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Keys to Temple Pt 1 - The British Pyramid

Keys to Temple Pt 2 - The British Pyramid

Sekeds and      Pyramid Geometry

666 - A magic number?

Whatever happened in 3100 bc?

Avebury's Sacred Geometry

Who were the Elohim?

The Cotswold Circle

Marlborough Downs Long Barrow Mystery   (coming soon)

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What on Earth Was Happening in 3100bc

Introduction: This article explores some of the significant events that were happening on the Earth around 3100bc a period of great change in human development. Could there be any connection?

Background

Something quite extraordinary was happening on the planet c. 3100bc which has implications for understanding the 'Ley circles' on the Marlborough Downs.

These events can be summarised as follows:

• The start date of the Mayan Calendar
• The start of Dynastic Egypt with the unification by Narmer Menes
• The start of the age of Kali
• The commencement of the great megalithic monuments of Britain such as Newgrange, Avebury and Stonehenge
• Climatic changes throughout the Northern Hemispheres

Before examining the ways that the Marlborough Downs circles could have been surveyed and set out in the landscape and their relationship to other patterns in the British Isles we need to set back further in time to consider the bridge that could explain the connection between the ancient cultures of Britain and Egypt.

Fig. 1 Comparative Chronology Chart

We can be reasonably sure, from the radio carbon dating of monuments such as Avebury, the Sanctuary and Silbury Hill that the twin circle pattern of the Marlborough Downs was conceived somewhere close to 3000 BC. Substantial evidence is presented in The Keys to the Temple that indicates the crucial importance of Silbury Hill and the Sanctuary to the design of the twin circle matrix . Silbury Hill has been dated to 2750 BC, whilst the Sanctuary is a little earlier around 2900 BC. Allowing time for the conception of the project to come into fruition 3000 BC is a reasonable assessment for the beginning of the initial survey work.

This coincided with the cultural shift at the start of the third millennium BC which saw the first stages of construction of some of the most significant megalithic sites in Britain stretching from the Stenness Stones of Orkneys in the far north of Scotland to Stonehenge on the plains of Wiltshire in Southern England, a distance of just under 840 kilometres. All the evidence indicates that the landscape surveying and planning envisaged in this book was part of that same movement. We need to consider whether this was a spontaneous evolution of ideas from within the native stock of these islands or whether the impulse came from elsewhere.

Climatic changes

The study of the earth's climate over the past hundred thousand years is a fascinating subject drawing from many diverse scientific disciplines. Clearly no past meteorological weather charts are available so it is impossible to be completely certain about the climate of any one area or time. The various methods show overlaps and inevitably the shift from one climatic period to another is assimilated at different speeds depending upon the aspect being considered. The picture is built like a jig-saw from archaeology, radio carbon dating, geology, pollen analysis, tree ring dating, ocean sediment, lake sediment, ice cores, isotope measurements, insect fauna and so on. All these elements are woven together into a pattern which gives an idea of the different climatic influences.

We are now living in a relatively warm period following the retreat of the last Ice Age which finished around 15000 BC. This date is only approximate for the retreat of the glaciers did not happen over night and there were certainly minor variations during the following few thousand years with the most rapid warming taking place between 8000 BC to 5000 BC. By this latter date the climate had settled down into what is known as the 'Atlantic' period. In Europe and North America the climate was from 1° C - 3° C warmer than today.

Writing in the Journal of Quarternary Research in 1974 W. Wendland and R. Bryson pointed out, from extensive analysis, that five major post-glacial epochs of environmental change, coincided with five major epochs of cultural change. There is clearly a link between these two phenomena. Around 3000 BC there was a sudden climatic shift which coincided with the founding of Dynastic Egypt and the commencement of the open circle stone monuments in Britain. Prior to that date Egypt experienced a much wetter climate than today. For example in the millennium before 3000 BC the level of lake Chad in the Sahara desert was 30 to 40 metres higher than its present level, indicating a much higher annual rainfall for the whole area during that time.

It is the erosion effects of rain from this period that has given rise to the idea that the Sphinx must have been completed during this earlier wetter phase. Since 3000 BC there has not been sufficient precipitation to account for the extensive water erosion found in the excavated area surrounding the Sphinx. This is still a very controversial subject for Egyptologists are reluctant to accept that the Sphinx could have been carved before the start of Dynastic Egypt. Conversely the limestone outer casings of the pyramids, such as remain, do not show any significant water erosion which supports the orthodox dating of these monuments.

The climatic change around 3000 BC was marked, in the Alps, by an advance of the glaciers. This became known as the Piora Oscillation after Val Piora where the first evidence was discovered, through pollen analysis which indicated a fluctuating cold episode. As Professor Lamb says in his book 'Climate, History and the Modern World':

The duration of this colder episode seems to have been quite short, at the most four centuries, but traces of it or parallel vegetation changes extend to Alaska and the upper forest limits in the Columbian Andes and on the mountains of Kenya. There was evidently some disturbance of the global regime. Moreover it marked the end of the most stable warm climate of post-glacial times...referred to... as the 'Atlantic' climate period.

There is evidence from as far away as Australia that dramatic climatic upheavals occurred around the same time supporting the concept of a major world-wide shift in climate. This wobble lasted for a few hundred years before settling down to what is known as the 'sub-Boreal' epoch which lasted until about 1000 BC.

This perturbation was picked up in the analysis of bristle-cone pine tree-rings made famous for their recalibration of radio carbon dates. Summing up the climate of this period, Professor Lamb says:

Various peoples at various times have had legends of a Golden Age in some earlier time. The notion occurs in the literature of classical Greece and Rome and other peoples. Often it refers to an idealised state or society but occasionally there are references to a lost landscape, the best known being the Garden of Eden. It may be that these myths enshrine some of the changes with which this book is concerned. The times of highest civilisation and their decline were, of course, not generally synchronous in different regions. But there does seems to have been a very wide-ranging reduction of occupation of the north African and Arabian desert lands around 3000BC.

 

Lamb may well have added that Britain witnessed something similar around that period. As well as coinciding with new developments in the British megalithic structures - the ceasing of the building of long barrows and the start of the setting out of stone circles - this period saw important changes in agriculture. Up to the end of the fourth millennium BC the upland areas of the chalk downs had been cleared of trees and the land cultivated, but this process suddenly reversed and the natural vegetation started to return. From 3200 -2970BC, there was a marked decline in human activity, as shown in a dramatic decline in artefacts radio-carbon dated to that period. This suggest that some calamity had overtaken the people around that time. There is also evidence of a move away from crop gathering to animal husbandry. As Aubrey Burl, author of 'Prehistoric Avebury', says:

The years between 3250 and 2650BC constitute a 'Dark Age' in the prehistory of southern Britain, an obscure time from which little has survived... The evidence obtained from articles that can be securely dated by the Carbon-14 process graphically illustrates this decline... the evidence of steadily growing activity in southern and eastern England from the earliest Neolithic onwards, around 4450BC, then suddenly declines between 3100BC and 2850BC, before recovering its steady rise as population and output began once again to increase.

The cause of this sudden change is uncertain, although it is most likely connected to the climatic cooling seen in the Alps and elsewhere. But, paradoxically despite the drop in population this phase also saw the start of some of the most impressive monuments in the whole of Europe. So what is the connection?

From the early part of the twentieth century until relatively recent times it was thought that the development impulse, which had fathered the cultural changes in Britain, had arisen from a diffusion of ideas stemming from the Middle East and Mediterranean cultures. This view changed with the recalibration of radio carbon dates which arose when tree ring analysis pushed back the chronology for the dating of British monuments to a period before the equivalent developments in Crete and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. No obvious source for these new ideas could be found and so there was a move away from the diffusionist concepts to considering them part of an indigenous development within Britain.

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The challenge of the Marlborough Circles

The existence of the Marlborough Downs landscape circles poses a serious challenge to any suggestion of an evolutionary development within Britain itself . The monuments in Wiltshire all started within a relatively short period of each other and suggest a clarity of concepts unlike anything that had gone before. Nor was Wiltshire alone in this. Sites as far apart as Newgrange in Ireland and Maes Howe in the Orkneys carry the same cultural stamp. The skill displayed in building techniques of these monuments, aligned as they are to the mid-winter sunrise and sunset is of a very high order that does not have any obvious precedents. They are also amongst the oldest of these type of circular sites within the British Isles.

I have not studied these localities in depth to ascertain whether these monuments are also part of a larger landscape patterns. Such research could form the basis for another book. I am aware of at least one other landscape circle of identical size to the two that overlight the Marlborough Downs. It can be found in the Cotswold area in England and contains on its circumference, amongst other sites, the Rollright stone circle. It is important to establish the validity of the Marlborough Downs pattern in its own right, but information on the Cotswold landscape circle can be found on this web site. I am all too aware of how easy it is to see patterns where they do not exist, at least as consciously created forms. Yet I am sure also that in time other landscape circles will emerge.

An analysis of the location all circular monuments - stone circles, henges and round barrows - shows them heavily weighted in the western half of the country declining drastically in numbers as one moves towards the east. The one exception is Aberdeenshire, on the eastern coast of Scotland, which originally held one of the most extensive concentrations of stone circles in the whole of the British Isles.

Access to island sites like Callanish in the Outer Hebrides could only have been from the sea. It is this sea borne link stretching down from the north of Scotland to Ireland and thence to the western seaboard of France and the Iberian Peninsular that culturally unifies these widely dispersed sites. However improbable the only logical conclusion is that in conjunction with the known influxes of people around 3000 BC from Continental Europe came another group, not from the east but across the sea from the west, probably landing initially in Ireland before spreading into the western half of the British Isles. But where did these people come from?

This same time-frame also saw the start of Dynastic Egypt with its sudden flowering of a sophisticated cosmology, a written language and refined artistic skills. As with the development of the British monuments some authorities have suggested that this was an indigenous development, whilst others have seen it as an influence from the cultures of the Indus and Euphrates. The third alternative stated by Professor Emery was that this impulse came from another as yet undiscovered area.

To recap, despite some objections, there is good circumstantial evidence to support the following ideas:

• Both Britain and Egypt experienced a synchronistic infiltration of a group of people, with sophisticated concepts, around 3100 BC.
• This date coincided with a climatic disruption of sufficient intensity to cause the decline in the population of the indigenous Neolithic peoples in Britain and elsewhere.
• The design of the Great Pyramid and the inherent geometry of the Marlborough Downs landscape pattern powerfully links together these two cultures.

The problem that now confronts us is discovering the origin of these people for no evidence has emerged of their cultural home? This has indeed been the main stumbling block for Egyptologists in accepting Professor Emery's ideas.

Extract from The Keys to the Temple

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Related Material and Links

Keys to the Temple Introduction

Keys to the Temple Part 1

Silbury Hill

 

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 © David Furlong 2004

David Furlong has been teaching "earth energy" work for more than 35 years.