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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Christopher Knight
Megalithic Yard, The
The Megalithic Yard is a controversial unit of measurement originally proposed by Alexander Thom following a study of hundreds of megalithic sites in Britain and Brittany. Very many attempts have been made to verify his conclusions but to no avail. Wikipedia(d) offers an interesting overview of the wide-ranging theories that the controversy has thrown up.
Humans have used their body parts as measuring tools right up to the present day, e.g. foot, finger or hand, so it was not surprising that the human pace provided a unit of measurement that has been suggested by many as the original megalithic ‘yard’.
Paul Screeton in his Quicksilver Heritage [1882.48] noted that “the first person to write on prehistoric standard distances was Edward Milles Nelson (1851-1938).” He concluded that the megalith builders used a unit of measurement of 12.96 inches.
Not unexpectedly, some researchers, such as Ulf Erlingsson(a), Sylvain Tristan(b) and Jim Allen(c) have endeavoured to link the megalithic yard with their interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis, sometimes using convoluted associations with ancient Egyptian and/or Sumerian metrics!
>>Christopher Knight and Alan Butler in Civilization One [623.48] set out to “demonstrate that the Megalithic Yard was real, being derived directly from the polar circumference of the Earth using a system of geometry that was based on the revolutions of the planet in a year”<<
There is also an ancient unit of measurement known as the ‘long foot’ of 12.7 inches (32.2 cm). In 1889, a set of small carved chalk drums were discovered near the village of Folkton in Yorkshire. In early 2019, archaeologists from the University of Manchester and University College London concluded, after a study of three of the ‘drums’, that they “could be ancient replicas of measuring devices used for laying out prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge.” They found that “a string wound 10 times around the smallest of the drums would give a measure of exactly 10 long feet — a length used to lay out several ancient henge monuments“(e). A similarly engraved fourth drum was discovered in 2015 in Burton Agnes, also in Yorkshire(g) and is thought to be 5,000 years old.
Douglas C. Heggie [1837], an astronomer and mathematician as well as the late Aubrey Burl (1926-2020) [1838], arguably the leading authority on British stone circles, have both expressed the view that Thom’s evidence was at best ‘marginal’.(f)
The Academia.edu website has a 2020 paper by Robert Carl that reexamines some key arguments concerning the validity of the Megalithic Yard’s existence and some of the specific critiques that have been aimed at it(h).
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20200217205938/http://spcov.free.fr/site_nicoulaud/en/article.php
(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20190730190157/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/elcastillocubits.htm
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalithic_Yard
(g) https://the-past.com/news/elaborately-carved-burton-agnes-chalk-drum-goes-on-display/
(h) https://www.academia.edu/43164917/A_Brief_Reconsideration_of_Alexander_Thoms_Megalithic_Yard
Butler, Alan
Alan Butler is British and an engineer by profession and for the past thirty years has been a full-time researcher and writer with a number of 
successful books to his credit(a). His area of interest is principally ancient civilisations which led to the publication of Civilization One[623] and Before the Pyramids[646] co-authored with Christopher Knight. A critical review(e) of the former is offered by Jason Colavito, a man who only writes critical reviews.
The sequel to Civilization One was Who Built the Moon [937] in which Butler and Knight offer evidence that our Moon is artificial!
>In 2023, Shane Leach tried to resuscitate this daft idea. Leach also recycled the suggestion that the Martian satellite, Phobos, was an alien construction. However, neither he nor Butler & Knight can claim originality as this idea of artificial moons was floated decades ago by the Russian I. S. Shklovskii(g).<
Even more extreme is his claim in Intervention[966] that at critical junctures in man’s history, humans from the future have returned to intervene!!
Butler also wrote a book on the Phaistos Disc – The Bronze Age Disc[504]. In it he contends there is support for his 366-degree geometry. The Disc has 30 divisions on one side and 31 on the other, which, with, a calendar alternating 30-day months and 31-day months would result in a 366-day year! Sylvain Tristan supports this idea(d) .
He has only touched briefly on the subject of Atlantis in a number of his books, but this changed with his 2014 book The Dawn of Genius[938] in which he deals more fully with Plato’s island. In chapter nine he expresses the view that Plato’s Atlantis story is probably a conflation of a number of historical tales of which the Minoan Hypothesis provides some of the threads. He rejects an Atlantic location as contrary to geology and Plato’s nine thousand years to be archaeologically unsound.
Guy Gervis wrote a positive review of Civilisation One, while a more critical view of Butler is offered by Jason Colavito(b).
In 1999, Butler published City of the Goddess[1065], which deals with Washington, DC’s direct connection with Freemasonry and its veneration of the Great Goddess! Then in 2015 America: Nation of the Goddess[1066] was published. It has been co-authored by Butler and Janet Wolter, wife of TV presenter Scott F. Wolter. We are already informed that among the gems contained in it, is the revelation that “every baseball diamond is actually a temple to the Goddess.” I’m not making this up. Jason Colavito was equally surprised(c).
Butler and Knight teamed up in 2010 to produce an article(f) on Graham Hancock’s website, in which they reprised much of their earlier work on Stone Age metrology, Freemasonry, Sumerians and the design of Washington, DC.
(a) https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Butler/e/B000APK0AU
(d) The Golden Lines (archive.org) *
(e) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/review-of-civilization-one.html
(f) Was our solar system designed to produce humans? – Graham Hancock Official Website
(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/spaceship-moon-and-soviet-scientific-politics *