Uriels Machine - Robert Lomas, Christopher Knight

Author's product rating:   

Degree of Information	High
How interesting was the book?	Compelling
How useful was it?	Very useful
Would you read it again?	Yes
Value for money	Good

Advantages:	very original concepts
Disadvantages:	non

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

There has been a flux of books in recent times presenting a new angle on the evolution man, his rise to civilization and the steps that took him there. Some are very off the wall and offer massive re-thinking in our veiw of the past, often relying on extra-terrestrial interference or lost lands such as Atlantis. Others are more reserved in the ideas they present, David Rohl and his new chronologies of ancient Egypt for example, ideas that are able to nessle into what we already accept with a minimum of fuss in the grand scheme of things. What Knight and Lomas offer us here is something close to the later, but a book that takes loose ends from sources as varied as the Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Kenniwick Man and uses them to lead to a yet undiscovered use of Technology in prehistoric times.

Firstly I must point out that by technology we are not talking about the machinary and mechanisms that the word counjours in the modern mind, but refers to astronomical observatories, possibly a world wide network, the remains of which still surround us today in the form of megaliths, that is, standing stone alignments. It is becoming commanly accepted that these alignments, found all over the world, have an astronomical pupose, but what is different in this book is that they manage to link the physical with the textual and present written evidence for their use as such. Examples about if the authors are to be believed, but you have to bear in mind that most ancient writtings appear in such a way that the language and implications may have changed over time and therefore the conclusions offer only one possible interpretation. Enoch describes places that may relate to stone alignments used to measure astronomical data, and a host of other possible examples are highlighted.

One of the problems with the technology is that much of it was built of wood and the standing stones we see today represent later additions to the original site. To back up there arguments however the authors actually built a wooden post version of such a site. By observing the maximums and minimums of seasonal changes in the suns position they planed out an alignment of posts that could then be used as a calender to mark the passing of time and astronomical movements. The plan of the site they built looks very much like a scaled down plan of Stonehenge, a site which has recently been highlighted as having similar propoties. One interesting point that was discovered in the making of their post observatory is that as the movement of the sun appears different in different parts of the world, the layout of the observatories would change depending on the latitude it sat upon. What was found was that at latitude 55 degrees the alignments would be a perfect square, and it is at this latitude that we find not only the remains of many destroyed stone alignments but also Hadrians wall. Was the Romans decision to build the wall exactly were they did bourne out of a need to destroy the power of these sites and their followers, after all there is little evidence of the wall as a defensive structure.

The evidence presented in Urieal Machine is wide ranging and links ideas from all over the world, but as i stated earlier books of this nature rely heavily on the authors interpretation of the evidence. I happen to think that the theory that they present is fairly convincing, but everyone will have to draw there own conclusions. A very worth while read for those who think that prehistory has more to tell that we have yet heard.