Tanum Rock Drawings Sweden Deciphered as Astronomy

This posting is not about modern law but about ancient law. It was the ancient ordering of the stars of the heavens, which, according to Bertrand Russell, gave men their first conceptions of natural law.

We have been successful - so we allege - in deciphering the entire complex of Scandinavian rock drawings at the World Heritage Site of Tanum, now in Sweden, and formerly in Norway (until the year 1658 - see the Treaty of Roskilde).

Our decipherment shows that the more than 1500 petroglyphs (rock drawings) at Tanum and its rock art affiliate locations form an enormous ca. 70 square kilometer planisphere (sky map of the heavens).

The graphic presentation of the decipherment is found below:

The Decipherment of the Tanum Petroglyphs by Andis Kaulins 2007

This sky map forms a shape of the stars along the Milky Way which was probably intended by its makers to represent a heavenly boat of the ancient Nordic seafarers. We have drawn in the line of the Milky Way to show this, but it is not, as far as we know, actually drawn on the ground.

As we shall be presenting a paper on this topic in May of this year in Horn / Bad Meinberg, Germany, at the Machalett Conference on Preshistory and Early History, this posting just contains the basics of our discovery.

It was 30 years ago in the year 1977 that this author first visited the petroglyphs (rock drawings) of Tanum, located in Tanumshede, Västra Götaland (historically Bohuslän), about a two-hour drive north of Göteborg (Gothenburg). Tanum was not well known internationally in 1977, in spite of over 1500, in part gigantic, rock drawings.

Tanum includes the following petroglyphic locations covering many square kilometers of countryside: Vitlycke (where the museum is located), Tanum, Tegneby, Aspeberget, Gerum, Ryland, Oppen, Slänge, Varlös, Fossum, Lycke, Hoghem, Västerby, Ljungby, Tuvene, Litsleby, Kyrkoryk, Orrekläpp, Rungstung, Satetorp, Ryk, Tyft, Hovtorp, Björneröd, Bergslycke, Kalleby and Trättelanda.

One key to our decipherment was the Tanum rock drawing location map found at the World Heritage Site for Tanum. Without such a complete overview of the area, such a decipherment as ours would be impossible, since it is the entire complex of petroglyphs which builds the secret to this enormous site. All of these petroglyphs as a whole represent the stars of the heavens, with multiple petroglyphs in clusters representing constellations of stars known to us today. Many of these along the ecliptic of course form our modern Zodiac.

One cannot escape the feeling at Tanum that we are witnessing the birth of modern astronomy among the ancient seafarers, whose need for a knowledge of star orientation in sea navigation is beyond dispute.

These ancient men formed these constellations primarily for practical purposes and not, as mainstream archaeology persists in advocating regarding these petroglyphs, for unproven rites and rituals, which may have been a part of the complex of the ancient world, but certainly not as its moving force.

It is in fact little wonder that there are so many boats (ancient ships) represented in the petroglyphic figures. To the seafaring ancients, the night sky was a sea of stars. We think it possible that this might be the location at which our modern stellar constellations were initially "grouped" by European man - for purposes of navigation in seafaring travel.

There are other proofs - beyond the evidence of the rock drawings themselves - that this astronomical decipherment is correct, e.g. the names of locations at which the rock drawings are found, but these proofs will first be discussed in a paper in German to be presented to the 41st Conference of the Machalett Study Group on Prehistory and Early History in May of this year.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

UPDATE:

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Nineveh are Depicted in a Relief at Plate 52, Figure 1 Rawlinson: An Octopus as a Model for an Archimedes Screw Invented in the Days of Sennacherib  
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The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Herodotus in his travels was the first to refer to the "wonders" of the world and Callimachus of Cyrene in the 3rd century BC as a scholar at the library of the Alexandria Mouseion wrote A Collection of Wonders around the World .

The original idea of identifying Seven Wonders of the Ancient World comes from a list originally compiled in the 2nd century BC by Antipater of Sidon, who, instead of the Lighthouse of Alexandria listed below, included the Ishtar Gate.

These wonders, however, were not wonders of the natural world, but were all man-made engineering and construction wonders which the ancient Greeks as travelers (tourists) could visit several thousand years ago.

Listed in their order of construction, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were:

1. The Great Pyramid of Giza
2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
3. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
4. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
5. The Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
6. The Colossus of Rhodes
7. The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The Seven Wonders of the Medieval World

Various locations accessible to travelers in the Middle Ages - and some of these of course were totally unknown to the ancient Greeks - have been included by various sources among the much later Seven Wonders of the Medieval World. This is our selection from a longer list of alternatives:

• Stonehenge
• Colosseum of Rome
• Great Wall of China
• Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
• Hagia Sophia
• Leaning Tower of Pisa
• Taj Mahal

New Ancient Wonders of the World

Modern archaeological discoveries have also opened up our eyes to new, previously unknown wonders which fully qualify as Ancient Wonders of the World, of which this list, created by us, is only a limited example:

• The Tomb of Tutankhamun and other tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt (see National Geographic presentation) and the King Tut artifacts now found in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (see also an interpretation of these artifacts at Ark of the Covenant)
• Lascaux (also here), France, a cave featuring early human art (see decipherment)
• Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc, France, a cave featuring early human art
• Catal Huyuk, Anatolia (today Turkey), one of the most ancient Neolithic settlements
• The Temples of Malta and Gozo, early megalithic buildings
• Schliemann's Troy
• Evans' Knossos, Crete (see Phaistos Disc and the Lost Proof of Parallel Lines)
• Machu Picchu, Peru, lost city of the Incas
• Easter Island (see also Easter Island Script)
• Angkor Wat, Cambodia, a temple (see Sacred Sites)
• Val Camonica (see also here), ancient rock drawing site
• The Temple of Petra and the Nabateans in Jordan
• Yin Xu (Yin Ruins), Anyang, Henan, China, root of Chinese culture
• Emperor Qin's tomb and its terracotta army in China
• The Pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico
• Cahokia Mounds near Collinsville, Illinois, USA (see this interpretation)
• Qumran Caves, Israel (West Bank), where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found (see the Mishnayot and explanatory materials)
• Nazca Lines and Figures, Peru
• Pompeii, Italy, the buried, forgotten city
• Ur and the Great Ziggurat, Sumer in Mesopotamia, today Iraq
• Newgrange in Ireland (see alleged astronomical connection)
• Balnuaran of Clava, the Clava Cairns in Scotland (see alleged astronomical connection)
• Carnac, France (see alleged astronomical connection)
• Ancient World Megaliths and Megalithic Sites

The Seven Wonders of the Modern World

As world populations and technology have expanded, it has become more difficult to pick out just seven world wonders from the many now available. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (in 1994) were:

• The 31-mile Channel Tunnel under the North Sea, linking Britain and Europe
• The CN Tower in Toronto, the world's tallest freestanding structure on land
• The Empire State Building in New York City
• The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay
• The Itaipu Dam between Brazil and Paraguay
• The Netherlands North Sea Protection Works
• The Panama Canal

World Wonders Built in Recent Years

In our view, a number of new building structures definitely fall into the category of world wonders:

• - The Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge on the Kobe-Naruto Route, Japan, is the world's longest suspension bridge.
• - The Oresund Bridge linking Denmark (Copenhagen) and Sweden (Malmö), is the world's longest single bridge for both road and railway traffic (see NASA photo)
• - The Viaduct de Millau in France, the world's highest road bridge, is higher even than the Eiffel Tower (beautiful opening page) (for the Viaduc de Millau see also the French sites here and here).
• - The Troll A Gas Platform is the world's largest offshore gas platform (Norway)
• - The Millennium Dome at Greenwich, United Kingdom, is the world's largest dome and was built on the Meridian Line in Greenwich (Longitude 0° 0' 0") from which world time is measured and world location is reckoned.
• - The Laerdal Road Tunnel, Norway, is the world's longest road tunnel, on the road connecting Oslo with Bergen.
• - The Falkirk Wheel, Scotland, is the world's first and only rotating boat lift.
• - The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest dam in the world.

To those - as follows - we can add modern skyscrapers and similar tall structures which mark the modern age as mankind continues to reach for the stars.

The World's Tallest Man-Made Structures and Buildings

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and Emporis have partnered recently and rank the world's tallest structures and buildings. As written at Emporis: "Taipei 101 is the world's tallest building, surpassing the height of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur in late August 2003."

See the Wikipedia for a current list of tallest buildings and structures in the world, ranked by category. Many of these man-made structures are true world wonders in our modern age. See also a list of the historical development of the world's tallest man-made freestanding structures on land.

Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century

The National Academy of Engineering has a list of their selection of the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the just past 20th century but none of these are architectural or archaeological tourist travel sites, even though they are world wonders in their own right:

• Electrification
• Automobile
• Airplane
• Water Supply and Distribution
• Electronics
• Radio and Television
• Agricultural Mechanization
• Computers
• Telephone
• Air Conditioning
• and Refrigeration
• Highways
• Spacecraft
• Internet
• Imaging
• Household Appliances
• Health Technologies
• Petroleum and
• Petrochemical Technologies
• Laser and Fiber Optics
• Nuclear Technologies
• High-performance Materials

As one can see from that list, in ancient times mankind's wonders of the world were confined to things that men built and constructed. In our modern age, the wonders of the world are rightly expanded to include the many new and wondrous things that man has created beyond architecture alone.

Happy Halloween 2006 : The Ancients Revered Cats

Happy Halloween 2006 : This is our "Ancients" Cat Pumpkin
The ancients revered cats

HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2006.
The ancients revered cats
See The Role of Cats in Ancient Egypt