An Ancient Heritage

By | April 4, 2007
6 Comments

I brought three books with me on vacation this week:

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel

  • Lost Discoveries
  • Uriel’s Machine

The first two books – Guns, Germs, and Steel and Lost Discoveries – are solid popular science books. They might be controversial, but I doubt that any critic would characterize either book as wacky. Uriel’s Machine is wacky. But entertainingly so.

All three of these books challenge the traditional western historical narrative. If your self-worth is based on a sense of European racial superiority, you probably won’t care for Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book…

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. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops.

I’m no fan of political correctness being inserted into history. Fortunately Guns doesn’t suffer from that problem. Jared Diamond doesn’t suggest that the West stole its wealth and accomplishments from others, or that it covered up some magnificent African Golden Age. Rather, the initial advantages of the Western World are leveraged over the last 10,000 years. Advancement is exponential. Once a civilization gets a little ahead on this upward curve, it tends to stay ahead.

“Lost Discoveries” expanded my idea of the Western intellectual heritage. It’s not just the Greeks that we owe. One huge contribution – the “Arabic” number system – with its zero and a place-dependent values, comes to us from India. We have 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes because of the Babylonian sexagesimal number system. The twelve hour clock-face is a direct descendant of the Zodiac wheel.

But the wacky Uriel’s Machine has some neat stuff too. When wading through the book make sure to carry your inner skeptic with you. No, the sudden arrival of domestic animals 10,000 years ago was not the result of ancient genetic engineering. Selective breeding – yes; Recombinant DNA technology – no.

But interspersed within the silliness are, I think, some real gems. The book argues convincingly that Megalithic cultures – like those who built Stone Hinge – used their Stone Age observatories to understand seasons for agriculture. From a central point they would mark each sunrise. From this they deduced that the year moved in 366 day cycles – that’s 366 sunrises each year. They then described a 366 degree circle. It appears, in other words, that they had a heliocentric model of the solar system in the Stone Age.

The Babylonians then dropped it down to a 360 degree circle because it worked better with their sexagesimal number system (60 x 6). Anyway, that’s the argument that’s made.

In the 1960′s Alexander Thom noted that most European megalithic sites were built using a standard unit of measure he dubbed the Megalithic Yard – 32.64 inches. This short yard survived into modern times in places as distant as India (the 33 inch gaz) and Spain (the 32.5 inch vara). Dr. Thom said,

This unit was used from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any differences between the values determined in the English and Scottish circles… The length of rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than 0.03 inch… If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod of its neighbour… the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.

The modern meter is kept standard by defining it on the basis of a certain wavelength of light. The authors of Uriel’s Machine may have discovered how the megalithic yard was standardized.

What these ancient engineers had done was to mark out a circle of substantial diameter using a cord and centre pin, and then divide the circumference into exactly 366 equal cords by trial and error. They had then erected two poles to mark out one 366th part of the circle, and swung an adjustable pendulum until it produced exactly 366 beats during the transit of a convenient bright star between the two posts. The length of the pendulum is now exactly one half of a megalithic yard.

You can produce this measurement at any latitude and with different weights at the end of the pendulum. It is a completely standard measure.

Back in college I had a history professor named Dr. Tankersly who emphasized three guidelines when studying history:

  1. Don’t think of ancient people as stupid. They were just as smart as us, but had fewer shoulders to stand on.

  2. Don’t think of ancient people as more noble, smart, or worthy than we are today. There were highs and lows, but there was never a Golden Age where everyone was enlightened.
  3. Lastly, history rarely takes sharp turns. Closely examine any “sudden development.” You probably don’t have the whole story.

Guns, Germs, and Steel states that people have been biologically modern for at least 50,000 years. I doubt, then, that people sat around in caves for those first 45,000 years making no advances at all. When the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations arose 5000 years ago it seems probable that they were building on earlier advances.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    Sharp turns are the result of reaching some critical mass, a tipping point. Human beings fiddled around with planting seeds and trying to show up at the right place at the right time for many thousands of years before agriculture just “emerged” over night. Likewise, there were steam engines in the ancient world, but a lot of things had to come together before the Industrial Revolution seemed to appear out of nowhere. When the singularity — that sharpest of turns — occurs, it will also be the result of a long, slow building up.

  • DerHistorian

    I cannot understand the reasoning of the article’s author. The point is made that powerful and provident cultures are built atop of the shoulders of others, yet in the same breath the author claims not to support the “politically correct” notion that Europeans destroyed knowledge of the achievements of the cultures located on the African continent. History is not “politically correct”. Europeans did destroy most knowledge of African history, Europeans did build their cultures on the shoulders of “non-white” civilizations, most modern Europeans are descended from horse herders of the Russian steppes from 2,500 bce. Their ancestors did not build pyramids like the Americans, the Chinese and the Africans [well, maybe they did, if the Ukraine pyramid findings hold water]. Judging by the self-contradiction of the author’s article, I’d guess the author is a self-described “white” person.
    It’s OK if you are, but I’ve had it up to here with “white” historians denying that their people owe alot to other “non-white” civilizations, especially Africans, and denying that during the past 1000 years Europeans have destroyed the civilizations of 4 (or 5) continents under the banner of “white Christian European civilization”.
    I am a multi-ethnic person living in a multi-ethnic metropolis. It’s amazing how much racism I perceive amongst historians [even Afrocentric ones].

  • Phil Bowermaster

    Historian –

    I think that one can acknowledge that “powerful and provident cultures are built atop of the shoulders of others” without buying into a reading of history that casts white people (or anyone else) into the role of The Villains.

    Pyramid-building was a great technological advance; no doubt the Greeks and then Romans learned a lot about engineering from the earlier Egyptian civilization. But the Romans then applied that knowledge to make more useful things — aqueducts, for example, that promoted both the longevity of that particular civilization as well as further developments.

    By the way, why are you surprised that “even” Afrocentric historians are racist? Would you be surprised to learn that a self-described Eurocentric historian was a racist? Neither would necessarily surprise me.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    Stephen –

    I would just like to echo DerHistorian on one thing — it is perfectly okay that you are, in fact, “white.” No one around here thinks any less of you for it. In fact, my wife once described you (in a very offhand way) as “one of the good ones.”

  • http://www.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    DerHistorian:

    Yes, I’m white. It’s not a source of pride or shame. It can be an inconvenience – I just sunburned the crap out of myself this afternoon. That sort of thing happens to we pale guys on vacation. A scene from the movie “Fools Rush In” comes to mind.

    Anyway, Phil nailed my point. “One can acknowledge that “powerful and provident cultures are built atop of the shoulders of others” without buying into a reading of history that casts white people (or anyone else) into the role of The Villains.”

    The author of Guns, Germs, and Steel was asked why the Western world was so rich by comparison to the rest of the world. “Guns” is his answer to the question. You’ll have to read that book to get the full answer. I can’t do it justice.

    But, briefly, the success of the West is not because the people in the west are smarter, more moral, or better people. Instead, the West was the beneficiary of several things that gave them a competitive advantage to other civilizations. Part of it was an incredibly fortunate set of domestic animals for both labor and food. Plentiful metals were available to allow bronze and then iron ages. And the large horizontal landmass (spread far over the same latitude) meant that the Old World could experiment with multiple civilizations (religion, government, ect.) at the same time.

    These advantages put the West a little ahead of most of the rest of the world. And when you are dealing with exponential processes like technological development, a little advantage can become a very big lead over a few hundred years.

    Phil:

    You married well my friend. :-)

  • doctorpat

    The thing I found horribly annoying about Diamond’s GG&S is how he kept returning to the “white people are smarter” theme.

    Yes he addresses it once, refutes it.. and then five pages later he’s back refuting it again. All the way through the book. Look, deal with it once and get one with your life, anyone who really believes that the english were genetically superior to the Chinese is probably still trying to work out how to get the book open. They certainly won’t be able to read all the way past the preface.

    The second point is that he was quite convincing when it came to answering why the industrial revolution started somewhere in Eurasia, but quite weak in adressing why it was Northern Europe of all places.

    My view is that it was a lucky combination of a relatively free society combined with relative political stability… and a huge influx of wealth from the discovery of new trade routes (to India, the Indies and the Americas) that provided a breathing space for the capitalists while the governments were trying to adapt to work out how to capture it all for themselves.