Astronomy is the oldest of the sciences,The following posting is a seminal piece forcefully supporting our decades-long identification of many carved markings on ancient standing stones as being astronomical in nature, a view long ignored by mainstream archaeological communities, to their own stubborn detriment.
and the contemplation of the heavens,
with their periodic regularities,
gave men their first conceptions of natural law.
-- Bertrand Russell (later Nobel Prize winner for Literature)
in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon and Schuster (Clarion Books), New York, 1948. Quoted at AndisKaulins.com.
Perhaps recent reports about spectacular new -- surely cosmologically-related -- finds near Stonehenge and Woodhenge at Durrington Walls will help bring about a much needed change of academic focus in megalithic research toward a more serious astronomical understanding of the "heavenly" origins of mankind's belief systems, which began with a search for natural law in stargazed realms of stars.
Professor Vince Gaffney of the School of Archaeological & Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford is quoted at The Guardian yesterday, June 22, 2020, for a discovery first announced publicly just this Monday:
"The size of the shafts and circuit surrounding Durrington Walls is without precedent within the UK....[As a late addition to this posting, we add here a link to the actual research publication online at Internet Archaeology: Gaffney, V. et al. 2020 A Massive, Late Neolithic Pit Structure associated with Durrington Walls Henge, Internet Archaeology 55. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.55.4].
It demonstrates the significance of Durrington Walls Henge, the complexity of the monumental structures within the Stonehenge landscape, and the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated."
The BBC quotes Dr. Richard Bates, St Andrews' School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, that the new discovery points to
"[A]n even more complex society than we could ever imagine".How true, how true. But, in fact, WE have "imagined" it, for many years now.
See Stonehenge Deciphered
and our series of 2013 postings regarding Stonehenge and its forbears.
We now turn to the matter at hand, Mané Lud, a decipherment that has been slumbering on my hard disk for many years, and which we have now completed.
In 2019 we published an initial posting titled The Tumulus viz. Dolmen of Mane Lud viz. Mané Lud Locmariaquer Morbihan France Deciphered as Marking the Stars of the Vernal Equinox ca. 4320 BC.
Below is our just now updated decipherment, June 21, 2020, including astronomical analysis of the passageway stones of that same megalithic site Mané Lud in Locmariaquer, Morbihan, Brittany, France.
Decipherment of the Mané Lud Megalithic Site & its Passageway Stones
(Please Click on the Image to Get a Larger, More Readable Graphic)
Please note that our own drawings above and below are based on images found at Serge Cassen's online presentation of Le Mané Lud en mouvement. Déroulé de signes dans un ouvrage néolithique de pierres dressées à Locmariaquer (Morbihan), Paru dans Préhistoires Méditerranéennes, 2 | 2011 [Mané Lud in Motion. Unrolling the signs on a Neolithic standing stone structure in Locmariaquer (Morbihan). CNRS, Laboratoire de recherches archéologiques (UMR 6566), Université de Nantes, BP 81227, 44312 Nantes, at serge.cassen@univ-nantes.fr and https://journals.openedition.org/pm/582].
Cassen's detailed work on photographs of the stones was immensely helpful, as was also his correct instinct to search for groupings of figures carved on the stones, including comparisons to similar megalithic figures found elsewhere.
Cassen's detailed work on photographs of the stones was immensely helpful, as was also his correct instinct to search for groupings of figures carved on the stones, including comparisons to similar megalithic figures found elsewhere.
The proof of the astronomical nature of the markings on the standing stones of the dolmen derives less from our identification of the specific stars in the night sky corresponding to those markings, but derives more so -- indeed spectacularly more so -- from unexplained carved details on the stones that we can explain by astronomy, but which otherwise are hardly to be explained.
Especially in the case of what we call the "Auriga Megalith" at Mané Lud", two small and at first apparently unimportant horizontal carved lines on the megalith clearly substantiate our decipherment of the carvings as astronomical.
Megalith #21 at Mané Lud not only marks Stars of Auriga near the Vernal Equinox point 4320 BC but also line-marks Milky Way Borders
Click on the image to obtain a larger screen graphic, which is easier to read.
On the Starry Night Pro map to the left, we have then drawn those figures from the right to show the corresponding stars, including the virtually star-empty square next to Capella, the 3rd brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere after Arcturus in Boötes and Vega in Lyra, and showing how the two otherwise inexplicable horizontal lines drawn on the Auriga megalith mark the borders of the Milky Way at those points.
Auriga was important as the initial start for our decipherment of Mané Lud because it is located just next to the Vernal Equinox in ca. 4320 B.C. -- a date we apply to the Mané Lud dolmen.
Auriga was important as the initial start for our decipherment of Mané Lud because it is located just next to the Vernal Equinox in ca. 4320 B.C. -- a date we apply to the Mané Lud dolmen.
The megalith that is the neighbor to the left of the Auriga megalith must then logically mark the stars of Gemini, and, indeed, one sees two sets of twin figures viz. symbols, one set arguably marking the Upper Twins and the other duo the Lower Twins, as is found for Gemini in tablet texts from the ancient Fertile Crescent which we ascribe to the Sumerians (some ascribe them to Babylon) such as MUL.APIN, where one set of twins is transcribed as MASH.TAB.BA.GAL.GAL and the other set as MASH.TAB.BA.TUR.TUR.
In our decipherment we then hit a snag that kept us busy for quite some time. The snag was the problematic mystery of the unexpected markings on the next megalith to the left of Gemini, which logically should then mark stars in an area of the sky that we modernly group together to form Cancer, a constellation of the Zodiac, characterized by a dim area of the sky that has few bright visible stars, indeed, only two stars brighter than 4th magnitude. Accordingly, we were for quite some time greatly puzzled by the 12 flying-like figures found carved on that megalith. By our astronomical analysis of all the passageway megaliths -- those figures could only mark the stars of Cancer -- but how?
The solution to the puzzle was the discovery viz. recognition that the "Cancer Megalith" at Mané Lud depicted the famous Beehive Cluster of stars in Cancer. This was quite an amazing revelation, since it was totally unexpected.
The Beehive Cluster is made up of "the 1000 stars in Cancer", mid-located in Cancer virtually right on the Ecliptic. But most of those stars are not visible directly to the naked eye, so that the Beehive Cluster seemed an odd choice.
Modernly, the Beehive Cluster is designated as Messier 44 (M 44), New General Catalogue NGC 2632 of deep-sky objects, and Cr 189 in the Collinder Catalogue of open clusters. To our surprise, our reading informed us that in ancient times, the Beehive Cluster was in fact already well known to the astronomers and called Praesepe. Indeed, the brightest of its stars in exceptionally clear conditions were/are visible to persons with acute vision, which is one reason that it was the first recognized "nebula", prior to the invention of telescopes.
Richard Hinckley Allen wrote about Praesepe in Star Names, for which see online The history of the nebula Praesepe (from Star Names, by Richard Hinckley).
Richard Hinckley Allen wrote about Praesepe in Star Names, for which see online The history of the nebula Praesepe (from Star Names, by Richard Hinckley).
As we can see in the image below, the "Cancer Megalith" at Mané Lud marks stars in this area of the heavens with flying-like figures that represent the brightest stars in the Beehive Cluster:
Megalith #17 at Mané Lud marks Cancer via the Brightest Stars
in the Beehive Cluster (M 44, NGC 2632, Cr 189)
Click on the image for a larger screen graphic, easier to read.
Decipherments of the stars represented by the other passageway megaliths remain solid in our mind but provisional for now in terms of publication, until we can write them up in greater detail, a write-up process which can face surprises, so we are careful and say "provisional" for now. Our decipherment is confined for the time being to the larger graphic image at the beginning of this posting, without more details, which are ultimately forthcoming.