Zen-Haven March 6 2013
The ancient Greek Pythagoreans of the 5th century BC believed that the sun was a gigantic crystal ball larger than the earth, which gathered the ambient light of the surrounding cosmos and refracted it to earth, acting as a giant lens.
A giant lens? In the 5th century BC? Perhaps it was because nobody until now has been willing to recognise that lenses existed in antiquity, and that the crystal sun idea was overlooked, and has never been described in any books on the history of science or philosophy. However, it appears in my book The Crystal Sun.
What, then, is all this about ancient lenses? Surely some mistake?!
The fact is that I have located more than 450 ancient lenses in museums all round the world, and I even own a Greek crystal lens of the 6th century BC myself. Photos of many of these ancient lenses appear in my book. Anyone interested in full details of the actual lenses themselves should obtain the hardback edition of my book, because ten appendices full of such detailed information have been omitted from the paperback because the book was too thick.
Ancient lenses! Well, how far back do they go? The earliest actual lenses which I have located are crystal ones dating from the 4th Dynasty of Old Kingdom Egypt, circa 2500 BC. These are to be found in the Cairo Museum and two are in the Louvre in Paris. But archaeological evidence showing that they must have been around at least 700 years earlier has recently been excavated at Abydos in Upper Egypt.
A tomb of a Pre-Dynastic king there has yielded an ivory knife handle bearing a microscopic carving which could only have been done under considerable magnification (and of course can only be seen with a strong magnifying glass today). Thus, we know that magnification technology was in use in Egypt in 3300 BC. I reproduce both photos and drawings of this crucial evidence.
But magnification technology was not of interest merely for making and viewing small carvings. Its most important use was in telescopes. In fact, on the jacket of my book the reader will encounter an ancient image of someone looking through a telescope. This is a photo I took of a fragment of a Greek pot excavated about twenty years ago at the Acrocopolis in Athens, and dating to about the 6th century BC.
If there is all this evidence, why has no one ever talked about it before? The answer seems to be that unique capacity for stupidity which so distinguishes the human race, for obstinacy and the determination not to see. I call it consensus blindness. Everybody agrees not to look at things that make them uncomfortable, or which they think shouldn’t exist. Therefore, the fact that more than 450 ancient lenses have been sitting around in the world’s museums for all of these years and have been invisible is explicable only by invoking the theory that people subconsciously conspire not to see what they don’t want to see.
It is not as if I have come up with a little bit of vague evidence and want to use it to construct some wacky theory of my own. There are plenty of people crying in the wilderness with theories based on a little bit of disputed evidence. That is not the case with my book at all. I am standing right in the centre of the town square surrounded by a mountain of evidence which can only be ignored if people are so determined to look the other way that they are prepared to walk around with their necks crooked.
I attended the 8th International Congress of Egyptologists in Cairo in the spring of 2000, and went prepared to deliver a paper on ancient Egyptian optical technology. But I was not allowed to deliver it. I was told there was ‘no appropriate category’. Alas, it is true that there was no such category, as I was the only historian of science present at the Congress of 1500 people, a fact which I found rather depressing.
It might be worthwhile to review just why my discoveries are so important for Egyptology, and everyone interested in the pyramids needs to know about them as well.
First of all, there is the famous question of the orientation of the Great Pyramid. It is so perfectly oriented to the geographical points of the compass that no one has ever been able to understand how this was done, for the accuracy exceeds any hitherto known technology of ancient Egypt.
Then there is the equally famous question of how the extreme accuracy of the construction of the Great Pyramid was possible. In 1925, J. H. Cole discovered in his survey that the great pavement, upon which the Great Pyramid partially rests and which surrounds it, is flat to within 15 mm.
Earlier scholars had commented that the accuracy of the surface of the Great Pyramid was equivalent to the accuracy of the grinding of an optical reflective mirror in a giant modern telescope. The original (now largely destroyed) casing stone sides of the structure have been compared in their precision to the mirror of the Mount Palomar Telescope. How were such feats accomplished?
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Argentine physicist Jose Alvarez Lopez claimed that it was physically impossible for the Great Pyramid to have been constructed without extremely accurate optical surveying techniques such as are used in theodolites. I met Lopez in the 1970s and he told me this himself, arousing my interest in this question for the first time. But Lopez said to me sadly that he could not find any evidence for any ancient optical technology, so it was all a mystery.