Who Built The Stones? (Megalithic)

[admin]

From Komorikid:

Their Empire was not an empire as we perceive it. They had no central authority but did have a common bond; maritime trade. They were the first true trading guild; an extended family if you will that traded amongst their different clans as well as other cultures especially Egypt. They possessed intimate knowledge of astronomy, navigation and construction, which they jealously guarded, that enabled them to dominate for a very long period of time. They were members of a fractious group that sometimes fought amongst themselves yet still managed to dominate the sea.

Some of their group occupied the coastal regions of Northern Europe, others would eventually become the Classic Greeks, but the most dominant were those who inhabited the coastal cities.

They had harbours in Norway, Sweden, and The Baltic Coast, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France and Spain before any of these countries ever existed. In the Bronze Age their most prized possession was Britain from where they controlled the most precious resource of their time: TIN.

They dominated the sea and sailing for over two thousands years and with the skills they possessed they set out from their Atlantic shores and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Their knowledge enabled them to establish precise celestially fixed waypoints built in wood then stone to fix local time from a known prime meridian. And all of this was done before there was need for a written language

Their sea captains and navigators possessed the knowledge of a spherical world and its division into degrees. They also had an instrument of sheer simplicity with which they could accurately determine latitude and longitude. They were superior astronomers who had charted the heavens and could steer by star, sun, compass, dead reckoning and accurate maps. They had a Time Zone reference datum to calculate global position and an accurate clock that still exist today.

The evidence is all there but only a few have had the foresight to piece it all together from the many clues they left. Almost all of them in stone. The most critical was discovered inside the Great Pyramid by Bill Grundy in 1878 and sent to Piazza Smith who recorded and sketched the items in his diary.

[Mick Harper]

Very interesting, Komoro, but who are "they"?

The one thing we know for reasonably certain sure, is that "they" built a system of stone structures that are "clustered" (the most neutral term I can think of) along the western littoral of Europe from the Orkneys to Morocco.

This has always struck me as clear evidence that the megalith-builders were an Atlantic-based and, as you say, an essentially maritime culture. On the other hand the historical population that best matches the distribution of the megaliths is the Goidelic- (Celtic)-speakers of western Britain-Ireland-France-Iberia and yet these people are not notably maritime or Atlantic-oriented. They seem altogether too stay-at-home to qualify as latter-day megalithics.

The ubiquity of the megaliths--they stretch "inland" as far as as Malta, Kent and Denmark (any advances on that?)--means that the megalith-builders must have entered history in some guise or other. So perhaps before anything else we need a list of candidates.

[Tani]

[admin]

From Komorikid

Mick
You agree that the idea is worth following so consider the following.

Britain wasn't THE beginning but it was A beginning.

First assumption:
Everything we have been taught about European migration is false.

Second assumption:
Everything we have been taught about the extent of ancient maritime knowledge is false.

Third assumption:
Everything we have been taught about the religious significance of monolithic and megalithic structures is false.

Fourth assumption:
Everything we have been taught about the origin of written language is false.

Now apply Occam's Razor to the above.

Answer 1: THE SEA

Answer 2: OCEANIC TRAVEL WAS COMMONPLACE

Answer 3: STONE SITES WERE NAVIGATION MARKERS

Answer 4: WRITING WAS DEVELOPED TO CONCEAL KNOWLEDGE.

[Mick Harper]

Dear Tani (and all)

Although this thread just refers to "stones", it is vital that we don't just mean "stones".

One of the abiding difficulties of this branch of study (I use the term loosely) is to decide between:

a) what is a megalith and what is geological freak of nature
b) what is a megalith and what is just a structure made out of stone and
c) what is megalith for our purposes (i.e. put up by these mysterious Stonehenge dudes) and what is a megalith for other purposes (i.e. independently invented by some other bunch of dudes entirely).

[TelMiles]

Atlantis?
_________________
Against all Gods.

[DPCrisp]

That's not as glib as you might think.

I was looking at a map of the megaliths in Europe... and realised that if I shaded in the North African shoreline, too, on grounds we have discussed in the past about Rhesus Negative people, Berbers, Nabta Playa... then I was looking at an area that covered the western Mediterrannean coasts from the Pillars to Tyrrhenia and Egypt and parts of the continent.

[Jaq White]

Plato was writing of bygone times, not bygone places. If you are looking for the "place" as being some ancient, lost world submerged beneath the waters, then you will find dozens of them because we all know there are submerged cities beneath the sea, and none of them, and all of them are "Atlantean".

[DPCrisp]

Maybe your answer will turn out to be the right answer, but what piques my interest is that Plato speaks of the land being drowned in the very bygone days of catastrophic, end-of-Ice-Age flooding -- so we are led to believe. (Furthermore, there is a place that matches Plato's description.)

Of pivotal importance in Plato's account and all subsequent discussions is the location of the Pillars of Heracles, at the mouth of the Mediterranean.

NB. I've never seen the argument that Plato's purpose was politico-philosopho-morally motivated as having any bearing on the veracity of the tale: we often tell true stories for their symbolic content.

[TelMiles]

For many years now I have found no problem with the idea of "Atlantis", that is an ancient western 'land' that sunk as the ice retreated. And I am just glad to see the idea being discussed here.

DC Crisp, where is this place you speak of that matches Plato's description?

Tel
_________________
Against all Gods.

[Ishmael]

[DPCrisp]

[DPCrisp]

Have I said this in so many words?

History is in the SHAPE of geography.

It has been pointed out [ e.g. by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which "attempts to explain why Eurasian civilization, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual or moral superiority." There a Wikipedia article on this. ] that China's coastline, in comparison to Europe's, is rather smooth and featureless. It's not hard to see how geographical variety affects the opportunities and imperatives for innovation and competition.

We also noted that the 'interesting' top half of the Med. is where it rains, while the 'boring' bottom half is where it does not. The land is shaped by the weather... and politico-economic history is shaped by the land.

But also, the weather is shaped by the land. We saw that rain-and-desert are global patterns correlated to continents and oceans, but the thing to notice here is that Europe has a western littoral while China has an eastern one. The Eastern Effect is getting going in China and puts a stop to the Gobi desert, but the majority of the rain is going away from China. Conversely, the rain from eastern North America heads towards Europe.

When we can paint the picture in such broad strokes, we should be able to take any extra-terrestrial or fictional geography and a) decide whether it's possible and b) deduce where the historical/economic/political powerhouse(s) must be located.

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

Since Komoro has put some of his cards on the table, perhaps I had better do likewise. But a note of caution: everything I say here is stuff I came up with twenty years ago when I knew even less than I do now so I am not proffering any of the following as gospel, even by my own astonishingly lax standards.

We start with the Aryan-Semitic-Altaic super-family. Who they? Well, according to orthodox linguistic theory the three great language groups of:
1) Indo-European (English, Russian, Hindi, Hittite etc)
2) Semitic (Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, Akkadian etc) and
3) Altaic (Mongolian, Turkish, Finnish etc)
are all sufficiently alike as to form a super-group.

This implies a common origin for all three. So the first task is to consider where that common origin is. If you plot the distribution of the three groups you get the following 'swathes':
1) Indo-European: western littoral of Europe across to Bangladesh
2) Semitic: Iraq across to West Africa
3) Altaic: Eastern Siberia across to Hungary

If you join up the swathes you get a probable starting point somewhere around the Caspian Sea. Hence orthodoxy puts it somewhere around the Caspian Sea (though with all the proper caveats).

If you're an Applied Epistemologist you turn the problem on its head just to check out what kind of slime is growing underneath. So you reverse the swathes and say 'If they have all met up around the Caspian Sea, where did they start out from?'

And now the three swathes point you in the right direction:
1) The Indo-Europeans start out from the west coast of Europe
2) The Semitics start out from the west coast of Africa and
3) The Altaics start out from the eastern seaboard of Siberia.

But since they are all related and therefore they came from the same place, we have to extend the swathes so that
1) The Indo-Europeans started out from the Americas, crossed the North Atlantic and landed in Western Europe
2) The Semitics started out from the Americas, crossed the mid-Atlantic and landed in West Africa
3) The Altaics started out from the Americas, crossed the Bering Straits and landed in Siberia.

When and why all these people needed to leave the Americas for the 'New World' is a matter you need not bother your heads with now but suffice it to say it involves the Mystery of The Disappearing North American Horse.