Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (20 page)

Poor Eratosthenes clearly did not realize that the Olympian foot only existed because someone, maybe thousands of years before him, had measured the size of the Earth and divided it into precisely 129,600,000 parts. He had then innocently and painstakingly reverse-engineered it with his own experiment. It is clear that the Greek culture had already lost contact with the prehistoric origins of the knowledge it possessed, and today history textbooks erroneously describe Eratosthenes as being the first man to measure the globe.

The only major truly ancient civilization we had not yet looked at in detail was that of the Egyptians. We knew the Egyptian cubit was somewhat different to the Mesopotamian kush, so we did not really expect to find significant correspondences with our existing research. How wrong we were.

Having already established that 1,000 Minoan feet are the same as 366 Megalithic Yards, we found that the much later Olympian foot created by the Greeks (30.861 centimetres) is also related. To an accuracy of an incredible 99.99 per cent, a distance of 366 Minoan feet is the same as 360 Greek feet.

This means that there are 100 Greek feet in a second of arc of the Earth’s polar circumference and 360,000 in a single degree.

¹
New York Public Library:
Science Desk Reference.
Macmillan, New York, 1995.

²
The Book of Enoch: Chapters 72–82

³
Vermes, G.: The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1QapGen. Penguin, London, 1998.

⁴
Microsoft® Encarta®, Premium Suite 2003. the next calculation left us staring at the calculator in disbelief. We were stunned to find that we all travel on our yearly journey at speed of 60,000 kush per second. As a further level of strangeness this speed is a neat one ten-thousandth of the speed of light.

⁵
Phillips,
G.: Act of God.
Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1998.

The standard view of history is based on the assumption that the further back in time one looks, the greater will be the disorganization. We have found that the opposite is the case – the deeper we peer into the past the greater the harmony. Against a lifetime of conventional training this sounds counterintuitive. It would take a brave academic to challenge the standard paradigm of history and it has been largely left to interested amateurs such as Graham Hancock or Robert Temple (writers and broadcasters) to champion alternative worldviews. Hancock and Temple and others like them are working at the fringes of academic acceptability by looking for new ways to interpret how humanity might have arrived at its present position. Inevitably these people make mistakes, sometimes sizable ones, which give their opponents a stick with which to beat them. Whether Graham Hancock is correct in his assertion that archaeological records indicate the existence of a lost, ancient, global civilization we cannot say, but we are aware that our own, unrelated research is now pointing very powerfully in that direction.

It is now certain that people in the distant past were a great deal cleverer than anyone has so far asumed. However, the process of unravelling the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles were ignorant and unsophisticated has taken decades, and the battle still lumbers on. More than 40 years ago radio astronomer Professor Gerald Hawkins (late Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Boston University, Massachusetts) used a computer to show that the stones and other archaeological features at Stonehenge formed a pattern of alignments with 12 major lunar and solar events, suggesting that it was used as a Neolithic observatory and astronomical calendar. He identified 165 key points in the complex and found that many were strongly correlated with the rising and setting positions of the Sun and Moon over an 18.03-year cycle. He argued that Stonehenge had once allowed the users to predict eclipses of the Moon as well as the positions of the Sun and Moon at the summer and winter solstices.

Hawkins published his findings in an article, ‘Stonehenge Decoded’, in the journal
Nature
in 1963 and in a book of the same title two years later. But mainstream archaeologists could not accept the findings because their previous evidence had indicated that the level of sophistication suggested by Hawkins’s theory was too advanced for a site of this date. Instead of considering changing their worldview to accommodate new evidence, the natural reaction of the experts was to protect their old ideas by ignoring Hawkins’s material or immediately seeking reasons to fault it.

Archaeologists have an absolutely vital role in the academic world and we certainly do not wish to be disrespectful regarding the excellent work they put into understanding past cultures – but is it coincidence that some of the really big breakthroughs have come from people outside the discipline? This seems particularly true when one considers that Hawkins was a radio astronomer and Alexander Thom an engineer.

Standard archaeology is highly compartmentalized and connections between cultures divided by time or geography are not approved of without written contemporary evidence or crossover physical artefacts. The only holistic study of which we are aware is that relating to the development of language, which maps out a tree of connections for world languages as they appear now. Today, the people of the world speak more than 6,000 distinct languages, which are grouped into 11 main language families. The Indo-European family represents about 1.6 billion people and includes most of the languages of Europe and northern India, Australia, the United States and parts of South America.

In the 18th century the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested that all ancient and modern languages diverged from a single protolanguage. This idea, called ‘monogenesis’, sounds very odd but it is taken very seriously by many leading scholars. Anthropologist and writer Richard Rudgely has said the consequences of acknowledging a root language are mind-boggling. Such a language must be more that 10,000 years old and probably nearer to 15,000 years old. It is amazing that correspondences in language exist as far afield as the deserts of southern Africa, the Amazon rainforest, the Arctic and Europe. Linguist and writer Merrit Ruhlen has called the ancient original language, ‘Proto-Global’.
¹

Even academics as revered as Lord Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, have concluded that every group of humans in the world once spoke the same language – and that the date of this convergence was as recent as 15,000 years ago. These experts follow the patterns of words that are shared by peoples who have no known connection, yet they stop short of asking how such a thing can be true. Surely, if everyone spoke the same language there must have been a high level of regular contact between peoples around the world, at a time when, in the modern comprehension of prehistory, this would have been impossible?

We have taken a similar approach to that used for tracing the origin of language, but using measurements, astronomical methodologies and geometry instead of words, and these indicate a convergence something over 5,000 years ago.

We had built on Thom’s invaluable work to detect strong links in the astronomy-based measurement systems of the Megalithic people of the region centred on the British Isles with the Minoans on Crete, and the Sumerians of present-day Iraq and Kuwait. We now wondered whether the same principles that we had come to call the ‘Great Underlying Principle’ had been used elsewhere around the world.

We turned first to India, where there was a unit of measurement known as the ‘gaz’, the origins of which are no longer known. It was regularly used in the planning and building of sacred structures, such as temples as far back in time as the Indus Valley Civilization which is usually dated as 2800–1750
BC
. Also known as the Harappa culture, it covered a triangular area of some half a million square miles centred on the Indus River that runs from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. The time frame of this culture means that it was at its height at about the same time as the Ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians, but a little later than the Megalithic people. It also had a substantial overlap with the Minoan culture.

The gaz was still in use at the time British rule was imposed on India in 1765. To save the British any ‘confusion’ the gaz was later standardized to match the British yard, but early records suggest that it had originally measured something closer to 33 inches – which is 83.82 centimetres.
²
This approximate length would bring it extremely close to the Megalithic Yard, which is 82.96656 centimetres. More recent excavations have brought to light a number of measures, one of which is the ‘Indus inch’. This was 3.35 centimetres, and there were 25 Indus inches to the gaz – suggesting a length of 83.75 centimetres, which is even closer to the definition of the Megalithic Yard. This was interesting, but this near fit could easily be a coincidence and we were not aware of any further evidence to support a link, so it may or may not be connected to the Megalithic system. However, just a few weeks later an article appeared in the magazine
Scientific American
which rekindled our interest in the Harappan culture. It stated that excavations at one of the oldest sites had shown how an economic culture had existed during the Kot Dijian Period (2800–2600
BC).
A particularly interesting artefact was a tiny limestone cube that scientists identified as a weight, possibly used for tax or tribute purposes.
³
It weighed 1.13 grams, which directly related it to a series of standard weights used in later Indus valley cities. The interesting point to us was that this weight is one 400th of an imperial pound to a high degree of mathematical exactitude. No-one else would have considered trying to test for a match with modern units of weight because there is no known reason to even suspect that there could be a relationship. However, our research had taught us that the further back one looks the stronger the likelihood of a connection to the Great Underlying Principle.

We looked up the official website associated with the archaeology of the Harappan sites. It showed a picture of such stone cubes arranged in size order and the caption read:

‘… the most common weight is approximately 13.7 grams, which is in the 16th ratio. In the large weights the system becomes a decimal increase where the largest weight is 100 times the weight of the 16th ratio…’
⁴

It follows that this ‘largest weight’ referred to is 1.37 kilograms – which just happens to be three imperial pounds to a great level of accuracy.

We had long since identified that the pound weight can be derived from a one-tenth Megalithic Yard cube and here we see a system that has small weights of one four-hundredth of a pound and large ones which are 1200 times that amount, at three pounds. Coincidence? Possibly – but it seems very unlikely when the old unit of length known as the gaz is brought back into the picture. There is no evidence that we are aware of that gives a precise measure for the gaz but we know it was very close to the Megalithic Yard, which was still in use in Britain when the earliest Indus Valley cities were established. Could international communications have been so advanced as to allow a southern Asian culture to take its measurement system from the Megalithic builders of the western fringes of Europe? Or is it more likely that all the ancient cultures we have looked at had the same teachers? Could an otherwise unknown group of super-scientists, that we have dubbed ‘Civilization One’ have trained indigenous peoples around the world to accelerate global civilization. It is still very speculative but it is a very convincing solution to a problem that sounds odd to conventionalist ears, even though it is not in the least improbable, let alone impossible. We make no apology for sharing such a radical, even heretical, thought.

Vocalizing these ideas would be highly dangerous for any academic who values their career and peer-group esteem. In academia, only the world of quantum physics has learned that reality is far, far stranger than any science fiction writer could ever imagine.