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Stonehenge, the mystery of the stone circle

Stonehenge is currently the most visited archaeological site in England. Television crews and hordes of tourists follow one another day and night, striving to keep the magic of these fascinating places alive.

Despite this, we know very little about this site. The large megalithic circle made up of gigantic and extremely heavy rocks does not bear the slightest inscription: it seems to be the fruit of long-term work which spread out in stages over a period of about 10 centuries between the III and IIeme millennium BC.

Archaeological research has shown that at first the Stonehenge circle consisted of 56 so-called “Aubrey” holes, the name of the one who discovered, regularly spaced between them and used to fix large posts.

Beyond the circle formed by these holes, a large ditch with a diameter of approximately 114 m is in turn surrounded by a median. A singular composition if you consider that a ditch inside a median can in no case serve as defense systems …

Either way, centuries later the original wooden structure was reinstalled, replacing the posts with large blocks of stone. To begin with, a large circle of 30 arches, each made up of three stones, was built, with the lintels fixed in pairs on the load-bearing monoliths, so as to form an unbroken ring.

Subsequently, five additional gigantic arcs, not interconnected, were drawn up inside this circle, the stones of which weighed between 20 and 50 tonnes.

Unique features

With its juxtaposed stones forming a single structure, the outer ring of Stonehenge is unique.

No other megalithic monument has similar characteristics. The five inner arcs of the circle were arranged in a U: by dividing this shape into two symmetrical longitudinal halves, we obtain a line whose extension outside the circle reaches a large upright stone called “Heelstone”.

Building such a monument must have required considerable effort, if only in view of the weight of the stones that make up its structure. In addition, it is known that its stones, or sarsen, were transported over a distance of more than 30 km, because the sandstone quarry from which they are extracted is located near Avebury.

Then, to the circle of origin was added a second, formed of stones of smaller size of a variety of limestone called “bluestone”, whose characteristics are found, this time, more than 200 km from the .

Legend has it that Merlin the enchanter, thanks to his supernatural powers, would have transported to this place this enormous complex that a people of giants had already moved Africa to Ireland.

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Impossible to transport

To extract these “sarsen” and these “bluestone”, the former builders of the site only had clubs and antlers because they did not know how to work with metal.

We imagine them carrying with difficulty its huge monoliths to the Bristol Channel from where, first by sea, then up the course of the Avon, they would have finally reached Stonehenge.

But for now, this is just a guess. Moreover, a group of enthusiasts gathered under the name of “Millenium Stone Project” tried in vain to repeat this course using the means of the time, but the block of stone which they transported was dismally damaged in the waters of the canal. Richard Atkinson, one of Stonehenge’s foremost specialists, went so far as to say that the site’s builders were “howling barbarians who painted their faces blue”.

These comments were denied by a carbon-14 analysis which made it possible to date the antlers buried for thousands of years at the bottom of some of these holes. Based on these results, we now know that the circle formed by the great Sarsens dates back to around 2200 years BC.

Stonehenge versus the stars

Why should these men of another time have taken so much trouble?
What was Stonehenge used for? And was the space circumscribed by this circle of Peter the scene of ritual ceremonies of druids, the ancient priests of the Celts?

One of the answers was given not by studying the stones, but by observing the sky. Extending the straight line which cuts Stonehenge in two lengthwise and passes through the “Heelstone” outside the complex, we reach the exact point of sunrise on the horizon on the summer solstice day. From then on, we studied the stone circle from a completely different angle, namely from an astronomical point of view.

The astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer was able to provide a dating of the whole complex: according to him, indeed, these large megaliths would have been erected from 2800 BC, knowing that afterwards they would have been shot and then new around 1560 BC.

But that’s not all: over the centuries, many of its stones have reportedly been removed and today we are not sure of their original location. Anyway, in the 1970s, the famous astronomer Gérald Hawkins resumed research on the existing correlations between megaliths and the celestial configuration.

A megalithic computer

After much research, Hawkins discovered many other astronomical alignments that made him conjure up the image of a true megalithic computer. According to him, thanks to a system based on the location of Aubrey’s holes, the monument made it possible to predict the movements of the moon, the variations of elevation and sunsets and even eclipses.

In other words, the ancient and mysterious builders of Stonehenge seem to have had very advanced knowledge in astronomy, although we do not know how.

Today, if new studies have partially questioned the accuracy of the celestial correlations of Stonehenge, each year on June 21, we do here the summer solstice, when the sun rises in the exact alignment of the monument the most mysterious in Europe.

Stonehenge and Atlantis

According to some, Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments are the vestiges of the legendary Atlantis, the population of which spread out on the continents. A recent carbon-14 dating shows that samples from megalithic tombs are much older than imagined.

Megalithic civilization is therefore not the result of the decline of advanced cultures from the Middle East, such as the Sumerians, the Egyptians or the Greeks, but rather the expression of a much older culture, having lived thousands of years ago. In addition, there are also ancient megaliths in Malta in Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica and in the Italian region of Puglia, lands formerly part of Atlantis, if we believe the priests of ancient Egypt .

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Avebury, another ring of megaliths

Around 3500 BC, another imposing ring of megaliths, that of Avebury, appeared 26 km away from Stonehenge. Connoisseurs say that “Avebury is, compared to Stonehenge, what a cathedral faces a village church”. Today, a village has been built among its stones, but formerly its diameter was almost 1 km, against the 300 m of Stonehenge.

In addition, if archaeologists assume that ceremonies were propitiatory rites for fertility, a former NASA consultant noticed disturbing coincidences between this stone ring and Cydonia, the area of ​​the planet Mars where the famous “Martian Sphinx” is located.

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