•
Back in 1997 Alan researched and wrote a book about the Minoans, Europe’s first super-civilization.1 The Minoans inhabited the island of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean, and the civilization was at its height from around 2000 BC to 1500 BC.
In all sorts of ways the Minoans reveal themselves to have been very much a part of the megalithic culture that flourished in Britain, parts of France and in several of the larger Mediterranean islands. The Minoans, however, reached a very high degree of civilization in terms of their trade links, domestic architecture, farming and metalwork – they even had a form of writing (which is still not understood).
In the 1960s a Canadian archaeologist, J Walter Graham, carried out an intensive study of the remaining grand buildings of Minoan Crete, known as palaces. As a result of these studies it was possible for him to ascertain that the Minoans had used a fixed system of linear measurements. These were based upon a unit that Graham called the Minoan Foot – and he did so with good reason. Graham could achieve great accuracy in his reconstruction of the Minoan Foot because he had many foundations and even existing walls available for measurement. He concluded that the Minoan Foot had been 30.36 cm in length. Meanwhile the statute foot, still used in Britain and the United States, is 30.48 cm in length. The difference between the Minoan Foot and the statute foot is therefore about 1mm.
This would be a fairly surprising correspondence on its own, but one fact that revealed itself early on in our research is that there is a direct relationship between the Minoan Foot and the Megalithic Yard, even though this isn’t immediately apparent. The reason it doesn’t stand out is that the relationship is based on geometry, and what is more geometry of the 366° version.
A distance of 1 Megalithic Second of arc of the Earth’s polar circumference is equal to 366 Megalithic Yards (303.65 metres). If we divide the Minoan Foot into this distance the result is 1,000. In other words the Minoan Foot is simply a decimalized version of the Megalithic Yard, in that it uses the same number of degrees for the Earth.
The fact that the Minoans had so much else in common with their British counterparts strongly hints at a cultural relationship and it is suggested by a few outsiders in ancient history studies, with a great deal of evidence to back up the suggestion, that the Minoans may have visited Britain on a regular basis. The Minoans were great sailors and traders, but two of the commodities their island home lacked were the metals copper and tin, which are necessary in order to create bronze. The Minoans could obtain copper from the mainland around the Mediterranean but tin was a different matter altogether. No matter where their tin came from they had to travel a significant distance to obtain it. One place where it existed in abundance was in the southwest of England and, although it cannot be absolutely proven, it is highly likely that the Minoans visited England to obtain tin.
No matter what the trade connections between Crete and England may or may not have been, there is no doubt about the relationship in terms of geometry. The relationship of 366 Megalithic Yards and 1,000 Minoan Feet is so close and so significant that it cannot be a random chance event. It is therefore evident that use of 366° geometry was not exclusive to Britain.
Of course critics are sure to say that, in the case of the measurement known as the foot there is no puzzle as to how it originated because the name tells its own story. It is based upon the length of a body part, an adult male foot. True as this may be in some regards it merely obscures others. Not all human feet are the same length, but the Minoan Foot, as rediscovered by J Walter Graham, never varied. What is more, his findings were validated totally when a new Minoan palace was unearthed ‘after’ he published his conclusions. This new site at Zakros conformed absolutely to his expectations of the Minoan Foot.
Neither has the modern statute foot got anything to do with the length of anyone’s body parts. Examples of the unit are kept safe under lock and key, made from extremely durable and carefully wrought metals that hardly deviate with temperature and which do not corrode. So, whilst not arguing with the origin of the name ‘foot’ to describe such a unit, any relationship that does exist is peripheral to the truth of the situation.
Even some experts still suggest that the British standard foot was derived from its Roman counterpart. This is definitely not the case because the Roman foot was also standardized, and in modern terms it measured 29.6 cm, which is almost a full centimetre shorter than the British (and now the American) foot. A centimetre might not seem much but compared to the fineness of touch of the megalithic system it might as well be a mile! It can be clearly seen that the British foot is extremely close to the Minoan Foot. Since the Minoans flourished centuries before the Romans were anything more than goat herders, ‘they’ could hardly have been influenced by the marching feet of the legions.
What may well have developed from the Roman method of measurement is the British inch, at least as a concept. The Romans did have 12 inches to a Roman foot, though the inch in British terms seems to have little or no relationship with megalithic measurements or the 366° system of geometry. The word ‘inch’ comes from the Latin uncia and simply meant something that was 1/12th of something else.
Alexander Thom coined the name ‘Megalithic Inch’ for a unit that was 1/40th of a Megalithic Yard, but he was simply copying terminology regarding a unit that very roughly corresponded to a modern inch. In reality the statute inch and the Megalithic Inch are quite different in length.
What we can draw from all of this is that the modern foot is as close as makes no difference to a unit that was in existence at least as early as around 1800 BC and probably long before that. It is a metric version of a geometrical slice of the Earth’s polar circumference when using 366° geometry.