ok@edai.UUCP (07/26/84)
Is this discussion here just to prove that net.general should be kept? It seems most unlikely that the builders of Stonehenge wrote in Ogham. Ogham has got to be the world's clumsiest alphabet, but as it was intended to conceal information & not to reveal it I don't suppose the bards minded. It is basically an adaptation of the Greek alphabet (with, if I recall correctly, a digamma), so it can't really be dated any earlier than that (unless you want to claim that Celts invented the Greek alphabet too...). It uses different signs though. I haven't the book handy, so I don't know just which letter this is, but it is an Ogham letter such as you would find carved on a stone: / / / --------- / / / The letters differ in the number of strokes, which way they run, and so forth. The idea is that one bard can sign to another without letting the hoi polloi into the secret by slanting his fingers across his shins. There is also a verbal equivalent: if one bard exclaimed "by the three dogs of Finn M'Cool" another would understand him to be referring to a letter like the one above. A good deal of the "learning" of one of these oh-so-educated Celtic wise men consisted of memorising several dozen lists of this nature, just so they could have a low bandwidth secure channel for talking to each other without the rabble noticing. Somebody said that ley lines were now part of the archaeological main stream. The last time I read an article on ley lines (1983, in a semi-popular British periodical) it was a vigourous debunking, lamenting that archaeologists had treated ley lines the way everyone treated von Daniken: it was so obviously crazy they thought it'd go away. Obviously archaeologists realise that SOME alignments are significant, and that SOME alignments are astronomical. An alignment they'll believe in involves structures built at around the same time. All too often ley hunters will line up a -12C circle, a -8C hill fort, a Roman camp, a +14C church, and a +20C office block. An interesting point about Stonehenge is that it has been argued that it STOPPED the development of astronomy in its builders. There are numerical accidents in the Earth-Moon-Sun system which make it work, but studying the smallish whole numbers involved doesn't lead to any understanding of why it works. Not unlike the way in which Ptolemy's theory was much more accurate than Copernicus', but didn't lead to a successful understanding. (True, I assure you!)