My Ideas about Enigmatic Earthworks of Kazakhstan By CHEN Lung Chuan (Laurent) http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/nasa-sparks-interest-en igmatic-earthworks-kazakhstan-004389 (in English and Traditional Chinese) These are a series of patterns which need to be observed from high above in the sky. My personal interpretations about such patterns are that they actually form two respective portions, and the ancient Chinese “陰陽八卦圖” (see below) might be the integrated graph for them.
Figure 1 For the first portion, let’s take a look at this “陰陽八卦圖” as above (Figure 1), especially the peripheral circle. There you can see a sequence of long/continuous bars (consider them as “1”, positive or the like) and short/broken bars (consider them as “0”, negative etc.) Therefore, from the 3-digit “0/1” combinations, you can get 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Of course, this is quite obvious. In ancient Chinese culture, there is a pretty common saying about this “陰陽八卦 圖”, which is “太極生兩儀,兩儀生四相,四相生八卦.” To translate this phrase, “Tai-Ji creates TWO states, TWO states create FOUR phases, and FOUR phases create EIGHT divinations (Gua).” This may be considered as a sequence of
number 1, 2, 4 and 8 (respectively, 2 of power 0, 2 of power 1, 2 of power 2, and 2 of power 3 in mathematics.) I believe we can “map” this concept into these patterns found in Kazakhstan. Refer to Figure 2 as below. It should be noted that the orientations thereof are NOT critical.
Figure 2 ○-shaped pattern: (indicating ONE)
Tai-Ji (“太極”), origin, start, chaos,
initial point, … etc. (Just choose any one you prefer) ―-shaped pattern: (indicating TWO)
Two states (“兩儀”), Yin/Yang, up/down,
left/right, front/rear, … etc. ╳-shaped pattern: (indicating FOUR)
Four phases (“四相”), four
quadrants, …etc. ╳ -shaped pattern: (indicating EIGHT) Eight divinations (“八卦”) (4 phases × 2 □
(Inside/Outside).)
Moreover, for the second portion, let’s observe this one, as Figure 3.
Figure 3 How to translate this “3-stragiht-lines and 3-S-wise-curve symbol”? My idea is this is a planar perspective view of a 3 dimensional coordinate (X axis, Y axis and Z axis.) See Figure 4.
Figure 4 So you may find that the three inner straight and connected line segments in Figure 3 may correspond to the X-Y-Z axes in Figure 4, while those “S”-wise curves respectively match the Yin-Yang alternations (陰陽變化) with regards to SHAPE in each direction shown in Figure 4. Therefore, seeing that there are two variations (陰/陽) in each direction and you have 3 directions, you can get a combination of 8 possible Yin/Yang variations: 2 of power 3 (i.e., 23=8), which
meets the above-said 8 Divinations (八卦). Also, if you watch closely in Figure 3, you can see a “dot” formed at the joint of these 3 connected straight line segments, which means, in my ideas, the Origin (e.g., the (0, 0, 0) found in a typical 3-D Cartesian coordinate.) In summary, based on the aforementioned analyses, or maybe I should say “assumptions”, I have the following conclusions: 1.
the conventional Chinese “陰陽八卦圖” seems to be an integration for
demonstrating such patterns in one single graph; 2. in addition, the conventional Chinese “陰陽八卦圖” clearly shows a black dot in the white area and a white dot in the black area (see Figure 1.) I think this is to tell people, since there are originally 3 Yin-Yang alternations respectively in X-Y-Z dimensions to illustrate, but only one of them is drawn, the remained two are “hidden” or “exemplarily presented” therein for brevity and can be analogously inferred (thereby saving space effectively, for example.) You may try to “integrate” all these icons, patterns, concepts … into a SINGLE graph. It is not an easy job. CHEN Lung Chuan (Laurent) November 1, 2015
Taipei