Ancient Egyptians borrowed a Scottish design for pyramids
By Steve Connor, Science Editor, Independent
14 November 2000

The nation that brought us haggis, bagpipes and caber tossing can now lay claim to a far older invention – the Egyptian pyramids.

Scotland, a small country with a history of big ideas, developed a key technology for pyramid building, say researchers. Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight believe the pyramids owe at least one unique feature to the technology invented by the ancient people in the Orkneys 2,000 years before the pyramids.

Dr Lomas, a lecturer in information technology at Bradford University, said the Orkney people were cladding their buildings in white quartz as early as 3,800BC. A clear "audit trail" shows how the ancient Scots invented the cladding technique but Dr Lomas said no such evidence of independent innovation can be found in Egypt.

"There is a very strong possibility they took the technology to Egypt via Crete," he said. "They travelled extensively by sea."

The earliest Orkney residents arrived soon after the Ice Age, about 8,000BC. "Their building technique was so sophisticated," said Dr Lomas. "They seem to have been led by astronomer priests who passed their knowledge to pilgrims all over Britain."

In their book Uriel's Machine: The Ancient Origins of Science, Dr Lomas and Dr Knight say the ancient Orkney designers used the megalithic yard, measuring 82.966cm, calculated from their knowledge of the geometric relationship between the Earth, Sun, and stars.

Other than the Orkney people people and the Ancient Egyptians, no other societies dressed their building using the same cladding technique, Dr Lomas said.

"Unfortunately, although they were intelligent, they had not developed any type of writing we are able to read, so their discoveries had been forgotten," he added.

Scots solution to riddle of the pyramids
Kirsty Scott, Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday November 14, 2000

It was Scots who brought the world the telephone, television, whisky and golf. Now it seems they may also have been responsible for the pyramids.

Robert Lomas, of the University of Bradford, says builders in Orkney developed the complex techniques and methods of measurement needed to construct the sophisticated buildings more than 1,000 years before Egyptians started using them. Dr Lomas believes the Egyptians heard of the Orcadians' ideas after they spread across Europe, and copied them. He said remains of buildings on Orkney dating from 3800BC show an extremely sophisticated construction technique.

"We were amazed. They seem to have been led by a group of astronomer priests who passed their knowledge to pilgrims all over Britain," he said. "Unfortunately, they had not developed any type of writing we are able to read, so their discoveries have been forgotten. We can see what they did, but have to experiment to find out how they did it."

At the chambered tomb of Maes Howe, on Orkney, the builders devised a standard unit of length by taking detailed readings from the movement of the sun and stars.

Dr Lomas thinks the measurement - the megalithic yard - proves the islanders knew that the earth was round and that it moved around the sun centuries before it was generally accepted by the rest of the world. The measurement was used to build state-of-the-art monuments, he said.

In his new book, Uriel's Machine: the Ancient Origins of Science, Dr Lomas and his co-author Christopher Knight argue that the megalithic yard, which measures 82.966cm, could easily have been taken by seafarers to Brittany and beyond.

The megalithic yard was first discovered in 1967 by Alexander Thom, of Oxford University, after he had analysed more than 400 sites around the British Isles and northern France.

But, Dr Lomas says, Professor Thom was never able to explain the "physical reality" behind the measure.