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is based on the work of egocentric Victorian world views, in many ways, a world view that looked out of a white, imperialistic and industrialised empire and viewed the past very much in terms of how much of a contribution towards that creation various cultures had made. Greeks and Egyptians, obviously, were exalted as being the building blocks of the modern world for the splendours that they left behind, but anything further back in time was viewed with the same distain as the native peoples conquered by the red coated colonial armies of the day. What this effectively created was a short view of history. The Egyptian empire was then, and even now, is seen as one of the earliest periods of history when in reality if viewed in the context of a possible 2 million year existence of mankind should be seen as fairly recent. So with the ill placed "great wall" established, we are invited to see what lies on the other side of it.

The starting point of this book is the science of measurement and particularly the Megalithic Yard. Only a reading of 250 page work will explain how their theory works as its not an idea that easily condensed into a brief overview such as this. The main thrust is that ancient monuments, like modern day counter parts are built using the same principles and the most fundamental is a way of reckoning distances. With this in mind the authors claim to have identified what they call the Megalithic yard and many of are ancient monuments and structures across the world are build using round units and proper fractions of this length. In a world where standardised measurement was hard to create, the only feasible way of creating a universal measuring system was to create it from constants such as the movement of heavenly bodies when viewed from great distances against the passage of time. But that is just the beginning, once a basic standard is established it opens up a whole system of measurement that eventually evolved into our modern systems. The hour, minute, second, pound and pint are all much older than we give them credit for and the book also follows these systems through history to chart their evolution and application.

The conclusion of such a standardisation is that only a global community that had a fairly mobile element and easy communication could have left a legacy such as this. And although the book stays mainly on the subject of measuring systems it does span the whole globe in its search and their strong evidence does suggest that they have uncovered evidence of a more organised past than the one that we currently hold to be true. It is a technical sort of book with a certain amount of elementary maths, which needs to be taken on board to fully understand their theory. The reason that it works is because unlike some of the larger wide ranging approaches to the subject that have gone before, this takes a very specific element of the past and shows how it is suggestive of a larger argument and instead of trying to be all things to all people, it is very focused on its corridor of interest. On top of my recommendation with none other than Colin Wilson proclaiming it as "one of the biggest breakthroughs of all time" this may well prove to be a massively important book in its field.

The book is published by Watkins (1-84293-095-8) at 16.99 but I purchased mine from The Ancient and Medieval History Book Club for around 12.00 and I'm sure in second had copies will be available on E-bay and Amazon for a fraction of that.

Learn more about this author, Dave Franklin.
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