Lost Technology of the Ancients: The Crystal Sun
 Robert Temple reconstructs the wholly forgotten story of light technology in ancient civilisation. Dating back to at least 2600 BC in Old Kingdom Egypt, but unknown to archaeologists and historians, a science of optics and a sophisticated technology for the manufacture of lenses was widespread and fundamental in ancient times.
The ancient Greek
Pythagoreans of the 5th century BC believed that the sun was a
gigantic crystal ball larger than the earth, which gathered the
ambient light of the surrounding cosmos and refracted it to earth,
acting as a giant lens.
A giant lens? In
the 5th century BC?
Perhaps it was because nobody until now has been willing to
recognise that lenses existed in antiquity, and that the crystal sun
idea was overlooked, and has never been described in any books on
the history of science or philosophy. However, it appears in my
latest book The Crystal Sun, the paperback of which is
published by Arrow (London) in Britain and Australia on 1 February.
The hardback, from Century (London), has been available in Australia
since May, 2000.
What, then, is all this about
ancient lenses? Surely some mistake?!
The fact is that I
have located more than 450 ancient lenses in museums all round the
world, and I even own a Greek crystal lens of the 6th century BC
myself. Photos of many of these ancient lenses appear in my book.
Anyone interested in full details of the actual lenses themselves
should obtain the hardback edition of my book, because ten
appendices full of such detailed information have been omitted from
the paperback because the book was too thick.
Ancient lenses!
Well, how far back do they go? The earliest actual lenses which
I have located are crystal ones dating from the 4th Dynasty of Old
Kingdom Egypt, circa 2500 BC. These are to be found in the Cairo
Museum and two are in the Louvre in Paris. But archaeological
evidence showing that they must have been around at least 700 years
earlier has recently been excavated at Abydos in Upper Egypt. A tomb
of a Pre-Dynastic king there has yielded an ivory knife handle
bearing a microscopic carving which could only have been done under
considerable magnification (and of course can only be seen with a
strong magnifying glass today). Thus, we know that magnification
technology was in use in Egypt in 3300 BC. I reproduce both photos
and drawings of this crucial evidence.
But magnification
technology was not of interest merely for making and viewing small
carvings. Its most important use was in telescopes. In fact, on the
jacket of my book the reader will encounter an ancient image of
someone looking through a telescope. This is a photo I took of a
fragment of a Greek pot excavated about twenty years ago at the
Acrocopolis in Athens, and dating to about the 6th century BC.
If there is all this evidence,
why has no one ever talked about it before? The answer seems to be
that unique capacity for stupidity which so distinguishes the human
race, for obstinacy and the determination not to see. I call it consensus
blindness. Everybody agrees not to look at things that make them
uncomfortable, or which they think shouldn't exist. Therefore, the
fact that more than 450 ancient lenses have been sitting around in
the world's museums for all of these years and have been invisible
is explicable only by invoking the theory that people
subconsciously conspire not to see what they don't want to see.
It is not as if I have come up
with a little bit of vague evidence and want to use it to construct
some wacky theory of my own. There are plenty of people crying in
the wilderness with theories based on a little bit of disputed
evidence. That is not the case with my book at all. I am standing
right in the centre of the town square surrounded by a mountain of
evidence which can only be ignored if people are so determined to
look the other way that they are prepared to walk around with their
necks crooked.
I attended the 8th
International Congress of Egyptologists in Cairo in the spring of
2000, and went prepared to deliver a paper on ancient Egyptian
optical technology. But I was not allowed to deliver it. I was told
there was 'no appropriate category'. Alas, it is true that there
was no such category, as I was the only historian of science present
at the Congress of 1500 people, a fact which I found rather
depressing.
It might be worthwhile to
review just why my discoveries are so important for Egyptology, and
everyone interested in the pyramids needs to know about them as
well.
First of all, there is the
famous question of the orientation of the Great Pyramid. It is so
perfectly oriented to the geographical points of the compass that no
one has ever been able to understand how this was done, for the
accuracy exceeds any hitherto known technology of ancient Egypt.
Then there is the equally
famous question of how the extreme accuracy of the construction of
the Great Pyramid was possible. In 1925, J. H. Cole discovered in
his survey that the great pavement, upon which the Great Pyramid
partially rests and which surrounds it, is flat to within 15 mm.
Earlier scholars had commented that the accuracy of the surface of
the Great Pyramid was equivalent to the accuracy of the grinding of
an optical reflective mirror in a giant modern telescope. The
original (now largely destroyed) casing stone sides of the structure
have been compared in their precision to the mirror of the Mount
Palomar Telescope. How were such feats accomplished?
Back in the 1960s and 1970s,
the Argentine physicist Jose Alvarez Lopez claimed that it was
physically impossible for the Great Pyramid to have been constructed
without extremely accurate optical surveying techniques such as are
used in theodolites. I met Lopez in the 1970s and he told me this
himself, arousing my interest in this question for the first time.
But Lopez said to me sadly that he could not find any evidence for
any ancient optical technology, so it was all a mystery.
Well, it is a mystery no
longer.
The Great Pyramid was
clearly surveyed with early forms of optical surveying instruments
that we could call proto-theodolites. This is all described at great
length in my book, and I urge anyone interested in the pyramids to
read all about it.
I have proved from
archaeological evidence that the technology for surveying the Great
Pyramid existed at least as far back as 3300 BC, and doubtless
earlier than that, since we can hardly presume that the ivory knife
handle was the first such object to exist, as it is already highly
sophisticated and suggests a long-standing tradition.
I was surprised as I strolled
through the museums of the world and saw ancient lenses on public
display labelled as all kind of crazy things - as anything but
lenses! When I went to study ancient Greek lenses in the
Department of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum, I met one
member of the staff who insisted that there never were any ancient
Greek lenses. (This is despite the fact that Aristophanes describes
one in his play The Clouds, and there are countless ancient
references to optical technology in the ancient literature, which I
have combed exhaustively and described in my book.) I then proceeded
to photograph and measure some ancient Greek lenses in that very
room, which the person concerned refused to acknowledge, and I
thought more than a little ironic that there is a display cabinet
standing just outside the door to the room containing ancient Greek
lenses mis-labelled as 'counters', and which can be seen clearly
magnifying the strands of the cloth underneath them.
When I was in the Athens
Archaeological Museum studying Mycenaean lenses, which were clearly
on display in the Mycenaean Room (where they are mis-labelled), I
could not help but be aware that a former Deputy Director of the
same museum had written an article about an apparent crystal lens
which he had himself excavated on Crete, but he neglected to mention
in his article that his own museum had many such lenses in display
cabinets which anyone could walk into the museum and see on any day
of the week.
Ancient lenses tended
to be of rock crystal until Carthaginian and Roman times, beginning
about the 4th century BC, after which glass lenses became more
common (being much cheaper), and crystal lenses then became rare.
I discovered significant
numbers of ancient British lenses, mis-catalogued in mineral
collections; they had been moved to geological museums from their
original archaeological collections and were thought to be
'crystal specimens'! Some of them were most ingenious, and had
what I called 'resting-points' protruding from their backs so
that they could rest on a surface and an artisan could reach his
cutting tool round the back and have both hands free for his work.
In ancient Troy, one crystal lens excavated by Schliemann had a hole
in the centre. Some people thought this was an argument for claiming
that the lens in question was 'useless' because it was
perforated in the middle and thus clearly no lens. However, the hole
in the centre in no way interferes with the magnification, and
offers an extremely clever way for an artisan to insert his cutting
tool directly through the middle of the magnifier, and have
magnification of his work all around it in a circle!
Schliemann excavated about 48
crystal lenses at Troy, but these all disappeared during the Second
World War, and all that remained were catalogue descriptions and a
single photo of four of the lenses in a group (reproduced in my
book). I tried for many years to find these missing lenses, and a
friend who various times approached the museum in East Berlin where
the lenses were last known to have been stored was repeatedly lied
to and told that the lenses had 'been destroyed by Allied bombing
in the War'. But of course all this was complete rubbish. When the
truth finally came out about the missing Trojan gold hoard found by
Schliemann, and that the Red Army had seized it and taken it back to
Russia, I suspected the lenses were probably with the gold. And
indeed they were. But I have never been granted access to them; the
Russians are afraid the Germans will claim them back, and so they
won't let scholars have normal opportunities to study them.
To return to the subject of
the ancient British lenses, I should mention that they provide the
missing physical evidence that the late Professor Alexander Thom was
looking for when he said the accuracy of the astronomical
observations of the ancient Britons exceeded the capacities of the
naked eye, and he wondered about their optical technology. We now
have the lenses that seem to fill Thom's need. Indeed, there are
good reasons for suspecting that the real purpose of the trilithon
lintels at Stonehenge were to support a wooden observation platform
for telescopic observations of the moon. In other words, Stonehenge
would have been domed. I present the evidence for all of this in my
book at some length.
The only group of
archaeologists who wholly and enthusiastically welcomed my findings
into early optics were the Scandinavian ones, in particular the
Swedish archaeologists. Far from being put out with my findings,
they were delighted by them. I made very extensive studies of the
Viking lenses, and recently one of my articles has been published in
Swedish translation in the Swedish archaeological annual, Gotlдndskt
Arkiv (Vol. 72 for the year 2000). The Vikings were the last of
the ancients, as far as optical technology went, and they
accomplished miracles of crystal engineering. They actually produced
crystal lenses as small as water drops that could magnify three
times. I call their achievements 'micro-optical technology'.
Although my discoveries about
ancient Chinese optical technology were rather limited (extracts
from ancient texts plus reports of six excavated ancient lenses
which I was unable to inspect personally, in one case because of
floods preventing me from getting to a provincial museum), The
Crystal Sun is being translated into Chinese and I have
been asked to lecture about it at China's leading technical
university, Tsinghua University in Beijing, of which I am a Fellow.
My resources not being
infinite, I never travelled to Mexico and Peru to inspect the
ancient crystal lenses which apparently are to be found there, so
the New World is not well represented in my account. I hope others
will remedy this deficiency one day. I do, however, have a special
account of the so-called 'Skull of Doom', a life-sized crystal
skull of Maya origin, in my book, since it was the first ancient
crystal object I ever studied, when I was 18 years old!
There is much weird lore in my
book, so much so in fact that it cannot all be absorbed as casual
reading. I have written a long chapter on the subject of
'thunderstones', and another on meditative hallucinations, all
of which are linked in wonderful ways to ancient optical ideas. I
give a lot of attention to the religious traditions associated with
light, from ancient Egypt down through the 'light-theology' of
Christians like Robert Grosseteste in the Middle Ages.
But it is not only light that
is considered in The Crystal Sun. Shadows are equally
important. In ancient Egypt, the science of shadows was far advanced
and highly precise. And in this connection I have made a major
discovery, which is shown in a photograph taken on 21 December. For
I found that there is a special winter solstice sunset shadow cast
upon the south face of the Great Pyramid, which nobody had ever
noticed before, despite the fact that it has been clearly visible
once a year for at least 3500 years. Just think, 3500 missed
opportunities!
As the Gnostic Gospel of
Thomas likes to say, 'Those who have ears to hear, let them
hear.' I would extend this to say: 'Those who have eyes to see,
let them damned well start using them! It would make a change!'
What is this winter
solstice shadow, then? It is a shadow cast by the second
pyramid, known as the Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren, which is the
Greek form of the name), upon the Great Pyramid at sunset on 21
December.
But the mere fact that one
pyramid casts a shadow on another is not the point. What is
important is the nature of that shadow. And here is where it all
gets very interesting. Anyone who has made a study of the interior
of the Great Pyramid will be aware that both the ascending and
descending passages inside the structure have the same slope, a
curious angle of slightly more than 26 degrees. This in itself might
seem a bit odd. But bearing in mind how the ancient Egyptians loved
a good tease, it was wonderfully amusing and surprising for me to
discover that at sunset on the winter solstice they had chosen to
project a giant shadow on the exterior of the same structure having
the same slope as the passages concealed on the inside!
It was a bit of a game,
surely: what you see on the outside is what you get on the inside,
but you can only realise this if you already know it in advance! In
other words, it was for the initiated only. They could have their
little laugh to themselves, but nobody else knew what the hell was
going on.
I also managed to demonstrate
that the ascending passage leading up to the causeway from the
Valley Temple beside the Sphinx also has this same slope. Its slope
had never been considered or measured before. And yet the fact that
its slope is the same as the ascending and descending passages of
the Great Pyramid surely indicates a common canon of design for the
two structures, at the very least.
If the Egyptians were really
intending to cast a shadow on the outside of the Great Pyramid which
secretly indicated the nature of the slopes to be found in the
concealed interior, then there are important consequences to be
considered: it means that the Pyramid
of Khafre had to be the precise size it is, and in precisely the
position it is, for this shadow to be correctly cast.
That is rather a lot of stone
to lug around, just to cast a shadow.
So isn't there something
more to this than just the common slope angle? Well, yes, there is
indeed. It just so happens that this odd angle of slightly more than
26 degrees is the only acute angle possible for a right triangle to
be formed that is known as 'the golden triangle', because it
embodies the famous Golden Mean Proportion. And it also just so
happens that the Golden Mean Proportion is at the basis of the
entire canon of ancient Egyptian art and architecture, as I also
explain in my book at some length. And in fact, the shadow if
truncated by a vertical line running up the middle of the south face
of the Great Pyramid, does actually form a golden triangle, which
once again is mirrored on the inside, because it is a similar golden
triangle which determines the precise point of commencement of the
Grand Gallery on the interior of the pyramid, as I show in a drawing
in my book. And as for the vertical line running up the pyramid,
that too is real, and has been shown from an aerial photograph,
although it is invisible to the naked eye or by any perceptual means
at ground level. There is actually a purposeful slight indentation
of a few inches in the construction of the side of the pyramid,
discovered in measurements made by Petrie. This 'apothegm', as
geometers call such vertical lines, forms the right angle to
transform the solstice shadow into a perfect golden triangle.
So we see here the Egyptians
were playfully carrying on with their geometric obsessions in full
view of the world, casting giant shadows in golden mean proportion,
but for at least 3500 years nobody noticed.
All this blindness! What more
have we not noticed?
I hope that people will dip
into, if not fully read, The Crystal Sun, because all of
these findings are important and need to be known. I was
disappointed not to be able to speak at the Cairo Conference and
reveal some of these findings to the Egyptologists. For instance, I
was able to demonstrate the existence and use of diamond-tip drills
in Egypt, but they are so small they can easily be overlooked, just
as the much larger lenses always have been. I wanted to warn the
diggers that those dirty little objects that might seem like tiny
dark pebbles could be diamond drill tips. But alas, they still
don't know.
One of the lessons from all of
this is surely the need for archaeologists not to close their eyes
to scientific subjects. They have always been reluctant to study the
fundamentals of astronomy, so the field of 'archaeo-astronomy'
is one of struggle and travail, making relatively little headway in
the academic community, despite heroic efforts on the part of a few
scholars. But as for 'archaeo-optics', as its sole investigator,
I fear we have a long way to go before its implications will get
through to other scholars. And so, I ask you as readers to help out,
by calling these things to the attention of anyone you know, and
beating some friendly drums. Let's get the news out!
Copyright © Robert Temple
Robert Temple is the
author of nine books which have been translated into 43 languages.
Temple's classic The Sirius Mystery, containing detailed data
on the star Sirius which modern astronomers have only just
discovered, was originally published in 1976 and republished in 1998
to universal acclaim. Robert Temple has a web site at http://www.robert-temple.com.
© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting.
|
articles 
