Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (8 page)

As Chris stopped to think about the calculations he realized that the gallon would have to fit the same way as the pint because there are eight pints to a gallon and a doubling of the side of a cube will create a capacity eight times larger. But this fact did not detract from the oddity because the imperial system is not known to be based on cubes. These results were odd in the extreme and all logic said that they had to be a coincidence. We had already learned not to dismiss any information simply because it does not fit our own preconceptions. So, instead of tossing the calculation in his office bin Chris picked up the phone and told Alan about the strange correspondence.

‘What?’Alan responded. ‘That’s crazy!’

‘I’m not saying there is a connection – it has to be a coincidence because the pint and the gallon as we know them today are medieval units at best, and they have probably been restandardized several times,’ Chris explained.

But he went on to suggest that we could not simply ignore the results, just because they seemed ridiculous. We should not rule out the possibility that there was some sort of oddball connection between the Megalithic Yard and the imperial measurements, and added, ‘Though I have no idea what it might be.’

We quickly established that the pint and the gallon had had a variety of values before the standardization of imperial units in the various British Weights and Measures Acts of the 19th century, so the correspondence with the Megalithic cube might not be meaningful. However, we looked at examples of the pint from earlier periods and found only small variations. One that was almost the same as the imperial pint dated from the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509) and checking this against the 4 Megalithic Inch cube showed that it was even closer than the modern pint. It was almost a perfect match, with a deviation of less than 1 part in 1,000. Closer still was the standard pint identified for the Exchequer of the British government in the year 1601 because it had an amazing correspondence with the 4 Megalithic Inch – being out by less than 1 part in 5,000. To all intents and purposes this Elizabethan pint and the volume of the Megalithic cube are the same thing.

The pint had turned out to be much older than we imagined and early examples show an almost incredible correspondence to our Megalithic cube. What it meant we didn’t know, but we agreed to accept the volumetric findings without judgement and continued to look at the subject in greater depth.

The next day Chris rang Alan again with some important news.

‘You know we agreed to look at this area of theoretical Megalithic volumes without self-imposed boundaries, don’t you?’

Alan had learned to anticipate Chris’s puzzlement or excitement.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘So what have you found now?’

‘Well, I thought for thoroughness I ought to consider the volumes of spheres with Megalithic dimensions in addition to the cubes. This sounds really crazy, and I want you to check this out, but I think we have a problem.’

‘What sort of problem?’ Alan wanted to know.

‘The problem of explaining the apparently impossible,’ said Chris. ‘I started by checking out spheres with diameters of 5, 10 and 20 Megalithic Inches and they also produce volumes that are quite close to the pint, one gallon and the bushel. The accuracy level isn’t quite as good as the cubes because the 5 MI sphere held 1.027 pints, which is still as close as anyone in the real world would ever need. But a quick check of the rules that govern the relationship between cubes and spheres revealed that to an accuracy of 99.256 per cent a cube with a side of 4 units will have the same volume as a sphere with a diameter of 5 units, which made the findings odd but mathematically understandable.’

Alan was intrigued but puzzled.

‘If there is no mystery about the pint sphere, why did you say you had to explain the impossible?’ he asked.

‘What I’ve told you so far is the easy part of this conversation, because my next test took me from the rather weird to the downright ridiculous. What do you think that a 6 MI and a 60 MI diameter sphere would hold in terms of weight of water?’

‘I can’t guess. What do they hold?’ Alan asked, with not a little impatience.

‘Well, the 6 MI sphere holds a litre and weighs a kilo, so the 60 MI sphere, 10 x 10 x 10 times as much, holds a cubic metre and weighs a metric tonne. And it’s incredibly accurate too.’

Alan laughed aloud down the phone.

‘Ha ha, very funny...’ He paused. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

‘No. You check it out, Alan. The numbers don’t lie. The fit is better than 99 per cent accurate and when I tested the same principles using modern inches and centimetres for the spheres, there were no meaningful results at all. Something truly weird is going on here.’

Alan ran through the calculations during the conversation and agreed that they were correct. The fact that units of Megalithic linear measurement so accurately produce modern imperial measures of capacity when cubed was a fascinating coincidence, but the spheres were something else altogether. For it to be a further massive coincidence seemed almost impossible, yet for there to be a connection seemed even more unlikely.

The possibility of a random event in this case seemed minute because the formula for finding the volume of a sphere (see Appendix 2) involves the concept of pi (π), which is the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. Pi is an irrational number (that is, one that cannot be expressed as a whole fraction) equal to 3.14159265359…, but the numbers after the decimal point apparently go on forever in a seemingly random stream of digits. This makes it very odd indeed that there could be a correspondence between the metric system and spheres that have Megalithic dimensions, not least because the metric system was not developed until the end of the 18th century!

At this point, we had two options: either to forget the whole matter as some bizarre chance event, or to continue investigating the whole area without passing judgement. We chose the latter course, managing to convince each other that the results might make sense with more evidence and the passage of time.

Alan started to wonder what substances the Megalithic people might have wanted to weigh if they had devised a system of weights and measures. He knew that it was within the bounds of the available technology of these people to create a square vessel to form a cube because sealed water containers had been found at Skara Brae. Having manufactured his own 4 x 4 x 4 MI cube the obvious first thought was grain, specifically barley and wheat. He managed to get hold of some seeds of ancient strains and began to conduct practical experiments with his ‘Megalithic pint cube’. He quickly discovered that all grains, whether barley, wheat or unpolished rice, behave in a very predictable way when poured into a cube container. The pointed, ellipsoid shape of the seeds causes them to occupy a volume that is 125 per cent that of the same weight of water, bearing in mind that the relative densities of water and seed are different. Alan filled his pint cube with barley grains as carefully as possible and then tipped them out onto the pan of a pair of scales to weigh the result. The barley grains weighed exactly one imperial pound!

Further experiments with an 8 x 8 x 8 MI cube filled with barley confirmed that it weighed 8 pounds and the 16 x 16 x 16 weighed 1 bushel – a known dry weight of 64 pounds.

This was truly incredible. A pint of water and a pound of grain both appeared to be derived from a cube with sides one tenth of a Megalithic Yard long.

Like everyone in our society, we have been taught that the pound and the pint are old units. However, nobody suggests these are ‘ancient’ units of measure, and we were also aware that standardization to precise current values of both the pound and the pint is a relatively recent event. Yet, if we put aside our own prejudices and looked at the evidence as an objective outsider might, we could see the conclusion staring us in the face. Stretching credibility, we could imagine what might have happened in Neolithic Britain.

At some point in the distant past when trade was developing, someone had created a system of weights and measures using the Megalithic Yard and Megalithic Inches as a starting point. Taking a length of one tenth of a Megalithic Yard as the internal dimension they carefully cut five thin pieces of slate and sealed the joints with fine clay. This innovator had then filled the cube with water until the meniscus was bowing at the rim. Next they poured off the water into a clay beaker and marked the water line on the inside to create a standard unit of liquid that just happens to be the same as an imperial pint. A further procedure was to fill the same cube with grain, gently patting the top to ensure that it was as level as possible within the cube. Our imaginary scientist then poured the grain onto a simple balance and chipped shavings from a stone on the opposite side until the scales were in equilibrium. This stone was thereafter a standard unit of weight that, once again, just happens to be the same as an imperial unit – the modern pound. This hypothetical early trader thus could have created accurate and repeatable units of liquid measure and dry weight simply by watching the motion of Venus crossing the heavens. What a magical thought!

If the pound and the pint were really Megalithic, the parallels between the Megalithic and the metric systems were quite astonishing. Both basic linear units were based on a subdivision of the polar circumference of the Earth, and both units of weight and capacity were defined by a cube with sides one tenth of the linear unit.

The pound and the pint could be recreated anywhere by anyone with the necessary knowledge to watch Venus travel across one 366th part of the sky and swing their pendulum the required number of times. By any reasonable definition these were divine units taken straight from heaven. There was no magic in this, just science, and what is more, science as pure and perfect as it would ever be need to be to create a springboard for civilization.

Now, we asked ourselves again, is all this perfection just chance? Any normal academic would have run away from these findings long before they had reached this point, in fear of so much ridicule from peers that it could spell the effective end of a career. But we are not constrained by such pressures and we had arrived at a point at which it would have been unreasonable to reject the thesis that had unfolded in front of us.

We now felt that we had almost accidentally opened an ancient door that was letting in some brilliant light. Despite the fact that we could not begin to think of a mechanism that could connect the Megalithic builders with modern units such as the pound and pint, and the kilogram and litre, we felt sure that there was something very special happening here.

The modern pound is correctly called the ‘avoirdupois pound’. It is believed to have been first introduced by the counts of Champagne for use at the fairs in 12th-century France. The meaning of the word ‘avoirdupois’ is somewhat obscure but it could relate to Old French and simply mean ‘objects of weight’. For more than 150 years, approximately 1140–1320, the fairs of Champagne constituted the international centre of European commerce, credit and currency exchange. Champagne was an agriculturally-rich region north and east of Paris, with a large and affluent population. The principal fairs were held in four cities in the southwest of the province: Lagny, Provins, Troyes, and Bar-sur-Aube.

The fairs were mostly wholesale operations with merchants buying and selling among themselves, rather than selling in a retail sense. They are further distinguished from normal markets by their great duration and by their infrequency. These great fairs lasted five weeks or more, and only the city of Troyes had more than one in a year. Many of the products traded were agricultural in nature and the term ‘avoirdupois’ is thought by some to have indicated anything sold by weight, such as spices, metals and dyes.

Where the counts of Champagne obtained their avoirdupois pound is not known and we agreed to return to this issue when we had gathered more information. Chris decided to look more closely at all modern measurements to see if there were any other notable correlations with Megalithic units. The imperial system is said to have evolved from disparate units from the past, involving body parts such as palmwidths, feet and outstretched arms. The standard imperial units of length still in use, or used in very recent times, form the following table:

As Chris looked at this now almost redundant list for the first time since he left primary school, he felt that the sequence appeared chaotic and that the rod stood out as being particularly odd at 5½ yards or 16½ feet. While the other units were neat integer numbers, the rod gave the impression of being alien – as though it had come from somewhere else. As he considered the rod (also known as a pole or a perch) he noticed that it was very close to six Megalithic Yards. In fact the rod is 6 Megalithic Yards to an accuracy of 99 per cent. Could it be, Chris wondered, that the rod was an ancient Megalithic unit? For thoroughness, he tried the rod as a potential metric unit and the surprises continued because it was 5 metres – to an accuracy greater than 99.5 per cent. Both of these could easily be a coincidence but the question that sprang to mind was, ‘Had the rod once been an ancient unit that was tidied up to equal 16.5 feet at some point in the relatively recent past?’ He could see a hypothetical underlying Megalithic pattern that would make a lot more sense: