The 'Hill of Many Stanes'

[An extract from a conversation with a correspondent in the US, from May and June, 2020, shortly after 'The Mathematics of the Megalithic Yard' was completed.] 

On Monday, June 1, 2020, 09:31:47 AM PDT, Thomas Yaeger [....] wrote:

[....], hi. Thanks for your mail. I'm going to respond to it in separate mails, since there is a lot to say. Interleaved, as usual (bad academic habit!)

At 06:03 29/05/2020, [....]  wrote:

Hi Thomas,
Sorry I haven't responded sooner. I've been working on a response to your article (& other emails) about the Megalithic Yard and didn' t want to write again until I had made some progress. I'm probably making it into too much of a project lol. [....} So, I'll send what I have for now (including other stuff I've been putting in a draft) and get it off to you. Sorry if it doesn't do justice to your arguments. 

[....] 

Your argument is very compelling and interesting. It seems like a real breakthrough although, naturally, I'm not enough of an expert to judge!

I think it is a real breakthrough, but it took a while to make it (as I said, the article was written in about a day and a half, after thinking it through for around two years). Developments are happening very fast now, which is interfering with my writing programme.

. I understand that math as such isn't the point of your argument, it's more about what Euler's number signified, right?

Yes. It's Euler's number, what it represents, and how they calculated it in the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE. I think I've changed my mind about how much Alexander Thom actually knew. I think he knew that it was a pointer towards the idea of the infinite. But he did not know that in those ancient days the ideas of the divine, the infinite, and reality itself were regarded as coterminous, and were just different ways of speaking about the same thing (which is an understanding which still survives in Hindu thought and religion). So for Thom, he could see the mathematics, but didn't understand the idea of reality itself as a primal fulness, or a plenum, and why that would engage ancient interest.

There is in Scotland a site near John O'Groats which is known as 'the hill of many stanes', which has remained uncleared since the neolithic. In the documentary he says he is impressed by what the builders of the circles were able to do without pen and paper, and logarithms. But that without such constructions (as the 'hill of many stanes') 'you can't really do it'.

What was he talking about in this short insert into the documentary? He doesn't explain what the small stones were for, or how they were used. I think I understand now that the field of stones was used to calculate Euler's number, in the context of an engineering construction. That site needs extensive re-evaluation.

Thom's book publications are very plain and not dogged with interpretation. I think he realised that what he could do, and get away with, was to draw attention to the fact that something very interesting and mathematically disciplined was happening in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, but the whole thing was just too big a pill to swallow for the academic community. He held back.

One thing that interests me is people's motivations, in particular, which of their psychological needs are being served by engaging in different courses of thought and action. I assume that people have always been curious about life and the world (some more than others, of course!), but what struck me about what you wrote is people's need for or a sense of order and structure in order to feel a degree of safety in a world that is challenging to fathom.

 It depends on where you are in society. Sometimes, as now people are told convenient lies (there is no money!), or circumspect evasions. Ancient priesthoods, because of their picture of the world, understood themselves to be dealing with the nature of reality itself. Neophytes would be chosen from all levels of society, since it was necessary to put a premium on intelligence, in order to join the worlds and make the incommensurate commensurate. Reality itself was the home of all knowledge, and all possibility. You can't deal with that without intelligence. The rest of society would have to make do with what Plato described as likelihoods, because they were too far from an understanding of reality.

Thom was not a classicist or a historian, so he did not know (as most modern scholars still don't) that ancient religion was about *knowledge* (scientia). The ancient priesthoods understood themselves to be dealing with knowledge, and that their activity was a science. That's all changed, but we continue to project modern religious intellectual weaknesses into the ancient past.

Thanks for the photographs.

More later,

Best,Thomas