Sacred Number and the Lords of Time by richard heath

Author:richard heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 1.1. Diagram of cross-section of Earth showing how the ancients determined the Earth’s radius (x) and circumference (2πx) specifically at latitude 48.19° north, in Brittany, where a simple right-angled triangle shows that the radius and hence circumference of that parallel and the equatorial radius must be related as a length 2 relates to a length 3.

RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES

Megalithic peoples appear to have chosen specific latitudes that enabled their metrological work to succeed. They did this in Brittany (5000–3000 BCE), where the latitude enabled them to study astronomy more easily (to be explored in chapter 2) and estimate the length of the equator to define a standard foot (as explained above). Megalithic peoples also chose a specific latitude between Stonehenge and Avebury in England (ca. 3000–2500 BCE), which enabled them to deduce the size of the Earth without a full geodetic survey. There is no evidence of similar preliminary works in the ancient Near East prior to the Pyramid Age, which employed megalithic metrology and its model of the Earth.

The ancient metrological system, in order to be the same everywhere, can only have evolved once in one region of the planet (just as the phonetic alphabet has evolved just once). Evidence for this development process is clear within the monuments of the early megalithic period in Brittany (5000–4000 BCE) and similarly in England (3500–2000 BCE), where it appears to have become a completed system ready to be communicated to the ancient Near East.

Metrology clearly evolved in the absence of arithmetic. It offered a method to obtain numerical results without needing the proto-mathematics developed by the Sumerians after 3000 BCE. When megalithic metrology was later adopted by the Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Semitic, and Greek cultures, it soon ran alongside the newer mathematical problem solving, which could manipulate numbers directly using symbols rather than lengths. Mesopotamian accountancy, counting the number of objects and adding and multiplying them, was a recording of quantities in symbols rather than lengths. Originally these quantity symbols were symbolic objects within a clay envelope then covered by both a summary of its contents and a seal. What we now call numbers are the summary without the seal, envelope, or miniature objects that were placed inside. Having two copies of the summary in the hands of each party proved a much more convenient contract for exchanges of goods and wealth.

Two thousand years before Sumer, however, the people of the megalithic in northwestern Europe were building a detailed understanding of astronomy and of the size of the Earth through measured structures that recorded long periods of astronomical time and modeled key radii and surface lengths in the Earth’s dimensionality. The historical influence of the megalithic is only to be found in the measures within buildings, for the pyramid builders of the Near East and later of the New World employed the same megalithic units of length, summarizing and preserving megalithic knowledge in its native language of metrology. A history of the megalithic was never written, perhaps, because

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