Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Current topics

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Boreades » 9:33 am

True, but the thermal efficiency of charcoal is a lot lower than coal. Meaning that for a given amount of ore, the volume of charcoal you would need is even higher. You would need a lot of forestry to supply a lot of charcoal. The Forest of Dean springs to mind. Easy acccess via the Severn estuary.

Cornwall and Devon are not well forested now (think of Bodmin, Exmoor, Dartmoor), can't be sure what they were like 5K years ago.
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Mick Harper » 11:28 am

The Templars were soldiers of Christ or at least of the Pope and formed specifically as a Crusading order to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land and to fight the infidel.


What they were formed to do is neither here nor there. We are talking about what they were doing c 1300. Military orders often become vast economic empires eg the Pakistan army today or the NKVD in the Soviet era because if you've got the power why not use it to be rich and comfortable rather than poor and getting killed a lot?

Actually the whole of The Megalithic Empire is the story of how society managed the tricky problem of balancing local territorial states with de facto imperialist trading organisations. Philip the Fair was able to snuff out the Templars overnight but presumably only because the 'Templars' were long gone (to Switzerland, Portugal, Scotland, Prussia or wherever).
Mick Harper
 
Posts: 910
Joined: 10:28 am

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Royston » 12:38 pm

The Old Testament is insistent that Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees - rather than from just plain Ur (in present-day Iraq). Woolley and his team of archaeologists claimed that he had discovered Ur of the Chaldees which has thrown everyone right off the scent. Everyone in the West, that is. One only has to go to Ur(fa), just inside the Turkish/Syrian border, to discover that all Middle-easterners know that this (now Turkish) town was the place linked to Abraham's birth. Anyone there can tell you that he was born beneath Nimrod's citadel in 1569 BC -- they know it because they've never stopped counting the years. He missed the point that it was labelled as such by the scribes to distinguish it from the still famous Sumerian Ur. Largely because of him, Western authorities still mostly believe that the Semites evolved in the deserts of Saudi Arabia.

Abraham's people were also known as Chaldees - i.e. People from the Land of Tin. And the main (only?) source of tin at that date was in the Mount Ararat region of the Caucasus mountains, hence their other name - Aramaeans.

Urfa became a new centre for erstwhile Hurrian peoples - aka, Chaldees, aka Aramaeans - as they decided to migrate from their original homeland when the tin was nearly worked out. Some went south, but most went southwest to the Mediterranean lands of plenty. This fits in with accounts of Phoenician explorations of the Western Med and beyond. They were looking for new sources of tin!

Interestingly, the Crusaders must have known that Urfa was Abraham's birthplace, because they actually built a church there - despite the fact that it was then a Kurdish stronghold (the Crusades were not what they seemed either). It's still in good order because the Moslem Kurds have continued to look after it.

But in Abe's day Ur(fa) was at the heart of Padarn Aram (the land of the Aramaeans).
Royston
 
Posts: 21
Joined: 10:18 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Donna » 12:48 pm

Royston wrote: Interestingly, the Crusaders must have known that Urfa was Abraham's birthplace, because they actually built a church there - despite the fact that it was then a Kurdish stronghold (the Crusades were not what they seemed either). It's still in good order because the Moslem Kurds have continued to look after it.

Hmm. If you think about it, the Crusades make precious little sense without some kind of 'hidden agenda'. What chance would the Europeans have had of surviving, let alone winning, any battles against the numerically superior Islamic troops.

If you accept that the Middle East was far more advanced than Europe, then you could argue that the real, albeit hidden, purpose of the Crusades was to make contact with eastern knowledge in order to transfer it to the relatively primitive West?
Donna
 
Posts: 29
Joined: 9:30 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby hvered » 3:04 pm

This is the stuff of conspiracy theories which are generally wrong. If you want to get eastern knowledge, there's nothing to stop you from studying at the university of Bhagdad or going native in Constantinople.
hvered
 
Posts: 855
Joined: 10:22 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Jacqui » 7:39 pm

It may be the apparently esoteric 'knowledge' is all about trade and the potentially enormous profits. The Templars seem to have been a pretty bizarre bunch but then trade organisations aka guilds, lodges, whatever, often have distinctive signs and/or paraphernalia presumably so they can tell who to trust.
Jacqui
 
Posts: 11
Joined: 3:27 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Boreades » 12:10 pm

Yes, the wealth of the Templars that the likes of King Philip so jealously desired was derived from their huge trading and banking empire. The banking system was trusted enough to allow buyers and sellers thousands of miles apart to confidently use Letters of Credit to make the deals, and then use the Templar shipping fleet to transport the goods. The Letters of Credit were written in code, to maintain security. The Templar fleet also had its own navigation and cartography specialists who produced maps far more accurate then anything else of the period (from whom Christopher Columbus got his maps, but that's another story). All this is a diversion from the megalithics, but the one thing in common is knowledge. In both cases, that knowledge was transferred by years of study and, by all accounts, verbally.
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Boreades » 5:40 pm

The kind of knowledge that Megalithic and Templar traders would both have guarded closely would include the sources of their wealth.

For the TAs (Traditional Archeologists), it's always been an unexplained mystery where so much copper came from. But in Michigan, USA, it is estimated that in the period c. 2400BC-1200 BC, c. 5,600,000 pounds of 99% pure copper was extracted. Native legends say the mining was done by blue-eyed yellow-haired "marine men".

Jay Stuart Wakefield says: "in the US no one knows where all the copper went, while in Europe they had a Bronze Age, and no one can figure out where all the copper came from. Academics refuse to consider Michigan as a source of the copper because they do not believe the oceans could be sailed at that time, and the topic is forbidden by the Powell Doctrine. No one can obtain a study grant or an academic position who does not ascribe to the official line, enforced by incestuous "peer review" gone amuck. "

More refs on Jay Stuart Wakefield and Reinoud M. De Jonge

1) http://www.rocksandrows.com/copper-trade-4.php
2) http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/rea ... 02&t=21454
and http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/rea ... 77&t=21454
etc
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Ajai » 10:46 am

The kind of knowledge that Megalithic and Templar traders would both have guarded closely would include the sources of their wealth.

The Templars (allegedly) ended up in Scotland which, coincidentally or not, is where the Masonic Movement started. Historians have recently started insisting that we turn the map of Britain on its head as it were, saying the major trade routes went via the northern isles and round Scotland.

It may well be the case that the shortest or most direct trade route was across the North Atlantic, using the 60° latitude say, though I'd have thought ores were more accessible from Scandinavian mines. The metalworking evidence is hard to 'read' and there no doubt exist many ancient mines we don't know about.
Ajai
 
Posts: 24
Joined: 9:53 pm

Re: Megalithic manufacturing in Britain

Postby Boreades » 6:35 pm

"there no doubt exist many ancient mines we don't know about."
Agreed. We are naturally focusing on the Western Europe aspects of megalithics. But there are some great megalithic connections to ancient India as well, which was rich in copper and tin. From where Persia got the decimal number system and much mathematics before we copied it and called it an Arabic invention. So I could be completely wrong about copper coming from America, and it came from India. But either way, the megalithics were still trading over thousands of miles further than Trad. Archeos would have us believe.

If you want a great diversion into lost pre-Sumerian civilisations, read Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age by Graham Hancock
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

PreviousNext

Return to Index

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 130 guests