New Views over Megalithia

[TisILeclerc]

What we do know is that there was a connection with the middle east. Tin, copper, and other minerals were in demand.

This means trade which means ships. Traders and sailors. And accountants. Accountants do the sums and calculate.

Tel Dor in Israel is on the coast and was once, or several times, an important port. We have Durdle Dor and Dorset.

We are told the stone circles were built by farmers who wanted to work out when to plant crops. I don't think farmers have ever needed stone circles to work out that. They look for the weather signs, behaviour of animals and birds and so on. They don't need to build stone circles which would take time to build and lots of labour.

But traders and their representatives on land would need to know precisely when the next ship is coming in. So they build permanent sun dials which count weeks and months. Or something like that. Sailors can calculate by the sun and stars.

By the shore we have a network of ships agents or hermits keeping an eye out for sails and keeping the beacons shining.

They can calculate how long a ship should take to come. All of this will be written down in some way. Clay tablets? If a ship sinks they will know that it's overdue. But there'll always be another one.

In the meantime the miners can mine, farmers can farm and the shipping magnates can er magnate and tidy up the circles.

The accountants can count the trading values of the goods and how much they'll get back in the home ports

People organise to whatever level is needed for their kind of society. They don't do things by chance.

Circles serve a mapping purpose as well. And we know that Orkney was in touch with Stonehenge so the idea of isolated little communities scratching a living is well and truly dead. Everything was organised. 12 inches to the foot. 12 pennies to the shilling. 12 months in the year. 12 hours in the day. 360 degrees in a circle and 360 days in the year more or less.

It all points to a centrally organised system and one I imagine based in the middle east and inherited from the Sumerians and others.

And what were the Druids doing speaking Greek?

[hvered]

The majority of historians believe agriculture was introduced to Europe from the Middle East. The Middle East does not have anything like the profusion of stone circles found in Britain. Israel has one known stone circle, part of a submerged Neolithic village near Atlit south of Haifa, and there's one stone circle in the Golan Heights in Syria.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence to justify linking agriculture to stone circles, not in its presumed place of origin anyway. The Middle East is also the birthplace of archaeology as practised today.

[Mick Harper]

[TisILeclerc]

[Mick Harper]

[TisILeclerc]

[Boreades]

Re who was writing things down, and why.

If the priests, druids, academics, etc didn't write things down (for their own good reasons), who did want to write things down?

By way of an example, the first useful working computer in Britain was built and paid for by Lyons Tea Shops. For valuation jobs, payroll, inventory, etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

Traders and merchants might have needed to write things down, for bills of sales, stock control, shipping inventories, etc. Hence the Phoenician alphabet arriving in Britain along with all the trade goods by ship.

Architects, designers and builders also needed to write things down.

Not forgetting the coded relationship between our Indian Decimal numbers and linear geometry (hiding in plain sight)

[Mick Harper]

Most ingenious. I suppose the most urgent use is labelling sealed jars, whether in the kitchen or in the hold. I ran into the problem at a hippy commune when we used to swap our food stamps for cheap USAID tins whose labels had fallen off. It made for eclectic meals. It was OK because we were all on acid but the problem for the Mesopotamian housewife or trader using amphorae is clear enough. Opaque enough. What we need to do is put ourselves in her place and decide how we would solve the problem.

[Boreades]

[TisILeclerc]

Does that mean prince Charles will have to go to Scotland to be crowned when the time comes?