If where the disk was found is reputed to be home to witches (the supernatural, but remember the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”), if it was so well and precisely crafted in the Bronze Age of 3600 years ago, if it was discovered in “a stone mound surrounded by a low circular rampart — possibly an early observatory”, if it was crafted to be an astronomical tool (and possibly a surveying tool), and if (because 7 of the 32 gold studs might represent the Pleiades or “Seven Sisters” constellation) it’s a message from the people of the Pleiades, then it’s only logical to conclude it was either inspired by or made by extra-terrestrial aliens.

Sorry, SETI, they’ve already been here.

jon

1st e-mail sent to National Geographic:
On page 87 it states “And a final modification was made when a series of holes along the perimiter were punched through the gold bands and the disk, perhaps to fasten the sky disk to fabric”. As a surveyor I would suggest that this disk is an early surveying instrument – place the disk horizontally on top of a pole, and put wooden, bone or copper pegs into the holes to aid sight lines. This method was in use before theodolites were invented, and is surprisingly accurate in the right hands. From the pictures there would appear to be about 60 holes around the outside which would allow for around 1770 different sightlines, which would give an accuracy of around 0.2 of a degree.

(I have since seen a better image of the disc from which I have estimated about 40 holes giving 1560 sight lines and an accuracy of around 0.25 of a degree. Can anyone tell me exactly how many holes there are?)

2nd e-mail sent to National Geographic:
Further to my previous e-mail, copy above, something that I did not notice at the time, but noticed during a program called Horizon on BBC television here in England on 29th January, was the small markings around the so called “night ship”. As a surveyor I should have looked for it, but I was so surprised that bronze age people should have a survey table at all, that I did not expect to see a much later refinement. The two grooves on this part show that it is a traverse bar that would have held a sightbar, which could have been adjusted to line up with any of what can only be described as micrometer adjustment lines on the sides of the bar. Fairly accurate survey tables, named Diopters by the Greeks, were described by them in the first century after Christ, but these did not have the micrometer traverse bars on them. This raises a very serious question. How did bronze age people come to have a survey table with a micrometer traverse bar some two thousand years earlier?????????

(As a new thought: Where did the Greeks get the idea for their Diopters from, if not from the previous cultures? Perhaps we have lost more knowledge than we have gained over the intervening centuries……….)

Anyhoo, does anyone else have insight into any Sumerian mythologic relationships to this disk?