Tag: Euan MacKie

Dun Torcuill: The Broch that Modelled the World

image above courtesy Marc Calhoun


Script

This video introduces an article on a Scottish iron-age stone tower or brock which encoded the size of the Earth. 

You can view the full article on sacred dot number sciences dot org, searching for BROCK, spelt B R O C H.

In the picture above [1] the inner profile of the thick-walled Iron-Age broch of Dun Torceill is the only elliptical example, almost every other broch having a circular inner court.

Torceill’s essential data was reported by Euan MacKie in 1977 [2]: The inner chamber of the broch is an ellipse with axes nearly 23:25 (and not 14:15 as proposed by Mackie).

The actual ratio directly generates a metrological difference, between the major and minor axis lengths, of 63/20 feet. When multiplied by the broch’s 40-foot major axis, this π-like yard creates a length of 126 feet which, multiplied again by π as 22/7, the simplest accurate approximation to the π ratio, between a diameter and circumference of a circle, as used in the ancient and prehistoric periods., generates 396 feet. If each of these feet represented ten miles, this number is an accurate approximation to the mean radius of the Earth, were it a sphere.

If we take the size of the moon in that model, as being 3/11 of 396 feet this would give a circle radius 108 feet and one can see that, using the moon, the outer perimeter of the brock was probably elliptical too.

Thank you for watching.

The Broch that Modelled the Earth

Summary

In the picture above [1] the inner profile of the thick-walled Iron-Age broch of Dun Torceill is the only elliptical example, almost every other broch having a circular inner court. Torceill’s essential data was reported by Euan MacKie in 1977 [2]: The inner chamber of the broch is an ellipse with axes nearly 23:25 (and not 14:15). The actual ratio directly generates a metrological difference, between the major and minor axis lengths, of 63/20 feet. When multiplied by the broch’s 40-foot major axis, this π-like yard creates a length of 126 feet which, multiplied again by π as 22/7, generates 396 feet. If each of these feet represented ten miles, this number is an accurate approximation to the mean radius of the Earth, were it a sphere.

The two ratios involved, 22/7 and 63/20, each an approximation to π, become 9.9 (99/100) when they are multiplied together, as an approximation to π squared.  Figure 1 shows that these two ratios, if 22/7 differently used as its reciprocal 7/22, also generates the ratio between the mean and polar radii of the Earth, since 63/20 x 7/22 = 441/440. The ancient Meridian length could be calculated from 396 when multiplied by using the most accurate rational π noted by Fibonacci as 864/275. The 396 units, of 10 miles per foot, was a practical distance to have realized in the megalithic without arithmetic, to store the 3960 mile mean radius of the earth, since the mile of 5280 feet is 4/3 of 3960; that is, 396 x 4/3 equals 528, implying that this model was conceived of within a decimal framework but without the base-10 positional notation of arithmetic. We show that the methods of calculation used can only have seen numbers-as-lengths as being composed of factors of just the first five prime numbers {2 3 5 7 11} and that this limitation upon numbers created a metrology in which fractional units of measure could manipulate lengths to multiply and divide them through addition and subtraction of the powers of these primes.

Marc Calhoun’s picture from the Island (picture from his blog)

Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Introduction.
  3. Main Thesis.
  4. Pre-arithmetic Calculation using Powers of {2 3 5 7 11}
  5. Combining Prime Number Composites.
  6. Appendix 1 Extract from Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain.
  7. Appendix 2: Preface: The Metrology of the Brochs.
  8. Metrological Bibliography.
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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.

Read 145 times by September 2012 10:28

Durrington Walls and its massive circle of Pits

Recent analysis of animal bones within Durrington Walls indicated, to the archaeologists involved, that people had travelled there from all over the British mainland, along with animals then eaten inside the henge[1]. But what would these people be doing there? It had earlier been suggested that an elite responsible for building Stonehenge lived in a wooden roundhouse within the henge ([2] see figure 1). So, people may have come from elsewhere to help the building works now found between Stonehenge and Avebury.

Figure 1 Reconstruction of the likely roundhouses within the Durrington henge, based on post-hole evidence [2]

More recently, pits have been found [3] within a circular strip that I notice lies between 3168 feet and 4038 feet from Durrington Walls, a boundary 864 feet wide. The pits may contain the material remains of the building elite and perhaps of those workers who died, functioning like nearby barrows but vertically.

This post aims to explain why this might have been done according to a significant geometrical pattern. In the megalithic, numbers played an active role and this perhaps inspired the myth of Atlantis recorded by Plato – the classical Greek writer who transmitted the ancient notion that numbers had a causative role in forming the “world soul”, rather than our usage for number: a means to quantify things within civilized societies or laws of nature.

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