A spectacular megalithic circle and, in the middle, a horseshoe-shaped structure. Stonehenge has captivated researchers for centuries and even today it is difficult for them to be completely sure of the purpose of the monument built some 4,500 years ago on Salisbury Plain (Wiltshire, England).
Theories there have been many. One of them, for example, pointed to the possibility that it had been used to predict eclipses. Another pointed out that it was actually a solar calendar. But it is becoming increasingly clear to archaeologists that the monoliths were a “place for the ancestors,” set within a complex ancient landscape that included several other elements.
Archaeoastronomers Juan Antonio Belmonte (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) and Giulio Magli (Milan Polytechnic) believe that the solar calendar hypothesis is based on a series of forced interpretations of the monument’s astronomical connections, as well as questionable numerology and irrelevant analogies. foundation, as explained in an article published in the Antiquity magazine.
A year ago, in another study published in the same publication, experts from Bournemouth University claimed that Stonehenge was used as a giant device that represents a calendar based on 365 days a year divided into 12 months of 30 days plus five epagomenal days, with the addition of a leap year every four.
This calendar is identical to the Alexandrian one, introduced more than two millennia later, at the end of the first century BC as a combination of the Julian calendar and the Egyptian civil calendar. To justify this “calendar in stone”, the number of days is obtained by multiplying the 30 sarsen lintels (which it is intuited were present in the original project) by 12 and adding to 360 the number of trilithos standing on the horseshoe, which is five
The addition of a leap year every four is related to the number of the “season stones”, which is, in fact, four. This machinery was supposedly kept running using the alignment of the solstice axis and would have been borrowed from Egypt, however greatly refining the Egyptian calendar, which was 365 days long (the leap year correction was not present until Roman times). .
It is true that Stonehnege exhibited an astronomical alignment with the sun which, due to the flatness of the horizon, refers both to the rising of the sun at the summer solstice and its setting at the winter solstice. But this connection would not go beyond being related to the connections between the afterlife and the winter solstice in Neolithic societies.
Although the alignment of the solstices is quite precise, Magli and Belmonte show that the slow movement of the sun on the horizon on the days close to the solstices makes it impossible to control the correct functioning of the supposed calendar, since the device must be able to distinguish positions with an accuracy of a few minutes of arc, that is, less than 1/10 of a degree.
On the other hand, archaeoastronomers point out that attributing meanings to the “numbers” of a monument is always a risky procedure. In this case, a “key number” of the supposed calendar, 12, is nowhere recognizable at Stonehenge, as is no means of accounting for the additional epagomenal day every four years.
Other “numbers”, moreover, are simply ignored (for example, the Stonehenge portal was made of two stones). Thus, the theory also suffers from the so-called “selection effect”, a procedure in which only those elements favorable to a desired interpretation are extracted from the material records.
Finally, there are cultural considerations that definitely shake the calendar theory. The first elaboration of the calendar of 365 plus one day is documented in Egypt 2,000 years after Stonehenge (and came into use centuries later).
Therefore, Belmonte and Magli say that even if the builders took the calendar from Egypt, something that has no archaeological basis, they had to refine it on their own and would have even invented a building to control time as well, since it never existed. nothing of this kind in the distant Egyptian lands.
