Category: Prehistoric

5000-2000 BC: Quantifying astronomical time and geophysical space, using alignment, counting and geometry.

Harmonic Astronomy within Seascale Flattened Circle

first published in July 2018

Only two type-D stone circles (see figure 3) are known to exist, called Roughtor (in Cornwall) and Seascale (in Cumbria). Seascale is assessed below, for the potential this type of flattened circle had to provide megalithic astronomers with a calendrical observatory. Seascale could also have modelled the harmonic ratios of the visible outer planets relative to the lunar year. Flattened to the north, Seascale now faces Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant (figure 1).


Figure 1 Seascale type-D flattened circle and neighbouring nuclear facility.
photo: Barry Teague

Stone Age astronomical monuments went through a series of evolutionary phases: in Britain c. 3000 BC, stone circles became widespread until the Late Bronze Age c. 1500 BC. These stone circles manifest aspects of Late Stone Age art (10,000 – 4500 BC) seen in some of its geometrical and symbolic forms, in particular as calendrical day tallies scored on bones. In pre-literate societies, visual art takes on an objective technical function, especially when focussed upon time and the cyclic phenomena observed within time. The precedent for Britain’s stone circle culture is that of Brittany, around Carnac in the south, from where Megalithic Ireland, England and Wales probably got their own megalithic culture.

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Number Symbolism at Table des Marchands

Table des Marchands, a dolmen at Lochmariaquer, can explain how the Megalithic came to factorise 945 days as 32 lunar months by looking at the properties of the numbers three, four and five. At that latitude, the solstice angle of the sun on the horizon shone along the 5-side of a 3-4-5 triangle to east and west, seen clearly at the Crucuno Rectangle [post2post id=”237″].

Before numbers were individually notated (as with our 3, 4 and 5 rather than |||, |||| and |||||) and given positional notation (like our decimal seen in 945 and 27), numbers were lengths or marks and, when marks are compared to accurately measured lengths measured out in inches, feet, yards, etc. then each vertical mark would naturally have represented a single unit of length. This has not been appreciated as having been behind marks like the cuneiform for ONE; that it probably meant “one unit of length”.


Figure 1 The end and cap stone inside the dolmen Table des Marchands in which the elementary numbers in columns and rows perhaps inspired its attribution to the accounts of merchants
Locmariaquer (Morbihan, Bretagne, France) : la Table des Marchand, interieur.
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Megalithic application of numeric time differences

Natural time periods between celestial phenomena hold powerful insights into the numerical structure of time, insights which enabled the megalith builders to access an explanation of the world unlike our own. When looking at two similarly-long time-periods, the megalithic focussed on the difference between them, these causing the two periods to slide in and out of phase, generating a longer period in which the two celestial bodies exhibit a complete ensemble of variation, in their relationship to each other. This slippage of phase between celestial periods holds a pattern purely based upon number, hidden from the casual observer who does not study them in this way. Such numerical patterns are only fully revealed through counting time and analysing the difference between periods numerically.

For example, the solar year is longer than the lunar year by 10 and 7/8 days (10.875 days) and three solar years are longer than three lunar years by three times 10.875 days, that is by 32 and 5/8th days (32.625 days), which is 32/29 of a single lunar month of 29.53 days.

The earliest and only explicit evidence for such a three year count has been found at Le Manio’s Quadrilateral near Carnac (circa 4,000 BCE in Brittany, France) used the inches we still use to count days, a “day-inch” unit then widespread throughout later megalithic monuments and still our inch, 1/12 of the foot [Heath & Heath. 2011]. The solar-lunar difference found there over three years was 32.625 day-inches, is probably the origin of the unit we call the megalithic yard and the megalith builders appear to have adopted this differential length, between a day-inch count over three lunar and solar years, in building many later monuments.


Figure 1 (in plan above) The monumentalising of a three-year day inch count at Le Manio as a right triangle based upon its southern kerb (in profile below), automatically generating the megalithic yard.
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Lunar Counting from Crucuno Dolmen to its Rectangle

A fuller treatment of this article can now be found in
Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels (2021).

Figure 1 The entrance of Crucuno’s cromlech, which opens to the south-east
[Summer Solstice, 2007]

It is not immediately obvious the Crucuno dolmen (figure 1) faces the Crucuno rectangle about 1100 feet to the east. The role of dolmen appears to be to mark the beginning of a count. At Carnac’s Alignments there are large cromlechs initiating and terminating the stone rows which, more explicitly, appear like counts. The only (surviving) intermediate stone lies 216 feet from the dolmen, within a garden and hard-up to another building, as with the dolmen (see figure 2). This length is interesting since it is twice the longest inner dimension of the Crucuno rectangle, implying that lessons learned in interpreting the rectangle might usefully apply when interpreting the distance at which this outlier was placed from the dolmen. Most obviously, the rectangle is 4 x 27 feet wide and so the outlier is 8 x 27 feet from the dolmen.

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Educating Megalith Builders at Crucuno rectangle

Around Carnac in Brittany the land is peppered with uniquely-formed megalithic designs. In contrast, Great Britain’s surviving monuments are largely standing stones and stone circles. One might explain this as early experimentation at Carnac followed by a well-organised set of methods and means in Britain. What these experiments near Carnac were concerned with is contentious, there being no appetite, in many parts of society, for a prehistory of high-achieving geometers and exact scientists. Part of the problem is that pioneers interpreting monuments are themselves hampered by their own preferences. Once Alexander Thom had found the megalithic yard as a likely building unit, he tended to use that measure to the exclusion of other known metrological systems (see A.E. Berriman’s Historical Metrology. Similarly, John Neal’s breakthrough in All Done With Mirrors, having found the foot we still use to be the cornerstone of ancient metrology, led to his ambivalent relationship to the megalithic yard. Neal’s interpretation of the Crucuno rectangle employs a highly variable set of megalithic yards, perhaps missing the simpler point, that his foot-based metrology is supported as present within the dimensions of the Crucuno rectangle; said by Thom to be a “symbolic observatory” of the sun: this monument was an educational device, in which Neal finds the geometry of “squaring the circle” which, as we see later, was probably the Rectangle’s main metrological meaning.


Figure 1 Alexander Thom’s survey of Crucuno Rectangle by Alexander Thom, see MRBB, 1978,   19   & 175-176
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Counting lunar eclipses using the Phaistos Disk

Figure 1. The location of Phaistos Palace atop a commanding hill in the middle of the fertile Massara valley in southern Crete. The Phaistos Disk was discovered in 1908 in chamber 8 of the northeast wing of the “Old Palace” (pre-1700 BCE) as per above diagram inserted from Balistier, 2000, 5.

This paper* concerns itself with a unique fired-clay disk, found by Luigi Pernier in 1908 within the Minoan “palace” of Phaistos (aka Faistos), on the Greek island of Crete. Called the Phaistos Disk, its purpose or meaning has been interpreted many times, largely seen as either (a) a double-sided text in the repeated form of a spiral and outer circle written using an unknown pictographic language stamped in the clay or (b) as an astronomical device, record or handy reference. We provide a calendric interpretation based on the simplest lunar calendars known to apply in Minoan times, finding the Disk to be (a) an elegant solution to predicting repeated eclipses within the Saros period and (b) an observation that the Metonic is just one lunar year longer, and true to the context of the Minoan culture of that period.

*First Published on 26 May 2017

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