Stonehenge

In the ancient world there were seven "wonders of the world", five of them are made of stone. Among the wonders of Stonehenge was not included. Stonehenge is a prehistoric construction of stone blocks a little younger than the famous Egyptian pyramids, according to the accepted methods of dating. Not impressed he nor the Greeks or the Romans! And Salisbury Plain in England, where there is Stonehenge, it is very dark and not conducive to the delight...

Stonehenge is a prehistoric construction of stone blocks a little younger than the famous Egyptian pyramids, according to the accepted methods of dating

In addition, it is not known for what purpose Stonehenge was built. Here imagination is constantly drawn to the religion, a cult. Stonehenge caused such assumptions: funerary center, the temple where the priests made ritual sacrifices, or performed some ritual dances. The authors of such assumptions for some reason do not want to see Stonehenge is absolutely not similar to any of the known types of temples and other ritual and ceremonial structures.

Back in the early 20 th century English astronomer N. Lockyer pointed out that the main axis of Stonehenge is oriented to sunrise point of the summer solstice, and on the position of this point, as it was several thousand years ago. Lockyer made a calculation and concluded that Stonehenge was built between 1880 and 1480 years BC. However, the fact that Stonehenge was used for astronomical observations, was received with hostility by archaeologists. How do these people did their astronomical observations? After all, they had no written language, and eked out a miserable existence! However, the idea Lockyer was attractive, and there are new studies of Stonehenge in terms of archaeological and astronomical hypothesis. The greatest response provoked study of the American astronomer G. Hawkins. Hawkins became interested in the details of the structure of the stone circles of Stonehenge, and gathered a significant number of pairs of its stones, and then use the computer compared the direction of the stones, such as the rising and setting points of the sun and the moon, planets and stars of the era in 1500 BC. G. Hawkins concluded that Stonehenge served as an astronomical observatory to monitor the movement of the moon and sun. Stonehenge has also been used to predict lunar eclipses, and was a kind of calculating machine Stone Age. Vertically mounted stones played the role of a gun sight and allowed to focus on the point of rising and setting of the sun and moon on certain days (the solstices, equinoxes). In the Stonehenge such "sights" were narrow gaps between the pillars of the ring of stones. Far pointers were capped mountains, on the slopes of the recess. On flat terrain pointers created artificially.

Still, if the astronomical hypothesis is correct, it remains unclear importantly: why those who created Stonehenge, performed these complex, labor-intensive and long-term astronomical observations?

No less interesting hypothesis that some ancient stone structures are a kind of "stone encyclopedias" of the ancients, which implicitly encoded scientific data about the Earth and the Cosmos. In the geometry of the stone circles of Stonehenge encrypted sophisticated mathematical and astronomical data as the value of pi, the diameter of the planets of the solar system. In addition, there is an assumption that Stonehenge is included in the British megaliths, including Woodhenge, Avebury.

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