Stonehenge is a monument of extraordinary complexity that captivates viewers with its magnificent megalithic circle and horseshoe-shaped structure, built around 2600 BC. Various hypotheses have been put forward throughout history about the meaning and purpose of Stonehenge. However, archaeologists now better understand that this monument was an “ancestral site” set in a complex ancient landscape that also included several other elements.

Archaeoastronomy plays a key role in this interpretation, as Stonehenge, due to the flatness of the horizon, shows an astronomical alignment with the sun, which signifies both sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice. This likely explains the builders’ symbolic interest in the solar cycle in relation to the links between the afterlife and the winter solstice in Neolithic societies.

This, of course, is far from saying that the monument was used as a giant calendar device, as suggested in a new theory published in the updated Journal of Archeology. ancient ages. According to this theory, the monument is a calendar of 365 days a year, divided into 12 months of 30 days each, and five epagomenal days with the addition of a leap year for each. This calendar is identical to the Alexandrian calendar, introduced more than two thousand years later as a combination of the Julian calendar and the Egyptian civil calendar at the end of the 1st century BC.

To justify this “stone calendar”, the number of days is obtained by multiplying the (probably) 30 sarsen bridges found in the original design by 12 and adding the number of standing horseshoe trilitons to 360, i.e. five. The addition of a leap year every four years is about the number of “station stones”, which is actually four. This mechanism is believed to have been supported in the study using the alignment of the solstice axis, and is believed to have allegedly been derived from Egypt, but it significantly improved the Egyptian calendar of 365 days (leap year setting did not exist until Roman times).

This is a fascinating theory that has been put to a severe stress test by two renewed experts in archaeoastronomy, Juan Antonio Belmonte (Institute for Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain) and Giulio Magli (Polytechnic University). Milan). . In his article published in the magazine ancient agesThe authors show that the theory is based on a number of obligatory interpretations of the monument’s astronomical connections, as well as controversial numerology and unconfirmed analogies.

First of all, astronomy. Although the solstice alignment is fairly accurate, Magli and Belmonte said that the slow movement of the sun near the horizon on days near the solstice, the device (remember: it consists of large stones) should be able to distinguish the position with an accuracy of a few arc minutes, less than 1/10 of a degree. Thus, while the existence of the axis is of interest to the solar cycle in a broad sense, it provides no evidence for understanding the number of days in the year intended by the builders.

The second is numerology. Giving meaning to “numbers” in a monument is always a risky operation. At the same time, the “key number” of the so-called calendar 12 is nowhere recognized, nor is there any way to account for an extra Epagomenal day every four years, and other “numbers” are simply ignored (for example, Stonehenge is made of two stones). Therefore, the theory also suffers from the so-called “choice effect”; thanks to this procedure, only those elements that conform to a requested interpretation are removed from the material record.

Finally, cultural examples. The first development of a 365-plus 1-day calendar was documented in Egypt just two thousand years after Stonehenge (and came into use several centuries later). Thus, even if the builders took the calendar from Egypt, they developed it on their own. They also independently invented a building to keep track of time, because nothing like it ever existed in ancient Egypt—probably the Egyptians reflected in their architecture that their 365-day calendar shifted through the seasons, but this is quite different. Additionally, the transfer and refinement of ideas from Egypt took place around 2600 BC. and has no archaeological basis.

As a result, Stonehenge’s alleged “Neolithic” calendar at full solar longitude is a purely modern construction with flawed archaeo-astronomical and calendrical foundations.

As has happened so many times in the past – for example (modern research has shown this to be untenable) with claims that Stonehenge was used to predict eclipses – the monument returns to its role as a silent witness to the sacred landscape of its builders. As Magli and Belmonte emphasize, nothing can lessen its extreme appeal and importance.