Technology is forbidden
when it is not allowed to exist. It is easy to forbid technology to
exist in the past because all you have to do is to deny it.
Enforcing the ban then becomes a simple matter of remaining deaf,
dumb, and blind. And most of us have no trouble in doing that when
necessary.
I have discovered an avalanche of evidence proving the existence of
a very remarkable ancient technology, one which is well and truly
forbidden because it indicates that our ancestors were not
idiots, and as we all know very well, if we ever admitted that, the
illusion of progress would be seriously imperiled.
The technology I have discovered is optical. I have
found in museums all over the world, more than 450 ancient
optical artifacts, most of them lenses, but in any
case, magnifying aids.
These ancient lenses generally magnify about 1.5 or 2 times.
Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th century discoverer of
Troy, excavated 48 rock crystal lenses at Troy.
This is one of the largest hoards of ancient lenses ever found.
These were unfortunately lost for many decades because they were
with the missing Trojan gold hoard which disappeared from the
Berlin Museum at the end of the Second World War. In recent years
the Russians have admitted that the Red Army stole the gold
and it is all in Moscow today. The 48 lenses are
with these gold artifacts.
Another large number of crystal lenses exists in Crete,
mostly found at Knossos. And yet another hoard exists
at Ephesus, in Turkey, though those ones
are very unusual because they are concave lenses used to correct for
myopia (shortsightedness), some shrinking images by as much as 75%.
Most ancient lenses are convex and were used to magnify. At
Carthage there are 14 glass lenses and two of rock
crystal stored in a drawer in the museum; they have apparently never
been displayed. Egypt too has examples one pair of
glass lenses was excavated from the wrappings of a mummy and
obviously were used as spectacles except that loops around the ears
for modernstylespectacles seem not to have been
invented in ancient times. So these may have had some kind of nose
loop or may have been held as a lorgnette.
The oldest evidence of a sophisticated optical capability which I
have found goes back as far as 3300 BC. An ivory knife handle was
excavated in the 1990s from a predynastic grave of that date
at Abydos in Egypt. It belonged to a
king. It bears microscopic carvings which could only have been made
with, and can only be seen with, a magnifying glass.
The oldest actual lenses which I have found are from the 4th
and 5th Dynasties of ancient Egypt and date to
perhaps 2500 BC. These are perfectly ground and polished convex
crystal lenses which are used as eyes in statues of that date. One
such statue is in the Louvre, in Paris,
but the rest are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
There are many ancient classical texts which specifically describe
both magnification and works produced under magnification by
craftsmen. For instance, the Roman author Seneca speaks of
magnification, and Cicero, Pliny and others
described microscopic works of art. I have gathered together
all of these texts in my book, The Crystal Sun. It is from
Cicero’s description of a miniature version of the Iliad so
small that it could fit inside a walnut shell that our modern
expression, ’in a nutshell’, came into use, passed on by
Shakespeare’s Hamlet into modern usage.
I even own an ancient lens myself which I was able to purchase from
a friend who collected ancient objects. He had no idea that it was a
lens, but he bought it because it had an archaic Greek carving of a
flying figure on it. In fact, that wonderful carving in no way
interferes with the magnifying properties of the lens, since it is
transparent. It was probably added to the lens at a later date in
its history, but it offers a convenient way to provide a minimum
date for the object.
I took it along to the Greek and Roman Antiquities Department
of the British Museum for a dating of the carving. I
was told there that the object was a 'fake’ because it was
made of glass. After much prodding, I got the 'expert’ to
say that if the object had been crystal, the carving would date from
the 6th or 7th century BC. Of course, I didn’t
believe for a minute that the object was glass, so I took it to the
Natural History Museum for an X-ray diffraction analysis.
This proved that the object was rock crystal, and hence
genuine. The interesting part of the comment by the British
Museum expert who insisted my lens was a fake was: 'they
didn’t make these then, it can’t be real’.
No, none of this can be real.
At the end of this article is a photo I took of a painting of an
ancient Greek of the 5th century BC using a telescope.
This painting is from a pot excavated at the Acropolis
about twenty years ago. The pot fragment has been on display in the
Acropolis Museum at Athens for many years,
where no one appears to have ’seen’ it. Many ancient lenses are on
display in museums around the world, falsely labelled of course as 'counters’,
buttons’, ’gems’ and so on, and no one sees’ them
either.
What is the answer to this? I call it consensus blindness.
People agree not to see what they are convinced cannot exist.
’Everyone knows’ that there was no optical technology in antiquity,
so consequently when you come across its, staring you in the face,
you go blind. End of conflict.
In fact, optical technology in antiquity sometimes reached
extraordinary heights. The Layard Lens in the
British Museum dates to the 8th century BC and was
excavated in the throne room of the Assyrian King Sargon II’s
palace in what is today called Iraq. I have carried
out a full technical analysis of this lens. I have been able to
demonstrate that this rock crystal lens, now cracked and
considerably damaged, was originally a perfect convex lens with a
flat (’plane’) base, which was ground in a special way known to
opticians as ’toroidal’, - a technique only available for the
public since about 1900. Such grinding produces lenses to correct
for individual cases of astigmatism. It would be possible to go out
into the street today and find someone whose astigmatism was
perfectly corrected by the Layard Lens. It was clearly
used as a monocle. It perfectly fits the eye aperture, as we can see
in the illustration. It is most extraordinary that such a high
technology existed in the 8th century BC. And not a
single Assyriologist has acknowledged the publication of my
study of this important object except for the one who encouraged me
in the first place; he was curious as to what the results would be.
So it appears that the community of Assyriologistsfind it
convenient not to ’see’ my book.
Another example of optical technology being taken to extraordinary
lengths I found in Sweden. The Eastern Vikings
had a very extensive crystal lens industry. More than a hundred
lenses survive in Sweden and the surrounding countries. None,
however, are known from Norway; the Western
Vikings were apparently not let in on the secret.
The Scandinavian archaeologists were delighted at my
findings, and they have translated some of my work into Swedish and
published it already in a leading archaeological journal there. They
had no reason to be blind’ because they loved the’ fact that I could
show that their Vikings were even more interesting
than they already thought. I discovered that the Vikings had
a microscopic optical industry: they were grinding and
polishing lenses the size of rain drops which could magnify three
times. This is an astonishing feat and one would marvel at it even
today.
There are many old British lenses as well. I found two collections
of them stored in geology collections. Some of them are
extraordinarily clever, and have projecting points at the back which
I termed resting points’, to enable them to be use by craftsmen for
magnifying while keeping both hands free; the point does not
interfere with the magnifying properties. A similarly ingenious
design was produced at Troy, where one crystal lens
was perforated with a central hole, through which the craftsman
could insert his carving tool, while the magnification all around
was undisturbed.
Ancient telescopes were not a difficult invention once
they had the lenses. All you have to do is to hold up a lens in each
hand and look through them both at once: thus you have a rudimentary
telescope. Even though the image is inverted - it takes a third lens
to flip it right way up - this makes no difference if you are, for
instance, studying the surface of the moon or looking at the stars.
No one can tell if a star is right way up or upside down - it all
looks the same. In The Crystal Sun I suggest that
primitive telescopes were used in ancient Britain and
that Stonehengewas an observatory. I suggest
that the outer trilithons may have acted as a base for
a perishable dome of wood or wattle, and that the inner
trilithons, which are higher, were to serve as the base for
a perishable wooden observation platform facing east, for the
observation of lunar risings.