3300 BCE Sumer, southern Iraq
3100 BCE Ancient Egypt
3000 BCE Harappa, Pakistan and northwest India
2600 BCE The Minoans of Crete and the Aegean Islands
2300 BCE The Akkadian Empire, based on the city of Akkad, central Iraq
2000 BCE The Xia dynasty of China
2000 BCE The First Assyrian Empire, based on the city of Assur, northern Iraq
1800 BCE The first Babylonian Empire, centered on the city of Babylon, central Iraq
1600 BCE The Mycenaean civilization of Greece
1600 BCE The Hittites, Turkey
1500 BCE The Olmecs of Mexico, the oldest known civilization in the Americas
1500 BCE The Phoenician civilization, centered on Lebanon
1500 BCE The Vedic Age in India
1000 BCE The ancient kingdom of Israel
800 BCE The founding of Carthage, Tunisia
750 BCE The Mayan civilization of Mexico
550 BCE The first Persian Empire, centered on Iran
500 BCE Classical Greece
500 BCE Birth of the Roman Republic, centered on Italy
300 BCE The Tiwanaku civilization of Bolivia
27 BCE Augustus becomes the first Roman emperor. The Roman Empire covers much of Western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa.
The term “ancient civilizations” refers to those dating from the period before the Common Era: in other words, BCE—over two thousand years ago. So you may be wondering why some other famous civilizations aren’t on this list, such as the Peruvian Incas, the Mexican Aztecs, and the people who created the Nazca Lines and giant pictographs on the desert floor in southern Peru. The Incan civilization only began around six hundred years ago, as did the Aztec, and the Nazca culture was at its height in the first century CE. The magnificent temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is often cited as an astonishing accomplishment from ancient times, but the truth is it was only built around the year 1200 CE. The Anasazi ruins of North America, such as those at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, date between 600 and 1300 CE; the Kafun period of Japanese civilization began around 250 CE, the rise of Islamic empires beginning in Arabia did not start until around fourteen hundred years ago, and the giant stone statues on Easter Island were first carved around 1100 CE.
These are only approximate dates, and there is much discussion among historians and archaeologists concerning them. Nevertheless, this gives us an idea of just when the Megalithic period of the British Isles fits in. It seems to have begun right at the very beginning of civilization, at the same time as the Sumerian civilization was forming. But unlike those of Sumer, the people of the British Isles had none of the trappings of civilization; they didn’t even have bronze until its secrets were brought to the islands around 2000 BCE, well over a millennium after the first stone circles were built (see chapter 9). Bronze wasn’t absolutely necessary for city-building civilizations to get started and to endure. Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas did outstandingly well, and erected some extraordinary buildings to rival those of the Old World, without ever discovering such hard metals. They made exquisite items out of gold and silver and created various soft alloys but never seem to have produced bronze even though they had both copper and tin. In some ways they didn’t need it, as they had a plentiful supply of obsidian, a volcanically formed glassy material that is much sharper and more versatile than flint and was generally used for cutting tools, arrowheads, knives, and a whole variety of purposes in other Stone Age societies. Obsidian played the role that bronze did elsewhere in the world to kick-start civilization.14 But before we examine just how the first Megalithic people lived and exactly what kind of society they had, we should take time to examine some other “civilizations” that do not appear on our list: those mysterious “lost civilizations” that may never have existed at all.
Fig. 2.2. Locations of pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas.
Over the years some authors have suggested that, as the Megalithic culture began before most of the world’s civilizations had even gotten going, it may have been started by people from some forgotten empire, such as Atlantis. The oldest written reference to Atlantis is by the Greek philosopher Plato around 360 BCE. In his work Critias, he recounts the alleged visit by the Athenian statesman Solon to Egypt in about 600 BCE.15 There, Solon was apparently told the story of the mighty island state of Atlantis, which had existed somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, after which it was seemingly named. Ultimately, the nation angered the gods, and the entire island sank into the sea. This is all said to have occurred nine thousand years before Solon’s time. The Egyptians, Plato claims, described the inhabited plain of Atlantis as being 2,000 by 3,000 stades in size, 230 by 345 modern miles, with an additional, larger mountainous area to the north. Its overall size seems to be somewhat ambiguous, but it was probably imagined to be about 800 miles long and 250 miles wide at its broadest point: around the size of mainland Britain. We are not told precisely where it was, but it was seemingly somewhere just outside the Strait of Gibraltar, as a submerged bank of mud was said to still impair shipping where the island sank, which at the time would only have been coastal shipping, so presumably somewhere off what is now either Spain, Portugal, or Morocco. Atlantis, as portrayed by Plato, had the kind of civilization comparable to his contemporary Greece, with huge temples, palaces, and stately buildings. It had a similar army and navy too, as the Atlanteans are said to have conquered the coast of North Africa as far as Egypt, and the north coast of the Mediterranean as far as Italy. Eventually, the Athenians of Greece managed to defeat them and liberated the occupied territories. In Plato’s work Timaeus, he tells us that soon afterward, “There occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night . . . the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea.”16
Historians generally agree that Plato either made up the mysterious island as a philosophical allegory or that the idea was simply myth. Plato relates how the Atlanteans besieged ancient Athens sometime around 9600 BCE, whereas archaeology has revealed that the birth of Athens as a fortified citadel only dates from around 1400 BCE, during the Mycenaean period, and even this settlement was far less elaborate than the classical city of Athens that existed during Plato’s time. Moreover, modern sonar mapping of the Atlantic seabed has revealed no evidence that any such island ever existed anywhere near where Atlantis was said to have been. But although most present-day scholars regard the supposed age and location of Atlantis as fiction, some believe that a genuine civilization may have served as its inspiration.
The Minoans were a Bronze Age civilization on the island of Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea (in the northeastern Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey). Beginning around 2600 BCE they were a seafaring power, and they came to dominate what are now the Greek Islands before the rise of the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland. By 1600 BCE the Minoan capital at Knossos was every bit as sophisticated as any Egyptian city of the time; perhaps more so, in that it had the world’s first known fully integrated plumbing system. And it supported a population estimated to have been around one hundred thousand people. The Minoans certainly had better and faster ships than anyone else in that part of the world and virtually controlled trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Then around 3,500 years ago, a massive volcanic eruption on the Isle of Thera (now Santorini), some 70 miles north of Crete, not only completely destroyed the Minoan city of Akrotiri on that island, but the resultant tsunami also swept away the harbor of Knossos, the Mediterranean’s greatest port. Minoan Crete may not actually be the Atlantis envisaged by Plato, but it might have started the legend of the sophisticated island state destroyed by the sea.17
Then there’s the lost continent of Mu. The idea began with the French-American archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon, who studied the Mayan ruins in Yucatán, Mexico, in the 1870s. His translation of Mayan writings led him to believe that these ancient cities were older even than those of Egypt. In fact,
he proposed that the ruins of the Yucatán Peninsula were all that remained of the Mu civilization that had once flourished on a long-ago sunken continent that had existed in the western Atlantic and that its ideas and the remnants of its culture had spread to both Mexico and Egypt. The fact that both cultures built pyramids, although quite different in design, made Le Plongeon’s theory popular for a while, until other scholars threw serious doubt on his supposed translations. Nevertheless, the notion of the lost continent was revived by the British engineer James Churchward in a series of books published during the 1930s. Churchward claimed that while he was a soldier in India he met a Hindu priest who showed him a set of ancient clay tablets chronicling the history of Mu, which had not been in the Atlantic, as Le Plongeon proposed, but in the Pacific. Supposedly translating the tablets, Churchward revealed that the sunken continent had been the home of an advanced civilization that had existed from around fifty thousand years ago, and like Atlantis, it sank beneath the waves after a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions some twelve thousand years ago. It had a population of sixty-four million, along with colonies elsewhere, including Mexico, Egypt, and India.18 Needless to say, as Churchward failed to produce the clay tablets as proof, his claims never received scholarly support. Just like the Atlantic, the floor of the Pacific Ocean has now been thoroughly mapped and charted by ship sonar and from data collected by satellites, and there is no indication that any such continent ever existed. In fact, the idea that the Mayan civilization preceded the ancient Egyptians by any period at all, let alone thousands of years, has been completely invalidated by modern techniques, such as radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence (scientific dating of pottery), and dendrochronology (tree-ring dating). The impressive Mayan pyramids and palaces weren’t built until over two thousand years after the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The lost continent of Mu and its very name seem to have been born in the fertile imagination of Augustus Le Plongeon and later reinvented by the even more imaginative James Churchward.
Lemuria is the Atlantis of the Indian Ocean. The name originated with the English zoologist Philip Sclater in the 1860s, after he noted the similarities of fossils in Madagascar, off the coast of eastern Africa, and fossils in western India showing that exactly the same kind of plants and animals had lived at the same time in the remote past in both these locations, now separated by 3,000 miles of ocean. The explanation, he proposed, was that the two areas were once joined by a huge landmass that long ago sank beneath the sea. He called this supposed lost continent Lemuria, after the lemurs, the primates of Madagascar. However, the scientific explanation for the fossil evidence was eventually formulated by the mid-twentieth century with the discovery of plate tectonics: Madagascar and India were once joined together but drifted apart, starting around eighty-eight million years ago. In simple terms, solid parts of Earth’s crust slowly floated apart on the molten magma below. As far as science is concerned, there is no need for there to have been a lost continent to explain the fossil similarities.19
Fig. 2.3. Locations discussed in this chapter.
Various old works from India, written in both the Tamil and Sanskrit languages, contain accounts of lands being lost beneath the sea. The earliest surviving manuscripts are around twelve hundred years old, but refer to events that purportedly occurred many centuries before. These may be purely mythological or perhaps concern actual areas that suffered from devastating tsunamis, such as the one caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake of December 26, 2004, when waves up to 100 feet high inundated coastal communities in fourteen countries, including Sri Lanka and India, and over 250,000 people lost their lives. In the mid-twentieth century, authors among the Tamil people of southern India and Sri Lanka, citing such texts, began to propose that an entire landmass, once ruled by their ancestors, had been lost to the sea. Called Kumari Kandam, it was said to have been the cradle of a civilization that had existed to the South of India. In the 1960s a number of Western authors were inspired by speculations concerning this lost land, resurrecting the name Lemuria for the supposed sunken continent of the Indian Ocean.20 Nevertheless, modern scientific surveys have revealed no geological formations under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that correspond to the imagined Kumari Kandam or Lemuria.
Ancient Greek mythology spoke of a land called Hyperborea that lay somewhere in the far north. It was said to be a land populated by giants where the sun never set. The facts that the indigenous people of Scandinavia would have been generally taller than the Greeks and that about a third of Scandinavia lies above the Arctic Circle, where the midsummer sun does shine for twenty-four hours a day, has led some researchers to speculate that Hyperborea was a real land somewhere to the north of Britain. The Ancient Greeks certainly knew of the British Isles. The earliest known recorded visit to these islands was by the Greek geographer Pytheas of Massalia in about 325 BCE. During his voyage he not only circumnavigated and landed in Britain but also sailed farther north to describe icebergs and a place where the sun stayed above the horizon at the height of summer: a land he called Thule, possibly the coast of Norway. Later classical writers also refer to Thule, describing it as being northwest of Britain, beyond what seem to be the Faroe Islands, just possibly making it Iceland.21 Some modern authors have suggested that Thule and Hyperborea were lost civilizations, thousands of years old, somewhere in the Arctic, although there is nothing in Greek or Roman writings to suggest that they regarded these places as some kind of northern Atlantis. They don’t speak of a city-building civilization, or even a particularly ancient people, merely a rather primitive culture contemporary with their own. Needless to say, anthropologists remain highly skeptical about any kind of ancient city-dwelling civilization becoming established in the sort of climate that exists above the Arctic Circle. Certainly no evidence of such has ever been found.
So with a perspective on ancient civilizations, both real and imagined, we now have a context into which to place the beginnings of the Megalithic culture—in the British Isles at the very dawn of civilization elsewhere in the world. But what came before? Could there have been an earlier, genuine culture from which the Megalithic people sprang?
3
Prelude
The Emerging Cultures of the Late Stone Age
MYTHICAL CIVILIZATIONS ASIDE, there have been a number of surprising archaeological discoveries to suggest that civilizations were close to getting started in various parts of the world well before those of Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, but for various reasons they petered out, stagnated, or disappeared entirely. On the Mediterranean island of Gozo, a part of Malta, is Ġgantija (Giants’ Tower), a temple complex dating from around 3600 BCE. The plan incorporates five large, roughly circular chambers built around a central area and a passage leading to an inner sanctum. Its rough-cut stone walls, once plastered in parts, rise to a height of almost 20 feet, and the complex covers about 10,000 square feet, much of it thought to have been covered by timber roofing. The walls are interspersed with carefully shaped, oblong standing monoliths, weighing many tons, together with smaller, similarly shaped stones, joined with lintels set into the walls to create rectangular recesses. The temple contains various features, such as carvings and what seem to be stone altars. Archaeologists have determined that the complex was in use and expanded for over approximately one thousand years, until it was abandoned. There are a number of similar but smaller such structures on the island dating from the building of Ġgantija until around 2500 BCE.1 Although this mysterious Neolithic Maltese culture, known as the Temple People, began some three centuries before the rise of Sumer, it never built cities or developed the other trappings of civilization in the anthropological sense. It seems to have died out when newcomers brought the Bronze Age to the island in the mid-2000s BCE.
Sechin Bajo is an archaeological site in Peru, just over 200 miles northwest of Lima. It is one of a number of ancient ruins in the area, but whereas most date from after 1500 BCE, the period of the so-called Casma/Sechin culture, part of Sechin Bajo is the
site of a much earlier ceremonial terrace. It consists of a platform, some 52 feet square and just over 6 feet high, built from rocks overlaid with clay bricks. Although it has been dated to around 3500 BCE and is one of the oldest artificial structures in the Americas, there is no evidence that those who made it ever created any kind of civilization or erected complex dwellings. In fact, it seems that the original Sechin Bajo people, although they made simple bricks, had not even mastered the skill of making pottery. The mysterious platform seems to have been a one-off construction, made by a people who either died out or went into decline for centuries before reemerging as the Casma/Sechin culture.2
Monte d’Accoddi, on the Italian island of Sardinia, is an ancient artificial mound: a kind of truncated earthen pyramid faced with stones. Its base is almost 90 feet long and wide, rising to about 18 feet in height, where there is a flat platform 40 feet long and 24 feet wide, reached by an earthen ramp or causeway. As it contains no entrances or chambers within, it is thought to have been an open-air temple rather than a tomb. It has been dated to as early as 4000 BCE, but like the Sechin Bajo terrace in Peru, it seems to have been a one-off accomplishment, and whoever built it never got around to creating any further structures that are known. Later, around 3200 BCE, a Neolithic people known as the Ozieri culture inhabited the island and built a settlement around the mound and began to use it for their own ceremonial purposes.3
These three archaic anomalies date from the first half of the fourth millennium BCE, but there are two even older and more astonishing ancient constructions in what is now Turkey. Çatalhöyük is the ruins of a Neolithic settlement some 28 miles southeast of the modern Turkish town of Konya, and it was occupied from around 7500 to 6000 BCE. Covering some 32 acres, it consisted of a honeycomb arrangement of rectangular, mud-brick buildings, built closely against one another with no paths or passageways between. They are all thought to have been domestic dwellings accessed through holes in the ceiling, reached by wooden ladders or steps, effectively making the joined rooftops the town’s streets. At its height, around 7000 BCE, Çatalhöyük is thought to have had a population of up to ten thousand people. Most houses contained two main rooms with smaller chambers for storage, and walls were plastered to a smooth finish and painted with murals, mainly depicting human figures and animals.4 Numerous clay figurines have been found, mostly depicting animals, along with many of seated women, suggesting a religion based around a supreme goddess. Çatalhöyük is by far the largest Neolithic settlement found anywhere in the world, and it can certainly be described as a city—by far the world’s oldest yet discovered—but was it a civilization?
Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge Page 4