Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (12 page)

The double-kush is said to be something very close to 99.88 centimetres in length, so a cube with sides of one-tenth of this would have sides of 9.988 centimetres. The volume of water that such a cube could hold would be 996.4 centilitres, less than 4 centilitres short of a litre of 1,000 centilitres, The sila is therefore equal to the amount of water that would fit into a one-tenth double-kush cube. The weight of the water in such a cube should represent the standard unit of mass. However, the mana weighs around half a kilogram, whereas it is clear that the true weight of one litre of water should be a full kilogram. The Sumerians, like the Megalithic people, regularly used halves and doubles of principal units and we wonder whether the Sumerian texts have been slightly misinterpreted and a mana did originally weigh a kilogram or, more likely, that the Sumerians found this unit cumbersome and so halved it for most day-to-day purposes.

We found that we were not the first researchers to suggest that the Sumerians used cubes to turn linear length into mass and volume. The late Professor of the History of Science, Livio C. Stecchini, remained convinced all his life that it was obvious that theoretical cubes had been used by the Sumerians to create mass and volume measures from the kush and double-kush. Present orthodoxy disagrees with this premise, preferring to believe that these mass and volume weights were somehow tortuously derived from Sumerian units of area. The general argument against Stecchini’s idea is based upon the fact that no cubes of the right size have ever been found in Sumer. The learned professor dismissed this observation by noting that in the case of the metric system, ‘original units for cubing one-tenth of a metre were, and still are, cylinders and not cubes’. In any case, even if the cubes had existed, they would have been very few in number and cannot reasonably be expected to automatically turn up in the archaeological record.

Our research has shown that the Megalithic people of the area around the British Isles used a unit of length that implies that they could have and probably did use the equivalent of the imperial pound and pint. Now, using the same model we had discovered that the people of ancient Mesopotamia used units of length, weight and capacity that have a remarkable correspondence to the metric system. How could this be?

The recorded origins of the units within the imperial system are just about impossible to trace but the metric system was designed ‘from the ground up’ by a team of scientists working in France during the late 18th century. The chances of the pound and the pint surviving for thousands of years seem remote, but did the French deliberately copy the Sumerian units?

Comparison of the Megalithic and Sumerian systems of geometry and the consequences for weight and capacity units.

The Sumerians/Babylonians used a system of mathematics that used base 60, which is the reason why we still have 60 seconds to the minute and 60 minutes to the hour. They also invented the 360-degree circle, which was also subdivided into minutes and seconds. In addition, they used a standard unit of length that is believed to be 99.88 centimetres – almost exactly equivalent to the modern metre.

The Sumerians’/Babylonians’ double-kush of 99.88 centimetres was reproduced by means of swinging a pendulum with a beat of one second 240 times to define a unit of time they called a ‘gesh’.

The Sumerians/Babylonians also developed an elaborate system of ritual timekeeping based on the movements of the Moon with 360 days per year, 360 hours per month and 360 gesh (240 seconds) per day.

From their unit of length the Sumerians derived units of weight and capacity that are incredibly close to the kilo and the litre. To all intents and purposes it is fair to say that the metric system was in use more than 3,000 years before the French invented it.

¹
Stecchini, L. C.:
www.metrum.org/measures/index.htm

²
Fryman-Kensky:
In the Wake of the Goddesses.
Fawcet Columbine, New York, 1992.

The age of great Megalithic building began before 3000
BC
and many of the major sites had been abandoned by the middle of the 3rd century
BC
. The last remnants of the Megalithic builders seem to have disappeared by about 1500
BC
, which means that they certainly overlapped with the Minoan culture that clearly used the same 366 method of geometry. From the Iron Age until the rise of the Roman Empire, much of what is now the British Isles and France was inhabited by the Celts. There is no record of whether the Celts inherited any of the weights and measures that had been used by the Megalithic builders but it is not unreasonable to consider that the old units may have survived in an original or in a modified form.

Only with the spread of the Roman Empire did these far western regions of Europe gain a recognizable uniformity in terms of weights and measures. Rome held sway over Gaul (France) and Britain until the beginning of the 6th century
AD
when the Roman legions were recalled and the area fell into that historically murky period known as the ‘Dark Ages’. The withdrawal of the legions led to a power vacuum in both Britain and Gaul which, through the peculiar set of circumstances prevailing, gave way to feudalism, a system under which international trade was not especially desired or encouraged. However, if any country was going to prosper and grow strong, a degree of cross-border cooperation was inevitable. The process was helped somewhat by the development of important sites of commerce, particularly in the area of northern France which eventually became known as Champagne.

In the 12th and 13th centuries the Champagne fairs, held regularly in specific towns and cities in the region, positively encouraged merchants from all over Europe and beyond to exchange goods. These were huge trade fairs (rather than markets for consumers) that were held under the authority of the dukes of Champagne and new, or apparently new weights and measures appeared at this time. Many British people will be surprised to learn that their much-loved pound and ounce made their first known appearance as French units at these fairs.

It is certain that both units of length and weight were created deliberately to serve the fairs in an attempt to offer common measures that everyone could understand and use without confusion. With the gradual demise in the importance of the fairs and with so much fighting taking place between the emerging nation states of the region, units of length and weight often became a strictly local matter, though frequently with underlying aspects of the old Roman system. Britain struggled but somehow managed with a seemingly incomprehensible muddle of different units, though the country we now know as France was in an even worse state.

Prior to the early 14th century, France was a series of different states which had not been united since Roman times. These were only welded together again as a result of conquests and dynastic unions resulting in virtual chaos, with a wealth of different length, weight and volume unit names and sizes existing simultaneously across the new country. Matters were made even more complicated by the fact that some units retained a common name in different regions even though they differed in size. The chaos continued until some new data on the circumference of the Earth was published in 1670 by Jean Picard, a priest and an astronomer living in La Flèche. Picard accurately assessed the polar circumference of the Earth using the distance from Sourdon near Amiens, to Malvoisine south of Paris, as his test area. This gave another priest an inspired thought.

Father Gabriel Mouton of St Paul’s Church in Lyon put forward the suggestion that France should design a completely original set of decimalized weights and measures based upon an agreed fraction of the length of one minute of arc of the newly-measured polar circumference of the planet. The idea immediately caught the imagination of leading thinkers, but Picard did not agree with Mouton’s suggestion for the means of devising a new linear measure. Instead, together with astronomer Ole Römer (a distinguished scientist from Copenhagen who spent long periods in France and Germany), Picard proposed that the new unit of linear length upon which everything else could be based, should be precisely the length of a pendulum with a beat of one second of time.

The concept of a ‘seconds pendulum’ had been first identified by Galileo earlier in the same century when he became the first recorded European to actively experiment with pendulums, though it was left to the Englishman Isaac Newton (1643–1727) to later establish correct dimensions for the seconds pendulum. The device had a particular fascination for Newton, who experimented extensively in all matters pertaining to gravity. Newton had calculated that a freely-swinging pendulum, at a location of 45 degrees latitude, with a beat of exactly 1 second, would measure 39.14912 inches in length which was correct to within one twenty-five thousandth of a second. (While this is all of great historical interest we demonstrated in the last chapter that the Sumerians had achieved all these objectives some 3,500 years earlier.)