The Simplest Measures on Earth
John Neal deduces in All Done with Mirrors that the different types of feet, used in many areas of the globe , are all rational fractions of the English foot (called English only through its surviving use there). The Egyptians used a foot called a royal foot that was one seventh greater (just as kings were shown as one seventh part higher than ordinary men). In Britain another, less well known, foot was endemic in megalithic Britain, one third of the "megalithic yard".
The idea of a megalithic yard came through the work of Alexander Thom, a maverick yet exacting scientist-engineer who, whilst on holiday sailing his yacht and seeing some megaliths, developed a life-long passion for surveying and interpreting these monuments. Having established the geometries of the many stone circles and accurately located stones, he could then wonder what type of measures might have been employed to build what were originally finely engineered structures.
This is an interesting "problem", the retrospective deduction of measures and in his case there was no corpus from which to draw apart from the metrology of the Old World, which the diffusionists downright denied could have been in contact with megalithic Britain (a position thoroughly overthrown today). Anyway, Thom wisely turned to statistical science and the methods of Broadbent to see if the inter stone distances showed signs of quanta, i.e. steps of increments, the least of which might be the units employed in the monuments.
Thom found a unit close to 2.72 feet (but it now turns out that there was more than one ancient measure around this value and the Astronomical Megalithic Yard is one of these).
Thom's work had opposition from science and never became accepted in the fields where it was most suited such as archaeology. For instance it was considered ludicrous that megalithic peoples could have maintained units of measure throughout Britain (and beyond). Also the alignment to horizon, Sun and stars led to endless claims of "selection", that such alignments could be accidental. Today these claims are again overturned since science does not know the numerical skills of the megalithic people apart from evidence of it and Astro-archeaology is now an accepted discipline of great utility in interpreting both monuments and cultures.
The Astronomical Megalithic Yard or AMY has a useful formula in feet of 19.008/7 (2.715428571).
AMY has been found in the Lunation Triangles, a major artifact of the megalithic culture discussed in Robin Heath's books and my own. As a Rational Fraction this yard has a foot that is 792/875 feet long. This Astronomical Megalithic Foot (AMF) then has an interesting relationship to both the English and Egyptian (royal) foot in that the former can be written as 875/875 (7/7 times 125) and the latter as 1000/875 (8/7 times 125).
The AMF is also a type of Assyrian foot in that multiplying 9/10 by 176/175 generates it making the AMF a Root Canonical Assyrian foot to use Neal's classification system.
The importance of the AMF and its Yard is that it divides into the Polar Radius, as does any unit that has a seven in the denominator - which the Royal foot also has. However, an ideal polar unit of measure has 11/7 within its formula and this can be "given" to the Royal foot if it is turned into a Royal mile of 5280 such feet (the formula of the mile being 25 x 3 x 5 x 11). This ideality of 11/7, in a polar measure, is demonstrated by the fact that there are 3456 Royal miles in the Polar radius (according to the ancient model recovered by John Michell in Ancient Metrology and elsewhere). The figure illustrates all of these facts as a "matrix diagram" where up equals more:
The implications of all this is that metrology is a small world because it connects the size of the Earth to everything built with these measures. It is these and many other remarkable relations that lead to a reappraisal of history and prehistory in Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization, plug, plug.
Richard Heath
in metrology & monuments
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