmony for well over 3,000 years without any other alteration being necessary. This is a phenomenal feat and any observer would be forced to admit that it is neater and more accurate than the system we use today.
The Phaistos Disc is capable of much more than this little miracle and it almost certainly has additional capabilities that we have not yet recognized. Everything known about it so far is itemized in The Bronze Age Computer Disc. However, it was the existence of the 123-day, or more properly in this context, the 492-day alternative calendar that alerted Alan to the presence in Crete of the 366-day year he had already suspected must have once existed.
It is not possible for this method of compensation to ever see the civil year and the true year at odds by more than 0.75 of a day, and even this inaccuracy can only exist for a maximum of 126 days. The larger discrepancies of our own calendar simply do not occur in this system.
Another feature of the Phaistos Disc is that it supplies an extremely accurate calendar for the behaviour and movements of the planets Mercury and Venus. If the hieroglyphics are replaced with modern numerals, what we get is an extremely accurate planetary ready-reckoner. So obvious was this that Alan soon came to appreciate that there was a simple rule of thumb, particularly for the planet Venus, that he had not recognized before. When using 366-day years the rule is this: any phenomena of Venus that takes place today will happen again 40 years less 40 days from now. For those conversant with the procedures itemized by the Disc, it would have been child’s play to catalogue and remember those times when Venus could be used to achieve an accurate Megalithic Yard. Although the procedure is straightforward, the explanation of it is not, and since this book is not directly connected to the Phaistos Disc research, we refer interested readers who wish to know more to The Bronze Age Computer Disc.
APPENDIX 6
The Amazing Barley Seed
Modern understanding of Sumerian and Old Babylonian measuring systems has been reconstructed by experts who have studied many cuneiform texts found on clay tablets in the ruins of ancient cities of Mesopotamia. Like many long-lived cultures, the various linear lengths, weights and volumes used in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ can be terribly complicated, with specific lengths or weights often reserved for a particular commodity. However, as we suggested in Chapter 4, there are certain weights and measures that were used as standards, and which did not change significantly over time. According to Professor Livio C. Stecchini these units stem from the Sumerian Period, circa 1800 BC.
The smallest unit of length associated with the Sumerians and the Babylonians was the ‘se’ which meant ‘barley seed’. There were 6 se to one shu-si and 360 se to the double-kush. Most experts in Mesopotamian metrology would not argue with these figures and it seemed reasonable to us that the se or barley seed, being the smallest denomination of length, weight and volume, should offer the perfect starting point for understanding the entire system. We had been somewhat surprised when an expert in this area of research answered our request for more information about the barley seed as a Sumerian unit of measure by email in the following way:
‘The barleycorns are more for calculational convenience rather than being considered as actual barleycorns.’ 1
Our response was to keep an open mind as to whether or not these ancient scientists actually meant what they said or whether it was indeed a kind of nickname for something small.
The standard ‘calculational convenience’ theory is quite understandable because in the British and many European measuring systems, the ‘grain’ existed as a term until the introduction of the metric system. In Britain, the grain was originally a true barley grain, though for some purposes wheat seeds were used. In the British and many of the western European systems, the grain eventually became a standard unit, often differing greatly from the humble seed that had been its origin.
Another reason why many archaeologists deny that the Sumerians were referring to real barley seed relates to information dealt with while we were working with the Sumerian cube, in Chapter 4. The supposed problem lies in the fact that 180 x 60 is the number of barley seeds in both a mana (weight) and a sila (volume). Using the barley seed as a unit of weight, this could never be the case, since a mana is about 500 grams and a sila is about a litre, which, we are told, weighed almost exactly a kilogram. All the same, we felt obliged to look more closely at this Mesopotamian se or barley seed. We knew from the texts that a kush (cubit) was said to have a value of 180 barley seeds. When we tried the experiment for ourselves, it became immediately obvious why experts in the past had dismissed the barley seed as a reality in the system. Given that the kush was around half a metre, each barley seed would have to measure 2.77 millimetres. Our own experiments showed that the length of a modern barley seed, when laid end to end, averages out at 8.46 millimetres. We might have left the situation at that, except for the fact that we decided to measure all the barley seed’s dimensions.
If the seeds had been pierced in their centres and placed onto a very fine thread, as in a necklace, the seeds would have been on their sides. We did not thread the seeds but laid them out in a row on double-sided sticky tape (see Colour Plate section). When we did so, we discovered that they conformed incredibly well to the Sumerian/Babylonian model and there were indeed close to 180 barley seeds on average to the kush!
Taking the kush at 49.94 centimetres in length, each barley seed should measure 2.77 millimetres. The average width of our own sample of modern barley grains (using both large and small seeds at random and across a number of examples) was around 2.81mm, typically giving more than 177 to the kush. This is incredibly close to the hypothetical Sumerian model and tended to suggest that, at least in terms of physical dimensions, our own barley seeds were not greatly different to the Sumerian examples.
At this point the theory that ‘barley seed’ was merely a word used for ‘calculational convenience’ by the Sumerians was already looking less likely. As we thought about the Sumerians and Babylonians dividing the horizon (like all circles) into 360 degrees we realized that if the seeds were arranged in a curve to form a circle it would hold just a few more seeds. It turned out that a circle of 360 barley seems was indeed a double-kush in length – so each grain was precisely equal to one degree in this circle. Here was another example of Sumerian thinking, with circles within circles dancing to the number pattern based on 360.
We next turned our attention to the weight of the seeds. In order to obtain the ‘intended’ weight of the basic unit known as the mana, we performed the calculation outlined in Chapter 4, taking one-fifth the length of the kush and cubing it. The kush is 49.94 centimetres, a fifth of which is 9.988 centimetres. The cube of this is 996.404 cubic centimetres. The metric system says that the weight of water in such a cube would be 996.4 grams.
According to the cuneiform texts (or at least to the standard interpretation of them) there ought to be a total of 180 x 60 = 10,800 barley seeds in a mana. We already knew that the weight of a mana must be exactly half that of the sila and it is the sila that
is created from the one-fifth kush cube. Put simply, this means that the mana is only half the value of the one-fifth kush cube and so should be expected to return a weight of 498.2 grams. If this weight is made up of 180 x 60 = 10,800 barley seeds, then each seed must weigh 46 milligrams.
We next measured the weight of our own barley seeds on a set of simple but accurate balance scales. In one pan, we placed a one gram weight, and in the other we began to place seeds, both large and small, until the scales balanced exactly. We repeated the procedure many times until we had a good average for the number of barley seeds necessary to balance the one-gram weight. The result was 21.5 seeds, meaning that our barley seeds weighed an average of 46.5 milligrams. For thoroughness we also checked this against independent figures, taken from the 1979 English crop, which averaged 45 milligrams per barley seed. Both our figures and those from the 1979 crop were so close to the expected Sumerian/Babylonian system that we were amazed how little our barley differed from that harvested more than 4,000 years ago. As a result of these findings, we are now confident about reconstructing the intended Sumerian measuring systems.
Judging by our own experiments, the originators of this system used a combination of large seeds from the centre of the ear of barley, and smaller ones from the ends of the ear. To obtain the definitive weight of one barley seed would have been impossible for the Sumerians. The whole system is built around significant numbers of seeds, the better to gain an accurate average.
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 21