Posted on 11/29/2006 4:27:10 PM PST by FLOutdoorsman
The oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, found in a 1440 manuscript, the Scala Mundi
They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript.
The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.
In the Scala Mundi, the Chronicle of the World, Merlin is given credit for building Stonehenge between 480 and 486, when the Latin text says he "not by force, but by art, brought and erected the giant's ring from Ireland". Modern science suggests that the stones went up from 2,500 BC, with the bluestone outer circle somehow transported from west Wales, and the double decker bus-size sarsen stones dragged 30 miles across Salisbury plain.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Thanks! A little disappointed though, I thought it was going to be the original blueprints though. ;')
We visited the American version of Stonehenge on the banks of the Columbia River on the Washington side a few years ago.
I am a little cautious of this latest find...
From Kinko's in Texas. They burned the original.
Fake but accurate.
Actually, go check out our American Stonehedge, built by our own Merlin.
http://www.coralcastle.com/home.asp
Exactly!!!
lol!
No one else noticed this book all this time? I mean, was the book recently discovered and thus the picture, too, or was the book in some library for a long time and no one opened it until now to notice the picture?
No, there's one profession that's older.
I don't have any knowledge of the real oldest profession's relationship to lined pads, though.
What else would their kids have put in their binders?
ROFL...
Ruled paper has existed since at least 400 AD. Before 1770, when John Tetlow invented the first ruling machine, the lines were drawn by hand. Nowadays, you can just click here.
While everything you say may very well be true, it still looks like it's drawn on a steno pad, using a Sharpie.
It looks like something scrawled on a napkin.
I heard about this many years ago. I don't remember if it was TV or a magazine?
ping
That would have been more up my alley than some rocks on a bluff.
Did you know the Caddy in the foreground is the one Hank Williams Sr died in...
Neat site for the lined-paper pdf generator. Thanks.
Very cool.
The book Stonehenge Complete by Christopher Chippindale (3rd ed., 2004) shows two drawings of Stonehenge from 14th-century manuscripts (the one in The Guardian story is 15th century). They both illustrate Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of how Merlin had Stonehenge constructed but one is just a partial picture (four upright stones visible) and one is stylized with all the lintels still in place.
I don't think we should assume that the 15th-century drawing is an accurate view of what Stonehenge looked like then--probably the artist is drawing it from memory.
The name in the circle to the right of the word Stonehenge is Aurelius Ambrosius--he was supposedly the king of the Britons at the time Stonehenge was set up.
the king of the britons?! i don't remember voting for any king!
help! i'm being oppressed! (ancestor of je$$e jack$on)
It was just across the road from the McDonald's.
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