NORTH GERMANY
I have already referred to the Goseck observatory on the River Elbe and the Nebra ‘Sky Disk’ that was found nearby. Goseck’s draw for the Minoans would have been the amber trade, which will be described in some detail later.
OUTER HEBRIDES – CALLANISH
This observatory is one of the most interesting (see Almendres, above). It too will be analysed in more detail in another chapter.
This is also an opportunity to examine the claim of L. Augustine Waddell, that the people who built the circular stone observatories across the western world were the same people who mined copper and tin; and in particular that these stone observatories were built in places where the Minoans traded extensively. The Minoans seem to have adapted existing circles, but to have used stones in place of wood. They were able to do this because after 2200 BC they had the technology needed – bronze axes and saws sharp enough to trim stone.
The circles I am interested in are in different parts of the western world and may even lead ever further west again – to North America. Those I have so far mentioned may have varied in shape and size, but they had many important things in common. They were often accompanied by cursi, ceremonial pathways marked out by megaliths, that led the way into the stone circle. Built using a common measurement, the megalithic foot, they were constructed to record the same astronomical events – usually the rising or setting of the sun at equinoxes or solstices; the moonrise; moonset and the moon’s eclipse; and occasionally the rising and setting of Venus. Because of the different latitudes of these stone circles, different layouts were adopted to record astronomical events.
There is another common factor. All building on European stone circles ceased by 1450 BC, when Thera’s volcano erupted, destroying the Minoan civilisation.
CHAPTER 28
STONEHENGE: THE MASTER WORK
In the previous chapter I mentioned Sir Isaac Newton’s thesis that new ideas can only develop following an initial leap of faith. Newton also said that nothing made his head ache so much as accounting for the motions of the moon.
Stonehenge is the perfect place, on a clear midsummer night, to develop an obsession not just with the moon but with the amazing sweep of the whole night sky. Stand on any nearby hilltop, the breeze in your face, and let your gaze sweep the landscape. Drink in the ceremony and drama of the henge itself; its solidity, its permanence. Look harder and if it’s still light enough you can see grand, ancient ceremonial avenues, cursi and hundreds of burial barrows. Stonehenge is magnificent, sacred and sublime, the bare bones of Britain’s prehistory.
People have been worshipping here, it’s thought, since 7200 BC.
Stonehenge itself – the name probably comes from the Saxon stân meaning ‘stone’, and hencg meaning ‘hinge’, or ‘hanging’ – was built in three main phases. The first probably dates from 3000 BC to 2920 BC, when people dug out a roughly circular enclosure about 100 metres (330 feet) in diameter, surrounded by a ditch or inner bank, which was built of the earth from the ditch. There were two entry points to this initial enclosure, from the northeast and the southwest.
The ditch was crudely made. In the 1920s Colonel William Hawley, one of the pioneering archaeologists at Stonehenge, likened it to ‘a string of badly-made sausages’. It was dug using picks made from the antlers of red deer and spades made from their broad shoulder blades – the same implements that had been used to dig the Great Orme Mine. The site has been carbon dated from these bones. It seems that the original purpose of this first site was ceremonial – as a gathering place to celebrate the arrival of spring, and possibly as a cemetery for the dead.
The next phases changed Stonehenge’s character completely, because the builders used stones. Vast stones. For reasons we don’t fully understand, around 2500 BC these huge lumps of rock were brought to the site, probably from the Marlborough Downs 23 miles (37 kilometres) away. Known as sarsens, they were cut from dense, durable silicified sandstone. Each stone erected in the outer ring was about 4.1 metres (13 feet) high and weighed around 25-tons. The large stones in the inner ring – ten uprights and five lintels – weigh up to 50 tons each and are linked to each other using complex jointing techniques. Stonehenge’s builders set up the massive sarsen uprights to tolerances of just a few centimetres. It makes you marvel: how was all of this done?
An even greater mystery is how the smaller stones, collectively known as blue stones, were brought here. Although there is a theory that glacial action brought them near to the site, this seems highly unlikely. The 2- and 4-ton stones seem to have come from the Preseli Hills of south Wales – a full 150 miles (240 kilometres) to the west of Stonehenge (see map). Intriguingly, as the crow flies Preseli is about 100 miles (160 kilometres) south of the Great Orme mine, which was in full swing by this time. One new theory, supported by radiocarbon dating, has it that the stone construction at the henge began between 2400 and 2200 BC. The change of date intrigues me.
This new survey by Professor Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright contends that the smaller stones were arranged in two concentric circles within an older wooden enclosure. The big sarsen stones were now carefully trimmed with bronze axes, adzes and saws to produce sharply defined rectangular blocks with mortise and tenon and tongue and groove joints to lock the stones together. The final arrangement of the stones was almost certainly completed sometime between 2280 and 1930 BC.3
The scenes here at the summer solstices of the 21st century AD – with hippies banging drums and the Wiltshire police force’s new aerial drone sweeping back and forth, lights flashing, filming the crowds from a hundred or so metres (a few hundred feet) in the air – may seem worlds away from what would have happened in the era before Christ. Yet perhaps it is not all that different in spirit. The crowds all come for the consuming drama of one moment – when the sun rises from behind the magnificent Heel Stone. Somehow, for a magical few minutes, it feels as if the sun has stopped dead in its tracks and hangs suspended in time.
The structure that was completed sometime between 2280 and 1930 BC was sophisticated. For example, the horizontal stones that were locked in place on top of the upright ones were not perfectly rectangular. The stones are gently and deliberately curved on both inner and outer faces. As a result the stones appear as a perfect ring, suspended high above Salisbury Plain. This effect, playing with the perspective supplied by the human eye, may well be a technique imported from the Mediterranean. The Minoans certainly used it and they handed it down to the Greeks, whose word for it is entasis.
From a navigator’s point of view, the circle of horizontal stones provided a perfect artificial horizon. That would have enabled astronomers to note precisely when the moon rose, or which was the first star to rise in the east after sunset. It would also allow them to time both solar and lunar eclipses accurately and determine the exact times of sunrise and sunset.
The Minoans had arrived in Britain by 2300 BC to collect tin and their technological influence can be seen in bronze implements dated 2200–2000 BC, when the percentage of tin content in those implements leaps to 11 per cent.4 At some stage (it is hard to prove definitively when) five huge stones were repositioned at the centre of Stonehenge, in a very similar way to the central stones at Nabta. So we have builders who could transport massive stones hundreds of miles, then prepare them with bronze tools for astronomical purposes, using a similar layout to the one found at Nabta.
Could the Minoans have been behind that change? It’s their appetite for luxury that gives them away. I am here at Stonehenge armed with the knowledge that oriental cowries and jewellery, including blue-glazed and glass beads very similar to those produced on ancient Crete, have been excavated from a number of Bronze Age graves at Stonehenge. They are, according to Professor L. Augustine Waddell, ‘of the identical kind common in Ancient Egypt within the restricted period of between about 1450 BC to 1250 BC’. The Uluburun wreck’s cargo included almost identical examples of blue glass, cowries and amber.
Was t
his idea too incredible? Could I realistically expect to challenge the official version of history, especially when it came to one of Britain’s most loved, most written about, most iconic monuments? The fact is that the more one peers into the mists of Stonehenge, the more the evidence of Minoan influence appears from the murk.
The most exciting initial discovery? During a casual Internet search, I chanced across an old Australian blog. The blogger gave an account of his tour of Stonehenge in the 1950s. You could still walk among the stones at that time, and he described a particular beam of light that had allowed him to see a carving of a double- headed axe . . . etched along the stones. I immediately thought back to Almendres and another tourist’s hastily shot photograph showing what looked to me like a carving of a labrys, a Minoan double axe, its shape eroded over the many centuries that have passed. I’d scarcely paid any attention to it. Then it clicked. I remembered Knossos, and what archaeologists call the ‘mason’s marks’ engraved on its stones – again in the form of Minoan double-headed axes.
Here is the remarkable truth. As soon as I realised that there was an exciting lead to track down, I began looking for answers. Within just hours, thanks to the wonders of the Web, I’d discovered that there is not just one such ‘axe’ carving on the megaliths of Stonehenge: there are many. They were created nearly 4,000 years ago. Some have interpreted these weathered, axe-shaped marks – a ‘stalk’, as it were, supporting a horizontal line – as mushroom shapes. However when archaeologist Richard J. C. Atkinson drew them in 1953, he realised that one of these centuries-old carvings was probably a dagger, the other a double-headed axe. What is also remarkable is the fact that these carvings were rediscovered in the last century – and yet fifty years on, they had still not been studied and were scarcely even recorded.
With the British weather fast eroding their outlines the marks are rarely seen today, if only because no one is allowed close enough to the monument to photograph them – except during the chaotic celebrations that annually mark the summer solstice. What with the impact of wind and rain, time was, in a sense, running out.
In 2002 Wessex Archaeology contacted Archaeoptics Ltd of Glasgow, which is a specialist company at the leading edge of applying pioneering new techniques to archaeology. The year before, the company had laser-scanned the timbers of Seahenge, the intriguing Bronze Age circle of waterlogged wooden posts exposed by the sea on a remote beach in Norfolk. The results had been high-resolution, digital 3-dimensional (3D) models – most helpful for analysis. Wessex Archaeology decided to investigate the potential of laser-scanning the Stonehenge carvings. Specialists Alistair Carty and Dave Vickers travelled to Wessex Archaeology’s Old Sarum headquarters near Salisbury with an impressive array of equipment, including a Minolta VIVID-900 scanner, capable of capturing millions of points in 3D and taking measurements just microns apart. The team included Wessex Archaeology’s Thomas Goskar, also a specialist in digital techniques.
The surfaces were photographed and scanned at a resolution of 0.5 mm, creating hundreds of thousands of individual 3D measurements known as a point cloud, which could then be animated into a 3D solid model.
This is Goskar’s description of the images scanned on ‘Stone 53’, one of the famous sarsen trilithons:
The first carving is 15 by 15.3 cm [5.9 by 6 inches], with a broad upturned blade, and a form of ‘rib’ a third of the way down the length. Although further analysis is needed, this shape could represent two axes, one carved over another. The second carving, 10.6 by 8.6 cm [4.2 by 3.4 inches], is very faint indeed, but seems to be a normal flanged axe, as we find elsewhere on the stone . . .
There was something poetic about the juxtaposition of the most advanced Early Bronze Age technology, with the most advanced 21st century archaeological recording methods. What was intended as an investigation into how well the carvings would be recorded by a laser scanner, turned into a major discovery.
We must remember that while the sarsens are thought to have been erected around 2300 BC, metal axes were not in common circulation for generations after this. Whatever the carvings mean, accurate recording is vital to our understanding of the monument as a whole.5
EARLY RESEARCH
During the early dawn of the British archaeological profession in the 18th century, the antiquarian William Stukeley discovered what local people had probably always known. That at midsummer sunrise the first of the sun’s rays shine into the centre of the rings of stone, meeting between the open arms of a horseshoe of stones. In fact, in the early 20th century Sir Norman Lockyer argued that there was a ritualistic connection between Stonehenge and sun worship. The precision of the alignment of these ancient megaliths with the sun could not be an accident.
Then Dr Gerald Hawkins, a well-known astronomer from America, burst upon the scene. Hawkins was Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Boston University in Massachusetts. In 1962 he and his assistants filmed sunrise at the summer solstice at Stonehenge. They plotted every stone and pit on the site and fed their co-ordinates into an IBM 704 computer, then the world’s most powerful – computers being in their infancy. The journal Nature published Hawkins’ first results in 1963.
Hawkins argued that the computer results proved that Stonehenge was a giant observatory for predicting eclipses of both the sun and the moon. His claims generated huge publicity. Professional archaeologists were furious. Here was an astronomer, and an American to boot, trampling over their patch and using new-fangled, unproven computer methods to uncover the secrets of ‘their’ beloved Stonehenge. Richard Atkinson described Hawkins’ argument as ‘tendentious, arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing’ – to Atkinson, the builders of Stonehenge were ‘howling barbarians’.
The archaeologists had overplayed their hand. It was obvious that Hawkins knew his subject – Stonehenge was his sixty-first published paper. Then again Hawkins was not, in fact, an American, but came from Suffolk. His degrees were in physics and pure maths and his PhD in radio astronomy was obtained at Manchester University. Hawkins had forever changed the way we think of Stonehenge.
Next into the fray was Sir Fred Hoyle, the most highly respected British astronomer of the day. He examined Professor Hawkins’ research and went even further. To him, Stonehenge was a model of the solar system. Hoyle selected three stones representing the sun, the moon and the moon’s orbit. These stones were then rotated around the holes of the Aubrey Hole ring relative to one another.
Hoyle could show that when the three marker stones lay either close to each other or opposite each other, eclipses would take place. The eclipse would occur when the moon stone was closest to the sun stone or was precisely opposite to it on the other side of the Aubrey Hole ring. Hoyle’s method is more accurate than Hawkins’, because Hoyle’s system could predict the actual day of lunar eclipse nineteen years into the future. Hoyle also identified many other astronomical alignments at Stonehenge. Hoyle and Hawkins had to take a leap of faith, based on the evidence before them: they did not have all the detailed proof we now have about the sophistication of Babylonian, Minoan and Egyptian astronomy, a body of knowledge that already existed during the latter stages of the building of Stonehenge. Neither did they have proof that the Bronze Age world was as elaborate and sophisticated as we are only just now beginning to understand – nor that there was long-standing contact between the civilisations of the Minoans, the Egyptians and the Babylonians.
From the Egyptian astronomers at Nabta, the Minoans could have known of the sun’s daily maximum elevation and declination. From the astronomers at Giza we know that the Egyptians also knew about the earth’s precession – from the apparent precession of Kochab. The Minoan mariners may have learned much more from the Mesopotamian astronomers, not least the precise times of the moon’s rising – something that, if Hoyle was right, could also be measured at Stonehenge. Had they had a good clock they could have calculated accurate longitude from the moon’s eclipse. From the altitude of the sun, taken each day at its maximum elevation, they could h
ave deduced declination to determine latitude.
CHAPTER 29
FROM THE MED TO THE MEGALITH
Supposing for a moment that the builders of Stonehenge did complete phase III of the circle around 1750 BC. If there really had been that much Minoan influence on the extraordinary monument, then logic would suggest that the travellers would have left evidence from the eastern Mediterranean: goods, perhaps, or traces of trade or even physical habitation.
To quote Professor Hawkins again:
Archaeologists are traditionally conservative and ungiven to theor-ising, but the indications of a Mediterranean origin for Stonehenge [phase III] are so strong that they allow themselves to wonder if some master designer might not have come all the way from that pre-Homeric but eternally wine dark southern sea [the Mediterranean] . . .
R.J.C. Atkinson inclines seriously to this theory, making much of the evidence of dagger and axe carvings and Mediterranean artefacts in the burials of Stonehenge.6 Atkinson’s views are supported by a number of distinguished historians. For instance, according to Professor W.J. Perry:
Megaliths [stone circles] all over the world are located in the immediate neighbourhood of ancient mine workings for tin, copper, lead and gold or in the area of the pearl and amber trade.
As Herodotus wrote: ‘ . . . it is nevertheless certain that both our tin and our amber are brought from the extremely remote regions in the western extremes of Europe’.7
Had the Minoans left any distinctive ‘calling cards’ on the rolling plains of Wiltshire? I set out for Stonehenge on a fair September day and enjoyed the sight of the stones as they leapt majestically into view from the much despised A303 road.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 23