jmw
Industrial
- Jun 27, 2001
- 7,435
Moving home is a traumatic experience, especially if the SO has anything to do with it, but it does have some collateral benefits such as the discovery of long lost items and books.
Just such a book has resurfaced, "The Sphinx and the Megoliths" by John Ivimy.
Now in this forum there have been many threads about re-inventing techniques thought to be forgotten, about the Romans and their lost arts of concrete making and so on.
This book proposes as a concept that could as easily fit the facts as any other concept, that the megaliths like Stonehenge in Wiltshire, and the Pyramids, are all based on a shared lost science.
There is a lot of stuff that needn't concern us but two observations stand out.
The first is the presumption that mathematics and geometry must have been much further advanced than we suspect and that much of this knowledge was lost.
The example given is the construction of an aqueduct by an engineer working for Polycrates in about 540BC using teams of men digging from both ends and meeting in the middle - something not thought possible, based on literary evidence, until the mathematics of the second century AD.... the aqueduct was 900 yards long and the centres were only 2 feet apart when they met in the middle....
But of much more convincing nature is the idea of source maps. Not the more recent claimed Chinese voyages of 1421 and apparently expunged from the records (there is a thread on this somewhere) but source maps dating back much earlier when it was evident that some civilisation was able to accurately find both latitude and longitude (to within 0.5[°] and produce accurate world maps. More accurate than until very very recently.
In much later centuries the maps produced are very much less closely related to the real world because of the lack of technology or science to make them and the inability to accurately locate the position of the navigators.
Most convincing is the Piri Re'is map (based on earlier source maps) which shows the Antarctic in accurate detail but overlapping Cape Horn.
It means that in that time, some civilisation had the ability to accurately measure both latitude and longitude and project its power or interest globally. The longitude method was tedious and time consuming but depended on a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and eclipse predictions... (of stars eclipsed by the moon, for example). These maps evidently showed the entire globe in great and accurate detail including east and west coasts of North and South America, the Pacific and Antarctica.
The Pire re'is map shows Antarctica but overlapping Cape Horn. This is thought to be an error in the original maps and acting on the assumption that there was a confusion, when the explorers' data was translated (referenced with the home data on star angles), that the 80th parallel was mistaken for the Antarctic circle (66[°]33'), when redrawn the coastline and features prove highly accurate - except.... they show river tributaries where there are Glaciers today... and this dates the source map to around 4000BC.
Fascinating stuff.
The importance is that it very much tends to support the idea that there are many lost arts and skills and that we have a mistaken view of the last few hundred years as being the true age of discovery when they are in fact an age of re-discovery partially stimulated by a selection of maps which trace back to the original source maps (with distortions from mis-understanding the previously advanced state of spherical trigonometry such as using a square grid where a rectangular should have been used.. there is a lot of confusion from the diffeent projections used and the handicap of the "modern sailor" was a lack of a suitable system to determine longitude exact by lunars or chronometers later on. The ancients, it seems, could have used star angles for eclipses.
All fascinating stuff and one wonders what other arts and skills are missing to us and how, had they not been lost, they might have influenced the path we did follow to where we are today.
JMW
Just such a book has resurfaced, "The Sphinx and the Megoliths" by John Ivimy.
Now in this forum there have been many threads about re-inventing techniques thought to be forgotten, about the Romans and their lost arts of concrete making and so on.
This book proposes as a concept that could as easily fit the facts as any other concept, that the megaliths like Stonehenge in Wiltshire, and the Pyramids, are all based on a shared lost science.
There is a lot of stuff that needn't concern us but two observations stand out.
The first is the presumption that mathematics and geometry must have been much further advanced than we suspect and that much of this knowledge was lost.
The example given is the construction of an aqueduct by an engineer working for Polycrates in about 540BC using teams of men digging from both ends and meeting in the middle - something not thought possible, based on literary evidence, until the mathematics of the second century AD.... the aqueduct was 900 yards long and the centres were only 2 feet apart when they met in the middle....
But of much more convincing nature is the idea of source maps. Not the more recent claimed Chinese voyages of 1421 and apparently expunged from the records (there is a thread on this somewhere) but source maps dating back much earlier when it was evident that some civilisation was able to accurately find both latitude and longitude (to within 0.5[°] and produce accurate world maps. More accurate than until very very recently.
In much later centuries the maps produced are very much less closely related to the real world because of the lack of technology or science to make them and the inability to accurately locate the position of the navigators.
Most convincing is the Piri Re'is map (based on earlier source maps) which shows the Antarctic in accurate detail but overlapping Cape Horn.
It means that in that time, some civilisation had the ability to accurately measure both latitude and longitude and project its power or interest globally. The longitude method was tedious and time consuming but depended on a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and eclipse predictions... (of stars eclipsed by the moon, for example). These maps evidently showed the entire globe in great and accurate detail including east and west coasts of North and South America, the Pacific and Antarctica.
The Pire re'is map shows Antarctica but overlapping Cape Horn. This is thought to be an error in the original maps and acting on the assumption that there was a confusion, when the explorers' data was translated (referenced with the home data on star angles), that the 80th parallel was mistaken for the Antarctic circle (66[°]33'), when redrawn the coastline and features prove highly accurate - except.... they show river tributaries where there are Glaciers today... and this dates the source map to around 4000BC.
Fascinating stuff.
The importance is that it very much tends to support the idea that there are many lost arts and skills and that we have a mistaken view of the last few hundred years as being the true age of discovery when they are in fact an age of re-discovery partially stimulated by a selection of maps which trace back to the original source maps (with distortions from mis-understanding the previously advanced state of spherical trigonometry such as using a square grid where a rectangular should have been used.. there is a lot of confusion from the diffeent projections used and the handicap of the "modern sailor" was a lack of a suitable system to determine longitude exact by lunars or chronometers later on. The ancients, it seems, could have used star angles for eclipses.
All fascinating stuff and one wonders what other arts and skills are missing to us and how, had they not been lost, they might have influenced the path we did follow to where we are today.
JMW
