Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 28

F IG . 3.1 The sarsen uprights and lintels of Stonehenge III, the last great
stone circle project in the British Isles. Vistamorph TM photo by Chris
O'Kane
and megalithic temples at least as far as Malta, and there are
arguments that it reached Asia Minor. Moving north, the same
people spread into Brittany, around the coasts of the British Isles
and on into Scandinavia. It seems they entered the British Isles
around 4500 b.c., following earlier hunter-gatherer and Mesolithic
settlement around 11,000 b.c., at the end of the Ice Age. In Ire-
land they built huge mounds, surrounded by standing stones, at
the Hill of Tara and in the Bend of the Boyne, most famously at
Newgrange. It's long been known that above the entrance passage
into the Newgrange mound, a window in the stonework admits
the light of the rising midwinter Sun. Recent excavations have
revealed that there are similar passages at the nearby mounds of
Knowth and Dowth, aligned to sunrises and sunsets at the solstices
and equinoxes; and in Great Britain, the Hebrides, Orkney and
Shetland they built stone rings, rows, and simpler standing stones,
culminating around 1800 b.c. with the final phase of Stonehenge
at the beginning of the Bronze Age (Fig. 3.1 ) (see Chap. 4 ).
Meanwhile, back in Sumeria, around 4000 b.c., a new art form
had emerged. With written documents still in the form of clay
tablets, people were putting their identifying marks on them with
'cylinder seals': devices like little paint rollers that could be run
over the wet clay to leave a strip of recurring symbols and images.
When followers of Immanuel Velikovsky insist that there is no
record of the planet Venus prior to 1500 b.c., it's worth pointing
out that there is an unbroken, evolving sequence of Venus images,
representing her as Inanna and later as Ishtar, from 4000 b.c. to