The Significance of Planetary Harmony: Creating Megalithic Structures Through Music
Over the last 7,000 years, hunter-gathering humans have been transformed into the 'modern' norms of city dwellers through a series of metamorphoses during which the intellect developed ever-larger descriptions of the world. Past civilizations and even some tribal groups have left wonders in their wake, a result of uncanny skills - mental and physical - that, being hard to repeat today, cannot be considered primitive. Buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza are felt to be anomalous because of the mathematics of their construction. Our notational mathematics only arose much later, and so, a different mathematics must have preceded ours.
Ancient Sumerian Texts (CC0)
Ancient Texts Encrypting Numbers to Create Prehistoric Monuments
We have also inherited texts from ancient times. Spoken language evolved before there was any writing with which to create texts. Writing developed in three main ways: pictographic writing evolved into hieroglyphs, like those of Egyptian texts, carved on stone or inked onto papyrus; the Sumerians used cross-hatched lines on clay tablets to make symbols representing the syllables within speech; cuneiform allowed the many languages of the ancient Near East to be recorded, since all spoken language is made of syllable and; the Phoenicians developed the alphabet, which was perfected in Iron Age Greece through identifying more phonemes, including the vowels. The Greek language enabled individual writers to think new thoughts through writing down their ideas, which was a new habit that competed with information passed down through the oral tradition. Ironically though, writing down oral stories allowed their survival, as the oral tradition became more or less extinct. And surviving oral texts give otherwise missing insights into the intellectual life behind prehistoric monuments.
