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[Dr Jack Dempsey]

Greetings to Stone Pages Readers:

I’m Dr. Jack Dempsey (Ph.D. Brown University), inviting you to engage with Calendar House: Clues to Minoan Time from Knossos Labyrinth---a study of Minoan calendrics available for free at http://ancientlights.org.
Calendar House presents evidence that a particular configuration of lunar, solar and stellar astronomy was important in Minoan life and especially visible in Late-period iconography. It incorporates critical feedback received over several years from archaeologists around the world.
Important recent works have led the way into Minoan astronomy: examples include alignment-studies by Lucy Goodison and the Blombergs/Goran Henriksson, articles by Alexander Macgillivray, Emilia Banou and Marianna Ridderstad, and books including Nanno Marinatos’ Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess. All of them include what non-specialists need to see and judge for themselves, and House works the same way.
Below are the Table of Contents, a 500-word Abstract, and a link to the work that I hope you enjoy and share with peers. Before long the website will also include a Minoan discussion-forum called The West Courtyard.
With advance-thanks for giving Calendar House a look, and an invitation to critical response, I wish you a more peaceful 2011.
Sincerely,
Jack Dempsey     jpd37@hotmail.com
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Calendar House Table of Contents:
1: Matching Discoveries
Clues to a Knossos Calendric Cycle

2: Into the Labyrinth
The Bull-Leap Fresco, & Elements of a Minoan Great Year Calendar

3: Sign & Countersign
The Fresco Border’s Lunar/Solar Operations

4: Forms of Time
Seasons, X, Great Year & Saros, Relatives

5: Astronomy & Sacred Animals
Problems, Politics & Symbols of the Cycle

6: Griffin & Labrys
Guides to the Journey Beyond

7: Kinship & Cosmology
Great Year Signs & Festivals in New Palace Times

8: Calendar & Kingship
A Labyrinth to Contain the Minotaur

9: Continuities
From Crete & Cyprus to Palestine

Coda:
Curiosities, & Marshack’s Critical Review

Sources Cited & Suggested

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Calendar House Abstract

Central mysteries have endured 100 years of science on Minoan Crete. What if any high calendar functioned there? What did their chief religious symbols mean? And did those questions connect to political power? Calendar House (in 9 chapters and a Coda) brings established research to bear on an overlooked 1972 discovery of answers that Alexander Marshack judged “valid and valuable”---pending more investigation.
With The Thread of Ariadne, C. F. Herberger proposed that patterns in the border of the Toreador or Bull-Leap Fresco from Knossos register a lunar/solar cycle of 8½ years; and, that this cycle and calendar illuminate signs of astronomy in the throne room, Crete’s sacred animals, Labrys the double axe and “horns of consecration.” Calendar House presents functional criteria, experiments and a range of contexts with which to appraise this cycle, fresco, and Herberger’s discovery for yourself.
Chapter 1 shows that the cycle exists, and reviews many clues of an “8- or 9-year” Minoan period. The Knossos throne, aligned with Winter Solstice, presents a disc-and-crescent, which in comparative iconography suggests lunar/solar referents. And while a New Crescent Moon appears on or near Winter Solstice every 8½ years within cyclic limits, the throne room also features a Summer Solstice alignment.
So, while ahead we see consistent traits in Early and Middle-period designs, a central Late Minoan calendar might be investigated, anchored to an actual “doubled pair” of events---New Moon at Winter Solstice, and (6 months later) Full Moon at Summer Solstice.
Hence Chapter 2 evaluates the fresco’s contexts, dating, versions, and limitations: its forms, colors, patterns and unique irregularities. Features of its border (rows of crescents and “ticks” like a “1”) match lunar phases and Crete’s writing, and correlate with the above cycle. Also, the asymmetric features and color-variations present a further pattern---doubled pairings, a sign of significance in Minoan iconography. Chapter 3’s calendric anatomy of the fresco then shows how these features’ alternating colors, positions and relations guide daily and cyclic time through the labyrinthine border, including an intercalation-function crucial to a farming calendar.
Further chapters test these patterns in the fresco, and against a range of contexts: Crete’s ecology and recent calendric finds, Egyptian and Near Eastern systems, further astronomy, and remains including the often-wheeled X (a cycle round a doubled pair of points). Do Crete’s most iconic animals---the snake, bull, lion, and griffin---also have recognized aspects consistent with such a calendar? Herberger’s discovery, while much-qualified, holds up under thorough critique.
On these bases, new meanings become visible in the throne room---including relations between lunar/solar cycles and Saros eclipses, which (like fresco operations) involve doubling. What then might be learned of Labrys, and its lunar, solar, stellar place between “horns”? In the midst of catastrophes, was this calendar visible as part of Knossos “propaganda”?
Chapter 9 and Coda explore post-Minoan traces of this astronomy in Cyprus and Palestine, and in the Antikythera Mechanism’s solar, lunar and eclipse cycles---which presently seem (according to the journal Nature) “to have come from nowhere.”

***
LINK:
http://ancientlights.../CalendarHouse/

[kevin.b]

Dr Jack Dempsey,
                A warm welcome, and a wonderfull read through that site.
This stones forum is split into different sections, there is an alternative section where something about this link I will leave could be discussed, if You want to.
I am a dowser that can detect the alignments and the consequences that such as the solstices and equinoxs cause to what is in this link,
http://www.hbci.com/...ew/milewski.htm

It's light, but not of the visual, but the visual often of course relates to what I consider creates visual light, the variations caused by the SHADOWING is imho what all the megalithic sites are constructed for in a variety of fashions.
kevin