Ancient Metrology

Submitted by astro3 on Friday, 26 May 2006 Page Views: 8576

Its a little-known fact that the inner diameter of the ring of Stonehenge sarsens is exactly equal to one hundred 'Roman' feet. A Roman foot is just under one Imperial foot. That's using the closely-concordant estimates of this sarsen-ring diameter published by Ronald Atkinsion in the 20th century and by Flinders Petrie in the 19th. So, as John Michell has argued, was this ancient temple constructed to preserve a measure?

It does not however show the 'megalithic yard' so well, and the best we can do here is to suggest that the circumference of that circle equalled 45 Megalithic rods, a rod being 2 1/2 megalithic yards - but, that isn't quite such a high-precision agreement as we get with the Roman foot.

Because of the smoothed surface of the inner sarsen surfces, and the way the lintels fitting onto them are made level, and curve round following the circle, to hold just the same diameter of circle, it does look as if the thirty grand sarsens were really built for this function. Also the English Heritage dating has ascertained that this ring of sarsens is several centuries earlier than the big horshoe of sarsens that is now inside it, which is here quite relevant.

The 100 Roman foot measure has a geodetic meaning, i.e. it relates to the size of the Earth! This is because 100 of the olympic Greek feet, the width of the Acropolis, is precisely equal to one arcsecond of the earth's mean circumference; and, as all the ancient sources agreed, the Roman and Greek feet were interlocked in a 24:25 ratio.

Multiplying those two numbers together gives 600 and that is the length of the Greek stade, ie the Greeks had 600 feet in their stade, and ten of these gives an arcminute of the earth's mean circumference. So it all kinda links together...

At the time of writing Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom was an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London in the Science and Technology Studies Department.

A full paper on this subject, The Acropolis Width and Ancient Geodesy (PDF link) has recently been published in the International Journal of Metrology, which is a respectable scientific journal.

Contributor Bio for astro3: Contributing since 2006.

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