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THE ECLIPSE IN 2983 B.C.

DISCOVERY NEAR GLASGOW

MARKED STONE OF GREAT ANTIQUITY

WHAT THE “CUP AND RINGS” MEAN

By LUDOVIC MACLELLAN MANN.

A few days ago Mr. J. C. M’Crindle, Shawlands, took me to see a flat sandstone rock on Cleuch Farm, now Cathcart Castle golf course, Whitecraigs. He had discerned cut upon the stone certain markings known to the antiquary as “cups and rings.” These had also been noticed by Mr. A. W. Barclay.

The designs have been delicately pecked out and are unusually shallow. They are well preserved, as the surface has until now been protected by a growth of vegetation.

AN OUTSTANDING PROBLEM.

The writer was struck at once by the similarity of the design to that on a carved boulder found some time ago in the Bluebell Wood, Langside, about 2¾ miles distant. Closer examination showed that the designs, although not identical, had many points in common, and that, in fact, they record the same event.

The meaning of such designs has long been an outstanding problem of archæology. For some years the writer has been engaged on its solution, and the markings can now be interpreted according to the principles recovered after the closest examination of full-sized drawings of some hundreds of examples from this country and from abroad.

The cupped stones are registers made by prehistoric astronomers who reckoned time by hours, days, years, and long cycles of years. The happening of eclipses punctuated their cycles.

READING THE MARKINGS.

A cup-marked surface furnishes the index-marks of invisible geometric dials or clock-faces. The markings, indicating certain days, hours, and years, usually take the form of small cup-like hollows.

To read the markings we must first find the centre of the scheme, and then restore the framework of the dials and the position of their “clock-hands.” Each long cycle checks the reading given by the others. They involve the periodicities of sun, moon, nodes, and five planets.

The Langside and Cleuch stones commemorate chiefly—one and the same event—an eclipse of the sun seen in the Glasgow district in the year 2983 B.C., at three o’clock in the afternoon of the sixth day after the spring equinox (March 27 in our reckoning).

SCIENCE IN ANCIENT TIMES.

One must dismiss the conventional notion that the pre-Roman Briton was a barbarian. The stones referred to bear records made 50 centuries ago by men who were by no means savage, but were possessed of considerable scientific knowledge. For many thousands of years even before that remote time, similar carvings were being made in all parts of the habitable world. The language used by the sculptor was one of measures and geometry. It was a medium of expression which overstepped the limitations of race, speech, time, and space.

To detail the method of reading the Langside stone and its corroborative witness, the Cleuch stone, is here impossible, but certain features may be outlined.

It should be noted that the date 2983 B.C. March 27, was obtained from the Langside stone before it was possible to ascertain from independent computers that an eclipse had actually been seen in Glasgow on that date. This is nearly 2000 years before the earliest published eclipse recorded by the Viennese astronomer Oppolzer, and the visibility of the eclipse had to be specially computed in Berlin, after the data had been supplied from Glasgow.

Similar independent reckoning took place in realtion to an interesting cup-marking from New Mexico, a rubbing of which was supplied by the late Mr. Cree, of North Berwick. This cupped stone records a total solar eclipse seen at the location of the carving in 3457 B.C., September 5 (Gregorian Style). It thus furnishes the oldest human document yet deciphered on the American Continent.

In like manner cup-markings at Loughcrew (Ireland), Stonehenge, Ilkley (Yorkshire), and other sites have disclosed the occurrence of total or annular eclipses which were visible at the places where the cup-markings are situated.

Anyone with even a slight knowledge of astronomy will dismiss any suggestion that such results could have been arrived at artificially or by chance.

LINKS WITH PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICA.

The key to the European Carvings has enabled the writer to solve some archæological problems of the ancient American civilisation. The wheel calendars of the old Central American Maya are but contorted survivals of the old prehistoric time-dials. The Maya calendar was found to have its prototype in the pre-Maya North American system, and to be in many respects identical with that of the Old Hemisphere.

It was only in 1927 that the late Carl Schoch of Berlin completed tables of the astronomical facts which made possible the completion of the present enquiry. Before 1927 no one had published the required data, and, indeed, there still remain unpublished certain tables which are necessary to make the subject generally accessible.

Cup-markings are not primarily pictures of groups of stars; but each sculptured area contains at least one small picture, sometimes disguised by the presence of extra cups, of a star-group in the zodiacal region. {col. 4} By this means the ancient scholar indicated to those who might come after him the period in which he lived, because at fixed intervals the great precessional cycle of some 26,000 years brings into prominence a new constellation on a fixed day of the year.

SYMBOL STARS.

The prehistoric new year survived as the old Roman new year of March 1 (our February 26). The star-group seen on March 1 on the meridian at midnight was used in prehistoric times as a symbol of the passage through the long precessional cycle. This plan seems to have given way in later times to that of observing the position of the sun in the constellations as marking out the course of time.

The symbol stars for about 8000 B.C.Read 3000 B.C.? were those here illustrated. They were then probably a portion of the Libra constellation which marked the beginning of the year throughout an interval of some 2000 years.

These stars are figured on the Langside stone, and five of them may be discerned on the Cleuch stone, which, however, is somewhat fractured at this point.

That cup-markings go back into an immense antiquity may be judged by the fact that symbol stars comprising the Sickle of Leo are portrayed, although not hitherto recognised, on the famous cup-marked grave-slab of La Ferassie, France, assigned to the Mousterian period.

RADIAL LINES.

A few of the principal radial lines by which the diagram is read are here shown applied identically to both designs. The day-index in either case is the chief south-west cup-mark, a common feature being the surrounding rings. These cups point out the thirtieth day of the ancient year, counting anti-clockwise on the dial, which begins its reckoning at the south, or at our “six o’clock.”

The same mark indicates both the hour of the day and the day of the year. The cup-mark is placed at a point five-eighths of the whole radius, counting from the centre. It corresponds to 3 p.m., the hour of the eclipse.

The Langside and Cleuch designs have another striking feature in common—the diameter of the time-reckoning dial is 53.1 inches in both cases. This measurement represents four ancient units of 13.28 inches—one of the commonest measures met with in meteorologyRead ‘metrology’.

The reading of the stones is far from being exhausted by the eclipse record. The crucial movements of Venus, Jupiter, and possibly the other three planets are indicated by different parts of the design.

TIME-RECKONING CYCLES.

The various time cycles started originally on the same day in very remote antiquity. Only two cycles have until now been known to the modern student—the familiar 3600-year period of Eastern peoples and the 144,000-day period of the Maya. The identity of the Maya date 9.0.0.0.0 with A.D. October 28Year missing in original (Greg.), discovered by the writer some years ago, is one of the most remarkable features of this immensely ancient system of time-reckoning.

The neglected cup-and-ring monuments are to be numbered in thousands. Their discovery often leads to their destruction.

They constitute, however, a vast library, spread over the habitable globe, of records as exact as any on the printed page—certainly more exact than many Eastern and Central American inscriptions, in which gross errors have frequently been detected.

Their intimate association with graves and with ancient structures built of stone or of earth (and, of course, with the contents of these places) enables relics such as pottery and stone implements to be precisely dated.

The Langside stone, which has already aroused much public interest, is now on view at Kelvingrove Museum, with its designs outlined in white.

When cut on outcrops of sandstone or other soft rock, their precious designs, which cannot always be removed to a museum, are apt to disappear through weathering within a few years after their discovery by turf-lifting. For the sake of posterity they ought to be preserved, and the turf should be replaced as soon as the sculpturings have been copied.

Mann’s original sketch of the Cleuch stone, after Roland W.B. Morris, The Prehistoric Rock Art of Southern Scotland (1981), page 93. According to Morris, this sketch differs from other records of the stone. The date 1927 may refer to Schoch’s calculation for the Langside stone, as the newspaper article implies that Mann did not know of the Cleuch stone until 1930.

The label at 5 o’clock, illegible in the newspaper, reads “Eclipse Index”.

Comments on Mann’s eclipse theory were published in Nature, 126, 743 & 893 (1930).