John Neal _ Measuring the Megaliths _ Megalithomania Lecture 2006 _ (Audio)

Measuring the Megaliths, a presentation by John Neill. John delivered a lecture on ancient units of measure from Egyptian cubits to megalithic yards and the surveying of earth in antiquity. He is the top living authority on ancient units of measure, also known as metrology. Recorded live at Megalithomania Conference 2006. Okay, well, as you've just heard, the measurement system of ancient times is quite complex, but it's not complicated. It's all held together by a system of fractions, and it's all interconnected. I'll endeavour to explain exactly how. That's complicated, that's not. Yeah, this shows the simple integration of measure, and these were identified by Livio Catullo-Staccini, who's probably the most famous metrologist. He wrote the appendix to Peter Tomkin's Secret of the Great Pyramid, which is a wonderful book, very informative, and he came up with these measures which I've portrayed as so. Now, the Mycenaean there is related as 15 to 16 of the Roman, and also as 9 to 10 of the Greek, and of course, if you know anything about metrology, it's widely accepted that the Roman is 24 to 25 of the Greek. Well, I extended that slightly by the certain knowledge that the so-called Drusian or Belgic foot is 8 to 9 of the Roman, but then if you put them in this arrangement, the same as Staccini did, then you can see that it's also 5 to 6 of the Mycenaean. Now, and these are the accepted values at this rate, you know, and they're all very exactly defined. Staccini defined that from the grave circle of Mycenae, which is exactly 100 of those Mycenaean feet, and already we're beginning to see a certain pattern there, inasmuch as that we're getting square numbers, 3 3's are 9, 5 5's are 25, 3 3's are 9, 4 4's are 16, 5 5's are 25, 3 3's are 9, so we're seeing square numbers here, and this fact has escaped me. Now, you can extend these measures to all known values of feet. Now, I've used those measures there, where what's called what I've had to term, I've had to make up terminology that I've tried to make fit their character, you know, or their nature, but these are the same values, or not the same values, rather. My God, okay, one back. Now, here, I've identified all the feet that have the same classification value, which I've termed root, and this is how they are in terms of the English foot, which is how they're supposed to be read. Now, the Mycenaean, then, has become 0.9 feet. Now, the reason I've chosen this form of expression is I've taken all the feet that are related to the English foot, the English foot there, which is also a value of the Greek feet. The Greek feet are, in fact, the extensions of the English foot, because the English foot is one in a series, or the Greek English foot is one in a series of what turn into the Greek feet, and all the other feet have the same multiplications. I'll endeavour to explain this as we go along. Now, this is how they appear, as like common Greek, then, is 35 to 36 of the Greek English, and these two values, the English foot and the common Greek foot, are pivotal to the whole structure of metrology. They relate to each other as 35 to 36 here. Each of them relates to one or the other of the measures, and this will become clearer later, but this is the same method, two methods expressing the same data. This is the same as that, but I've arranged it, as you can see, was in the original table, as suggested by Sturgini, and this is how they all fit together, and you can see that the Greek and the English fit most of them. In fact, all of them are connected to those two. No one measure is connected to all of them by a move of a single fraction. Now, it's even more pronounced now, being expressed like this, that these square numbers are coming up, 64 there, 9 there, 16 there, and it was John Michel who picked this out, actually, he used my values I've got, and he composed another table, which I'll show you in a minute, but first of all, a little elaboration on this. There's only 12 feet shown there, and there, I thought, at the time, it's difficult to see from there, but I've cut some slats to be those slices, and here they all are, all those feet, and you can see there's not a great deal of difference between them. This is the feet of all nations, and you can see that pretty well, but there's not a great deal of difference in the lengths of the feet, and these are used as far apart as Mexico and Japan, and they all use the foot measure, but they vary for reasons which I'll endeavour to explain. Now, taking these square numbers that appeared so prevalently in the table, John Michel arranged them as so, but he used all the squares, you see, he used all the squares, and so forth, and he found that there were every foot related to a square number. Now, at the time we arranged those, there are in actual fact from here, which is the Russian foot, and you find it all over the place, you might just call it Russian, because they relate to the English or the common Greek foot by a single fraction, but this one, for instance, the one called Assyrian, is also Mycenaean, and they call it Italic, and Etruscan, and there's hundreds of names for these feet, which has made the subject seem terribly complicated, when in actual fact it's very straightforward. Now, certain numbers we hadn't identified, there's one, but it is six to seven of the Iberian foot, and the Iberian foot is one third of the Spanish fara, and the Spanish fara is still used in lots of South American countries, and it's still used in Spain by artisans, they've adopted the metre as the legitimate value now, there's the Iberian foot, yeah, and three of those is 2.724587, which is the exact value of the Spanish fara, and it's generated mechanically, you see how these numbers were generated mechanically, and they're only visible in terms of the English foot, if you express this in millimetres, it would be completely invisible, you wouldn't see a damn thing, but because the English foot is an ancient measure itself, and related to all the other ancient measurements in this manner, then ancient metrology is easily interpretable by using the English foot, if you use metres, you'd be absolutely lost, you wouldn't have a clue what was going on. Now, we've recently found this one, 1.066 feet, a reference to it, a very solid reference, it's a reference by Flinders Petrie, who was probably the most engaged archaeologist you could possibly come across, and a tireless worker, and very reliable with his information, and he found the cubic of that particular foot, one and a half times that is 19.2 inches, and he found that precise value being used in the temples of Persepolis, and I've since found references to the same length being used in Githium in Greece, there's a metrological block there, it's a capacity block, it has capacities cut into it, and reading the same article on the Githium block, it said that the cubic commonly used in Githium was 19.2 inches, well this is the foot of that cubic, because the cubic is one and a half feet, sometimes it's two feet. Now, you can see that's the smallest of what you might call the pes mathematica, and this is the longest pes mathematica, these are all generated mathematically, and they're all values that they would use as standards of a foot, now that there are lesser feet here, but they are also half cubits, that's half the one and a half feet cubic, so they're three quarters of a foot, that is 12 digits, so that's here, here, and here, and here, they're all half cubits, and they also use two feet cubits, a very common measurement, two feet, and the smallest one is 1.8 feet, therefore when you're dealing with metrology, anything less than 1.8 feet is a one and a half feet cubic, anything more than 1.8, you'd have to divide by two to see what was its foot, so it's very handy to familiarise with these tables. There's one more point I wanted to make there, the one that we've been talking about, the standard of Githium and Persepolis, is also still in common use, and it's on tape measures that are used by American carpenters, every 19.2 inches there's a diamond marked, and they had to find out where stud marks are, because five of those non-load walls that involve stud work, they would be slightly wider spaced, so every 19.2 inches, the same cubit is being used, but we don't have terminologies like cubits anymore, but we still use the identical lengths, now five of those, because the cubit of that is 1.6 feet, five of those is therefore eight feet, so they still have a very practical reason that these ancient units of measurement have, you know, there's very good reasons for them. All right, we'll move on a bit, if I can press it in the right direction, that is. Now then, this tells us something about the integration of measure that we've already noted. This is probably the most famous drawing of canonical man that's ever been produced, and it's an absolute work of genius, what Da Vinci was, wasn't he, we know that, but he's drawn in a six-foot square, well, if he's drawn in a six-foot square of canonical man, he's six feet tall, and there's no indication in Da Vinci's work that he's six English feet, but he's divided up into cubits, there is a cubit, one, two cubits, that's therefore three feet, there's the other cubit, there's the final cubit. Well, there's a standard method of drawing a circle of the same perimeter as a square, squaring the circle, it's an age-old problem, but here, if you draw a Pythagorean triangle there, of three, four, five, you draw the corresponding square, triangle the other side, and the centre of that circle to the centre of that would enable you to draw a circle with the same perimeter, and the ratio that gives you is 22 over 7, but the three, four, five triangle makes it 14, so it's a double unit there, so it's 14 by 44, you know, 14 in diameter, and 44 in perimeter from those numbers, and those numbers then would be half a foot, because that's one and a half feet, that's a three feet, that'll be three feet there, or three in number there, that'll be four in number, that's five in number, it's a basic Pythagorean triangle, and it's the building block of the universe, according to Pythagoras. So I've used that to illustrate another circle that you can draw, this is Da Vinci's circle here, and it's 24 Roman feet, if your man is six feet tall, and he's six feet one of the other feet, you know, then the circle that you draw from the age-old method that I've put here would be 25, 24 English feet, so 24 Roman feet is the circle that Da Vinci drew, and if you draw the other circle there, it's 24 English, and that shows, you know, very distinct geometrical relationship between canonical man and one of the methods of drawing squared circles. Now you have well-known measures here, that's 1.6363, it's therefore a cubit, a one and a half feet cubit, and it would be a foot of 1.090909, and this is a Sumerian foot, which is 24 to 25 of the Royal Egyptian, this then is a two feet cubit here, more of that when we get to Stonehenge, but this then is your basic megalithic yard, or one of the megalithic yards, it's 2.7272 feet, and this is a step, but we'll come to this a bit later on, and his foot, because the Royal Egyptian relates as eight to seven of the English, then his foot is exactly a half of a Royal Egyptian cubit, two feet would be 1.71428571, and you find this value of a Royal Egyptian cubit repeatedly used, so canonical man, his foot is one seventh of his overall height. Now all ancient measurements are subject to the same variations, now the variations go along the rows as 175 to 176, 175 to 176, 175 to 176, and I've had to give them some sort of terminology, and between the two rows it's 440 to 441, 440 to 441, 440 to 441, so on. Now this simple, from a root of number one, multiplied by these values, this would be 175 over 176 squared, or 176 over 175 squared, and this is a precise value, the one that Stacchini was using in the original small table that he drew, and that's exactly the most widely accepted value of the Greek foot. Now this is a geographic, a root geographic value, and this would be one 360 thousandths part of the degree on the earth, yeah, at 38 degrees latitude, which is around three sevenths of the distance from the equator to the pole. If you take, oh dear, I've gone back the wrong way again, now if you take, it's gone a bit, now then, if we take this then, the standard canonical, I've called this canonical because from a multiplication, from a root, 441 to 440, plus 175 to 176, there to there, is 1008, and that's a canonical number, and all of the foot values that you care to put in that position, any one of those foot values in that original table, all 19 of them, that come from the Bent Table, the mathematical feed, any one of them that you put there are all subject to these multiplications. But this is how, from a root of an English foot, they progress into values of the is the precise accepted value of a Greek foot, so it's a root geographic Greek foot. Now this particular one is of interest to us, is the exact value of the foot at our latitudes, 360 thousandths of the degree at our latitude, of the latitude of Stonehenge, is the 50 second parallel, and this is what our Royal Navy, at this value, reckoned was 360,000 to the degree, exactly that value, because our degree is 69.12 miles at this latitude, and 1 60th of that is the basis of the nautical mile, and it's 608.256, it's rounded for convenience to 6080, which is the nautical mile accepted in Britain, but its real value is 60802.56, and 1 60th of that then, to be one second of a degree, so 100 times that then, is the exact length of the stylobate of the Parthenon, and it also is, governs the measurements that we find in Stonehenge, and I'll show you exactly how when we get there. These are all the possible feet, and subject to the multiplication, so it's not very clear actually, but any one of these is a foot, and all of them have been noted at these precise values, but enough of them to give by inference the existence of the others, but these are all the possible foot values, that's all the root feet, and all the multiplications they're subject to, and like I say, it's complex, but it's not complicated, it's all very straightforward, but nobody's ever understood it before. I don't know why. Now I'll just run through a little bit about how scattered and seemingly complicated the evidence is. I found this in a book by which is a firm of a German sort of association, who were interested in ancient metrology, and this gives all the foot values of the cities of Germany at the time of metrication. Now that's not the way I'd present the evidence, you know, I had to go through, and this is my methods, I had to go through and pick out all of these millimetre measurements, convert them to feet to make some sense out of them, and then give them their classic, but when they're properly tabulated so that you can see what's going on, this is how they'd appear. So I've taken all of the feet of the same value that I found used over Germany, then I've put the cities where that feet was used, where that particular value of the foot was used, and these particular values of the foot, that they're only for administrative purposes, it's for taxing, tithing, regulation, they're bureaucratic measures, and they don't mean a thing, I mean say something's Egyptian, or Assyrian, or Sumerian, it's just the bureaucratic standard. All of these values were used by all cultures, and here you can see that this is the case. Here in Germany, we have there, we have the Belgic foot, and at that particular value, it's a root geographic value, and that's the precise value of the foot that we saw in the original table, and elaborated slightly on Stakini's simple one. And then we can see all these ancient measures, this is so-called common Greek, and this is the Olympic Greek, and this is the one that's used in original tables, you know, one of these millimetre values. Now these are the absolute values of these feet, taken from the mathematical construction of metrology, and this is how they've been expressed as millimetres by the bureaucracy of Germany when they went metric. Now they've rounded everything up, and you can see, you can see how narrowly they can form. They've just gone to the nearest millimetre, and this is so obviously the case. This is as a ditched ancient metrology, but when the metre was introduced, and this draws a hideous veil across the subject, expressing things in metres, you can't see what they are. So I've had to convert these all back into feet, to see where they fit. There's an interesting measure actually, I should have dealt with that earlier, I've called it, it was a foot I dismissed and identified. In fact I hadn't really run across it, but it emerged from Jean-Michel's construction of the square numbers connected with the development of measures, and then Hierodotus had claimed that the base of the Great Pyramid, 756 English feet, was 800 feet. So I've called it the same, because Hierodotus was from Samos, and as is so often the case, when you find one of these measures, you find it all over the place. And there it is in use in Germany, here, so it's in use in all these cities of Germany, Bremen, England, Osterwalden, Westfalen, Gothenburg, Köln and so on and so forth. When you finally accept something as a measure, it seems as if you then find plenty of evidence for it. I'll go on from there a bit. I did these tables in millimetres and things because I gave a talk to these expressed things in English feet, and they're supposed to be experts in metrology. It's a complete folly to look for a single standardised measurement in any building at all, any ancient building, be it a Greek temple, be it a megalithic ring. You won't find that they're designed around a single unit of measure. Now this is how all these different feet exactly fit Stonehenge, and this is just the feet. There is the lintel ring of Stonehenge, very significant because it's one thirtieth of the overall width, and there are 30 little stones around. It's a metrological dream, a metrologist's paradise, Stonehenge. And this, of course, is how the standards will be kept in the monuments and the temples. And this is what people have always asked, how could nomadic people possibly maintain their standards? This is how, in the And if they met up there, the scientists, every four years, every eight years, whatever, from all over, then they could calibrate all their instruments from the stones that are standing there already, the length of the temple wall. This is how the measurements have been preserved from prehistory to the present at identical values. Now the inner diameter then is 14 then to 15 of the outer diameter of the lintel ring. And this is very significant, 14 to 15 is 1.07142, and that as a measurement is the root of the Belgic feet. And the Belgic feet is writ large here, writ large in Stonehenge, because all the measures in Stonehenge you can see because the Greek foot here, 96 Greek feet and 1.01376 feet, and it's exact. Petrie measured Stonehenge very, very accurately, and then he got it spot on. And that was the inner diameter he called the Pelasgo foot, the Pelasgo Roman foot, he identified it as. And I've later seen the same reference to the identical value, which is 0.9732096, it's there. That's the inner diameter of the Stonehenge middle circle. And the outer diameter is then 100 common Greek feet of 1.04272, and the ratio of the length of the course is 14 to 15. In terms of our root being multiplied by, all of these values are multiplied by 1.01376 from the root tables, ones that relate to the English foot. So this would be the measure that governs Stonehenge, 1.01376, which means it's built to standard geographic. Now, this value here is the geographic Greek foot on the very, very latitude upon which Stonehenge stands, and I find this highly significant. I'm running out of time here, so I'll have to skip on. And then here at Stonehenge, this is one of John's shows, he will be here. But 17.28 miles is exactly a quarter of it, and it's the quarter of the degree that separates the latitudes of Stonehenge from Avebury. I don't mean closely, I mean exactly. This is what comes out of a study of all the Bronze Age and Neolithic, is the nitpicking accuracy of these people in the dispensation of their monuments and in the precision of their layouts. This is just an aside here, because the style of it here is 1.01376 feet long, which is one second of one degree. And this is merely to illustrate how it's foolish to look for a single unit of measurement around any construction, because the whole thing was about the preservation of integers. So you've got whole numbers in every aspect. They didn't have fractured numbers. And this is basically the purpose of ancient metrology and its complexity, is the Pythagorean principle of perfect archetype that exists beyond the material. And everything that becomes material strives after the perfection of the archetype, but of course never quite makes it. Everything's a little bit flawed. So they had a whole gamut of numbers to express everything, and then mathematically generated to express everything in integers. I mean, every man is in one of the other of the feet. That's the sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, that range would be from about five feet, three to seven feet. How neat. But here you see, Vitruvius, the Roman architect, gave us methods of deducing modules from the temple constructions in 24 and a half into the peristyle, which is the top step, which is the same as the archetype. It's exactly 100, 100, 120, 160 by 24.5. It's four common Greek feet. And the, again, the standard geographic value, the same values that we used in Stonehenge are here. as large as life in the past then, but all these other methods of finding the module. Here we've got the metapetes and the triglyphs, this is how the frieze is divided up, classically in a green temple, and together they make up a cubic. It's exactly that length. This is 1.1264, you find its number all over the place. For instance, on the Ashmolean man, he's exactly 6 feet of 1.1264 in his width, it's a very famous statue of a man outstretched with a Roman foot over his arm, 6 to 7 ratio again. And it's exactly that value, and that value of that foot is also found on a metrological stone in Leptis Magna, a very famous stone. Anyway, better go on. This then is the nature of the megalithic yard, this is what a megalithic yard is. It's a step, and this is what its detractors have always said it was, it approximates to a pace of the Neolithic mile. Of course it does, the whole thing's designed around the human body for human convenience. A step is the human body in motion, and this is how itinerary distances were measured. In something we can all understand, a step is two and a half feet, a pace is five feet, a mile is 5,000 feet. Milpasin, which is where we get our word mile from, it's simply 5,000 paces, 5,000 times 5 feet, or 1,000 times 5 feet rather. Now this is, if you want to say the megalithic yard is two and a half feet, which of course it is, and Tom never saw that, but he did know that the megalithic yard, something that George was speaking about in his covering markings and all that sort of thing on the stones, Tom deduced a measurement that was 140th part of a megalithic yard. Well 40 digits, because it's 16 digits to a foot, is two and a half feet. So that's how the megalithic inch fits the megalithic yard, it's a digit to the megalithic yard being a step. And then all the old Greek values, if you see, you know, a finger or a digit is a megalithic inch, a hand length is a quarter of a megalithic yard, you find this quite often in megalithic circles, the pygon or rima in 20 digits is half a megalithic yard, and the step is a megalithic yard. Two steps the megalithic fathom, two steps the pace, and there you go. Ten hand lengths would be the megalithic rod, though the megalithic rod is not related to the megalithic yard as Tom thought it was, quite, because if you've got a two and a half feet measurement, you can't have two and a half then, you're going to get some three quarters, it won't be a whole measurement, it won't be a sensible measurement. Before we get up to the megaliths, now these are two values of the Belgic foot, they start at two different roots, so I won't complicate you with that, but these are all the possible values of the megalithic yard. Now Tom stated, as a probability amounting to a certainty, that a single unit was used in setting up of these circles, and I propose to call this unit the megalithic yard. It's utter nonsense, as we've seen from all the constructions of antiquity, no single measurement fits them all, but if every single structure has more than one module in it, in order to maintain integers, and you can see this from Tom's work on the megalithic circles, at 130 and a quarter, you know, and 43 and a third rods in the perimeter, no, the ancients always worked in integers, whole numbers in both diameters and perimeters, and the maintenance of whole numbers on circular structures is maintained by the use of these fractions that separate them, but we don't have time to explore that either, but these are all the possible values in terms of the English foot of the megalithic yard, and you can see that Belgic and Sumerian feet, and the closest one that you often see to what Tom claimed is there, 2.7216, this one also is written large in Stonehenge, that's a step of the Belgic foot, and you can find this value there, it would be a standard geographical value in Stonehenge, it's quite plain. Here, I think Martin has been through this, so we'll skip this, he pointed out how all the diameters point to other circles, just back there a minute, all of those are stone circle sites in Carnesh, and all those lines are directed at you from the way the diameters are lined up, and this is how they all are. Now then, I've gone into this circle a little bit to explain about the measurements in them, this guy who did this, he just gives the values in megalithic yards, Tom often does this, which is a damn nuisance, because you don't know which megalithic yard he's referring to, but if you take that as being the Spanish vara, it has a very neat, it has a very neat solution, you know that because a megalithic yard is two and a half feet, you can't have seven and a half times two and a half feet, you'd end up with some ridiculously complex, irrational number, so there is more likely to be the case. I have to wind up, okay, I'm sorry I've barely started really, but I'm afraid that's all I've got time for, but it is a science, it is real, it was used in ancient world, and fragments of it percolated down to the Greeks, and if the scientists want to use the meter, get them out of the bloody meter, leave us our God-given measurements, leave it to the people who believe in God, because we're supposed to be in God's image, and they all spring from human, for human convenience, so let the scientists get on with the meter, give us our feet and inches back. This has been a Megalithomania audio production, for more information visit Megalithomania.co.uk