Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (2 page)

The so-called cuneiform (from the Latin
cuneus
meaning ‘wedge’) characters developed by the Sumerians were made by pressing wedge-shaped sticks into wet clay. These Sumerian tablets may look rather unimpressive to us today but these ‘talking’ patterns were thought to have powerful magic by ordinary people. At first, the content of these documents was very basic, but as time went by improvements added layers of sophistication until around 800
BC
when the Greeks created a full alphabetic writing system that finally separated consonants from vowels. The period immediately before these early records were left by the Sumerians and the Ancient Egyptians has become a virtual wall, separating what we call ‘history’ from everything that happened before – which we label ‘pre-history’. Everything that occurred before the advent of true writing is now considered to be myth and legend because every piece of human knowledge had to be transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation.

This ‘wall’ effect actually says a great deal more about current thinking than it does about the people who occupied our world before history began. Being human, we tend to view ourselves, and our society, as being somehow definitive – the measure of ‘rightness’ by which to gauge others. During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, there was an egocentric worldview in academia whereby white, Christian, male explorers would travel to see the ‘inferior’ races who did not live ‘properly’. One English naturalist wrote of his disdain for a group in Tierra del Fuego who shouted at him from a canoe:

‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. We often try to imagine what pleasures in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same questions may be asked concerning these barbarians.’

These were the words of the young Charles Darwin, a man who went on to realize how all humanity has sprung from lower animals.

Today, academia is much more objective and less judgemental than in previous generations, but the ideal of anything approaching real empathy is frequently as distant as it ever was for much of archaeology. But, we would argue, if we really want to bring into finer focus the landscape that lies beyond the Great Wall of History, we must undergo something of a fundamental shift in our mind-set.

The subject matter of this book requires readers to open their minds to a softer, more yielding worldview that dissolves preconceptions and temporarily allows the mind to roam freely over the subject matter, thereby allowing consideration of possibilities that might otherwise be missed. The principle that appears to underpin standard academia these days can reasonably be called ‘stepping stone’ logic, where deductions are often only encouraged in a strictly linear fashion. By this mode of reasoning one can only proceed by confirming each step before looking for an incremental way forward. While it sounds entirely sensible, it can blind the researcher to factors that are outside their expectations. Albert Einstein is famously said to have observed that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. Surely the great man has to be right: true insights come from thinking outside the box rather than simply ticking procedural boxes in a neat row.

A very famous archaeologist once said to Alan that all of his findings must be dismissed because his starting point was, in his opinion, wrong. How foolish. Even if someone does start with an error it is entirely possible that subsequent discoveries could be right if validated without reliance on the original premise.

The mode of reasoning that we invite you, the reader, to adopt while reading this book is one we call the ‘tepee method’. This is a multi-dimensional approach to logical deduction rather than a classical linear ‘stepping stone’ process. It simply requires that each piece of evidence is seen in its own right and is not forced to conform to any preconceived notion of what
should
be. Even where different elements of evidence appear to be mutually exclusive, we suggest that they should be allowed to coexist until the time comes for a final analysis. With the tepee method each strand of evidence is considered to be a potential supporting stick – and only if there are eventually enough of them that work together does the argument stand. We believe that this is the only approach to examining the distant past that is likely to produce a cogent picture, one that does not pick and choose which facts it prefers to accept as ‘real’. As we conducted our research there were many occasions where we felt the urge to reject a finding as a coincidence because it did not fit with what we expected to see. We suspended our judgement and eventually, as a new picture emerged, we were very glad that we had not tried to force our preconceptions on the evidence.

Any readers who feel unable to open their minds right up at this point should close the book now.

The Great Wall of History has distorted the way most people view the past by telescoping events so that the Ancient Egyptian civilization is often thought of as being extremely distant, whereas in terms of the span of the existence of our fully-developed species, it was actually extremely recent.

The huge array of artefacts and records left by the Ancient Egyptians provides a wonderfully strong picture of their lives and achievements. We know the names of kings right back to King Menes who unified the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt in approximately 3100
BC
and ruled from the capital of Memphis at the head of the Nile Delta. This great civilization left us beautiful structures such as the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx – and we can even medically examine the physical remains of Egypt’s rulers and leading citizens, carefully preserved by skilful mummification. Archaeologists have estimated that the Egyptians embalmed huge numbers of bodies. Though seeming to be a massive number, some claim that as many as 730 million people may have been mummified between the time of King Menes and the 7th century
AD
, when the practice was ended.
²
Although many mummies have not survived the scorching heat of northern Africa, it is believed that several million are preserved in yet-to-be-discovered tombs and burial places. As recently as June 1999 a burial ground containing almost 10,000 mummies was discovered near the town of Bawiti, southwest of Cairo.

We know what these people ate, with whom they traded, as well as when and against whom they went to war. One 5,000-year-old Egyptian mace head contains a record of a great victory in which no less than 120,000 prisoners were taken, together with 400,000 oxen and 1,422,000 goats that were liberated from the enemy.
³
King Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid, was even kind enough to leave us a dismantled boat that has now been rebuilt. As a result, we can be sure that the Egyptians used only wood, rope, reeds and the like for their craft, which contained no metal.

These people also left detailed records of their gods and their religious practices. The famous Book of the Dead is a large collection of funerary texts from various dates, containing magical formulae, hymns, and prayers believed by the ancient Egyptians to guide and protect the soul of the deceased on its journey into the land of the dead. The texts tell us of a belief that happiness in the afterlife was dependent on having led a life in keeping with a principle known as ‘Maat’ – which meant doing good to all others.

These examples make the point that our knowledge of the Ancient Egyptian people on this side of the Great Wall of History is very extensive – but we know only very limited amounts of what happened on the dark side of the wall. For example, the Greek historian Herodotus, referred to as the ‘father of history’ for his nine-volume work written in the early 5th century
BC
, observed of Egypt that ‘there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description’. Herodotus is considered to be the starting point of Western historical writing, although the accuracy of his facts has often been doubted by modern scholars because they seemed to be laden with exaggeration. However, archaeological finds have begun to show that this Greek chronicler was extremely accurate. For example, Herodotus had described the great city wall of Babylon as having buildings placed on top of it and yet still having ‘enough space between for a four-horse chariot to turn’. This seemed unlikely to experts but remains have been discovered indicating that the wall was of such a width.

Thanks to early scribes and historians like Herodotus we have a rich knowledge of the last 5,000 years, but what do we know of cultures that blossomed before this time?

After 100,000 years of what is assumed to be virtual stagnation, humans began a completely new way of life in what is known as the Neolithic Revolution. It began approximately 12,000 years ago when people across the Middle East, Europe and Asia quite suddenly abandoned their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence and began to opt for permanent settlements. They began to cultivate rice, wheat, rye, peas, lentils and other plants, and to domesticate animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats. Technology also began around this time with the manufacture of pottery vessels for cooking and storing food, stone sickles, and grinding stones to turn grain into flour.

The term ‘Neolithic’ means new Stone Age, and it refers to the time when the first farmers tilled the soil, planted, watered and harvested their crops and cared for their newly-domesticated animals all the year round. In the British Isles the Neolithic Period can be said to span from approximately 6000–1500
BC
. This new lifestyle was more labourintensive than hunting and gathering but also more certain, and it may be the case that the Neolithic Revolution was caused by the need to produce more food as a result of an increase in population. According to standard interpretations of the available evidence, the world had created the platform upon which civilization would eventually be built, but from our perspective these early farmers were still very crude and unsophisticated because they existed on the dark side of the Great Wall of History. However, there was one Stone Age culture that appears to dramatically upset such a neat paradigm.

On the western fringes of Europe there was a culture that left tens of thousands of structures that still stand today. From parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic, down to northern Spain and especially throughout the British Isles these long-departed people built with enormous stones and are therefore remembered as the Megalithic builders – a name that literally means ‘giant stones’. The terms ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Megalithic’ tend to be used interchangeably because it was these new Stone Age people who built the giant stone monuments. In the fifth and fourth millennia
BC
these supposedly primitive builders created huge circles and other structures using stones weighing up to 350 tonnes, such as the 20-metre-high ‘Le Grand Menhir Brisée’ in Brittany. On the banks of the River Boyne in Ireland they left a beautiful circular construction now known as Newgrange, a massive structure and 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. But these people left very little else to tell us about their lives and beliefs. They had no writing as such, while most of their artefacts that were not stone or pottery have long since rotted to nothing in the damp European climate.

Particular and highly important members of the Megalithic builders have been named after the pottery fragments found around their encampments. They are sometimes simply called the ‘Grooved Ware People’ on account of the grooved patterns they chose to etch into the wet clay of their cooking utensils.

For thousands of years the massive stone structures these people so painstakingly created stood in silence. They were known as ‘fairy mounds’ by rural folk or sometimes uprooted by more pragmatic farmers to clear the land or to use the stone for their own building requirements. Few people gave any thought to the age or purpose of these giants in stone, until archaeology evolved as a serious discipline in the late 1800s. Even then, most early archaeologists were more interested in the exciting potential offered by excavations in places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia than in the British Isles and Europe.

It is now known that these mysterious people from the other side of the Great Wall of History had a significant interest in astronomy, and many of the larger Megalithic sites have been shown to have solar, lunar and stellar alignments. From the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney in the far north of Scotland, to Stonehenge in southern England and to the stone rows of Brittany in France, specialists have come to recognize that these people spent a lot of time observing the movements of the heavens. Newgrange in Ireland, for example, has a single shaft that was carefully constructed to allow the light of Venus to penetrate a central chamber once every eight years on the winter solstice, shortly before dawn.
⁴
Venus moves in such a way that it has a predictable 40-year cycle, made up of five patterns of eight years, giving the engineers who designed and built the Newgrange observatory a calendar so accurate that it can only be beaten today by the use of atomic clocks.

So, it is possible to understand something of the abilities and interests of the Neolithic culture, even without the benefit of writing. One man above all others was the pioneer of a discipline that is now known as ‘archaeoastronomy’ – his name was Alexander Thom.

Alexander Thom was born in Scotland in 1894. He became a student at Glasgow University and later returned as a lecturer in engineering. During the Second World War he worked for the British government but in 1945 he moved to Oxford University, where he became Professor of Engineering, a post he held until his retirement in 1961. His investigations into Megalithic sites spanned 50 years and did not end until very close to his death in 1985.