Geometry and Metrology – Page 7 – Sacred Number Sciences

Geometry 3: Making a circle from a counted length

The number of days in four years is a whole number of 1461 days if one approximates the solar year to 365¼ days. This number is found across the Le Manio Quadrilateral (point N to J) using a small counting unit, the “day-inch”, exactly the same length as the present day inch. It is an important reuse of a four-year count to be able to draw a circle of 1461 days so that this period of four years can become a ouroboros snake that eats its own tale because then, counting can be continuous beyond 1461 days. This number also permits the solar year to be counted in quarter days; modelling the sun’s motion within the Zodiac by shifting a sun marker four inches every day.

Figure 1 How a square of side length 11 will equal the perimeter of a circle of diameter 14

Preface: The Metrology of the Brochs

feature picture: Broch of Mousa. The broch on the island of Mousa is the best-preserved of the many brochs in northern Scotland. It is thought to be some 2000 years old
credit: Anne Burgess / Broch of Mousa / CC BY-SA 2.0

I wrote this preface for Euan MacKie who had resurrected his work on measures found within the brochs of Scotland. Euan was almost a lone voice in support of Alexander Thom’s work on metrology in the megalithic, and also the long distance alignments in the Western Isles of Scotland. When he met John Neal at the latter lecture in Glasgow, at which I was present, they appear to have entered into a review of the data and John Neal came back with an interesting theory which would make a full range of historic measures to have been employed in one area of northern Scotand, in the Iron Age. I sent Euan a summary of what ancient metrology appeared to be as a system of ratios and why Neal’s finding within MacKie’s data would be important. It became the preface for the article called The Roundhouses, Brochs and Wheelhouses of Atlantic Scotland c.700 BC-AD 500: Orkney and Shetland Isles Pt. 1: Architecture and Material Culture (British Archaeological Reports British Series) which I have recovered from a partial proof copy.

Preface

by Richard Heath

John Neal has demonstrated elsewhere [All Done With Mirrors, John Neal, 2000] that ancient metrology was based upon a “backbone” of just a few modules that each related as simple rational fractions to the “English” Foot. Thus a Persian foot was, at its root value, 21/20 English feet, the Royal foot 8/7 such feet, the Roman, 24/25 feet and so on. By this means, one foot allows the others to be generated from it.

These modules each had a set of identical variations within, based on one or more applications of just two fractions, Ratio A = 176/175 and Ratio B = 441/440. By this means ail the known historical variations of a given type of foot can be accounted for, in a table of lengths with ratio A acting horizontally and ratio B vertically, between adjacent measures.

In the context of what follows, this means that each of the differently-sized brochs analysed by Neal appear to have used a foot from one or other of these ancient modules, in one of its known variations. That is, the broch builders seem to have chosen a different unit of measure rather than a différent measurement, as we would today, when building a differently sized building. Furthermore, these brochs appear to have been based upon the prototypical yet accurate approximation to pi of 22/7, so that – providing the broch diameter would divide by seven using the chosen module – then the perimeter would automatically divide into 22 whole parts.

Thus, John Neal’s discovery that broch diameters divide by seven using a wide range of ancient measures implies that the broch builders had – (a) inherited the original system of ancient measures with its rational interrelations between modules and variations within these, from which they could choose, to suit a required overall size of circular building, often the foundations available: (b) were practicing a design concept found in the construction of stone circles during the Neolithic period.

These measures, used in the brochs, are not often found elsewhere in Britain, but are historically associated with locations hundreds if not thousands of miles distant. This suggests that the historical identification of such measures is only a record of the late use of certain modules in different regions, after the system as a whole had finally been forgotten, sometime after the brochs were constructed.

Such conclusions, if correct, are of such a fundamental character that they present a compelling case for ancient metrology and its forensic power within the archaeology of ancient building techniques.

—x—

Throughout Scotland and the Scottish islands there are in excess of 200 major broch sites. The following analysis is taken from, what I believe to be, the accurately measured inner diameters of 49 of them as supplied by Professor Euan MacKie. The modules are expressed in English feet although the original measurements were taken in metres and converted to feet at the rate of 3.2808427 feet to the metre. The range of diameters extends from the smallest, at Mousa, 18.897654ft, to the greatest at Oxtrow at 44.816311ft. John Neal’s original work on this can be found in this article, from this website’s earlier incarnation which also included a version of Appendix 2 of Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization – soon also to be added, for reference.

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Sacred Number and the Lords of Time

Back Cover

ANCIENT MYSTERIES

“Heath has done a superb job of collating his own work on the subject of megaliths with the objective views of many other researchers in the field. I therefore do not merely recommend reading this book but can state unequivocally it is a must read.”
–John Neal, British metrologist and researcher and author of Measuring the Megaliths and The Structure of Metrology

“In Sacred Number and the Lords of Time we have an important explanation of how megalithic science was developed. This book is a long-overdue wakeup call to a modern culture that has abandoned this fully developed and astonishingly rich prehistoric model of the physical world. The truth is now out.”
–Robin Heath, coauthor of The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth and author of Sun, Moon and Earth

A Pyramidion for the Great Pyramid

image: By 1200 BC, the end of the Bronze Age, the Egyptian map of the world (above) showed nine bows or latitudes, numbers 4 to 9 including the Nile Delta, Delphi, Southern Britain and Iceland, a map based on an ancient geodetic survey.

This post explores a pyramidion, now lost, which exceeded the apex height of the pyramid, so as to model the different reference latitudes established by geodetic surveys and encoded within their metrology and the Great Pyramid (by 2500 BC). This pyramidion would have sat on the flat top of the pyramid, 480 feet above the base of the pyramid.

In All Done With Mirrors, John Neal described how the full height of the pyramid, reaching to its natural apex, would have been just over 481 feet. Most pyramids probably had a pyramidion since a number have been found elsewhere that repeat aspects of or have a name carved on them, of a specific pyramid. Sitting on their apex, they often repeat the form of the larger pyramid, and are scale models of a specific pyramid. In the case of the Great Pyramid, exactly 441th of its natural apex is missing, and this is likely to be because a pyramidion once stood on the flat top the actual pyramid.

Recalibrating the Pyramid of Giza

Once the actual height (480 feet) and actual southern base length (756 feet) are multiplied, the length of the 11th degree of latitude (Ethiopia) emerges, in English feet, as 362880 feet. However, in the numeracy of the 3rd millennium BC, a regular number would be used. In the last post, it was noted that John Neal’s discovery of such rectangular numbers to define degrees of latitude, multiplied the pyramid’s pointed height (481.09 feet) by the southern base length (756 feet) to achieve the length of the Nile Delta degree of latitude and, repeating Neal’s diagram relating the key latitudinal degrees of the ancient Model as figure 1, the Ethiopian degree is 440/441 of the Nile Delta degree. As shown above, the length of the 756 foot southern base is changed, when re-measured in the latitudinal feet for Ethiopia; it becomes the harmonic limit of 720 feet of 1.05 feet – normally called the root Persian foot.

Geometry 2: Maintaining integers using fractions

understanding the megalithic: circular structures: part 2

The megalithic sought integer lengths because they lacked the arithmetic of later millennia. So how did they deal with numbers? There is plenty of evidence in their early monuments that today’s inch and foot already existed and that these, and other units of measure, were used to count days or months. From this, numbers came to be known by their length in inches and later on as feet, and longer lengths like a fathom of five feet, the cubit of 3/2 feet and, larger still, furlongs and miles – to name only a few.

So megalithic numeracy was primarily associated with lengths, a system we call metrology. Having metrology but not arithmetic, the integer solutions to problems became a necessity. Incidentally, it was because of their metrological numeracy that the megalithic chanced upon a rich seam of astronomical meaning within the geocentric time world that surrounds us, a seam well-nigh invisible to modern science. Their storing of numbers as lengths also led to their application to the properties geometrical structures have, to replicate what arithmetic and trigonometry do, by using right triangles and a system of fractional measures of a foot (see later lesson – to come). In what follows, for both simplicity and veracity, we assume that π was too abstract for the megalithic, since they first used radius ropes to create circles, so that 2π was a more likely entity for them to have resolved.

Category: Geometry and Metrology

Geometry 3: Making a circle from a counted length

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