Hi, all
Sorry it’s so quiet around here lately. Hopefully things are going on behind the scenes and will begin to bubble to the surface soon. I’m making a lot of discoveries, but I’m not quite sure what all of them mean yet.
The quest for “planetary harmony” – that is, the search for a more complete table of planetary cycle calendar values and the internal ratios of these sets continues, after the discovery of pointers at Stonehenge to a third valid set of calendar values inspired trying to take other possible sets more seriously.
We could probably already see from things like 365 and 364 both being a part of Mayan calendar formulas that there aren’t necessarily fixed values for the planetary cycles, but if doesn’t come as a surprise that there may be as many as a dozen valid sets of them, it does come as a challenge and work in this area, even when steady, is naturally slow.
Also, after having a look at the remarkable book by Peter Harris and Norman Stockdale, I’ve been inspired to try harder working out values for numerous lunar cycles, which now seem better sorted out than some of the planetary values that have puzzled me for years (Mars and Mercury most of all).
It wasn’t that long ago I thought that maybe the ancients were going to content themselves with simply referring to the moon via the Lunar Year. The past few weeks have been quite an eye-opener in that respect.
By now, I have a dataset that provides remarkably precise values for the Eclipse Year and the Draconic Month, and in fact attempts to identify the various Megalithic Yard values as all being different, albeit usually less precise, versions of the Draconic Month.
The datasets are enough to call for definition of just what their nature actually is, which may be sort of a “catch-all” net that engages and coordinates a number of different planetary values, and provides a boarder spectrum from which the best, most precise values, might be selected – values precise enough that they may work in actual calendar formulas, instead of the numerous references to calendars in the proportions of ancient architecture being purely symbolic or ornamental.
Yesterday I had another look at Jim Wakefield’s From the Rollrights to Stonehenge paper – he’s made some brilliant observations and I’m keen to see how transferrable they are between different systems of calculation, but the Saros Cycle continues to be a bit of a strange beast so far.
http://www.dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/Rollrights08.pdf
I’ve also been working on a revision of the Great Pyramid, brought on by an experiment proposed by a GHMB member that resulted in revisiting Petrie’s data for the indentation on the sides of the Great Pyramid, and trying to take Petrie more seriously than ever with his original figures.
I had thought the margin for error in Petrie’s figures was enough to support the idea that the Great Pyramid was indented at the base in the casing, but the opposition has some formidable points, including the bearings from Glen Dash’s paper (the same paper that is the source of my data on the pyramid platform).
http://www.aeraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/aeragram13_2.pdf
Essentially, according to Petrie’s account, the data I thought was in the Great Pyramid’s slopes is even more demonstrably present that I thought it was, but there appears to be more data than I thought, and figuring out what all is it’s trying to say is another sizeable work in progress that may take some time.
Just for variety then with these two sizable projects on the drawing board, I’ve been taking another look at ancient Greek temples. I’ve found them a little mysterious around the edges and I’m hoping they will become less so with more recent lessons.
I much miss working more with Mayan archaeology, but I’m not sure how prepared I am to get any further with the subject without a better understanding of how complex ancient calendar systems might work.
Also, my number-crunching friends rodz and David Kenworthy introduced me to Pommelte, a henge in Germany. Bill Wilkinson has worked with this site apparently.
I found a dataset from Andre Spatzier and am absolutely marvelling at how reminiscent Pommelte henge is of Stonehenge mathematically when the data is converted to both modern feet (Post Ring A) and to Harris-Stockdale Megalithic Feet (the Palisade).
Hopefully I will have more details on some of the numbers themselves when I get a more developed picture and a better idea of how the parts work together.
That’s all for now. Keep believing in your roots.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 