Week 2 Online Resource: The Zodiac and Early Astronomy

For my essay this week, I cited an article that I found, and I would like to provide here the notes I took about the article. It's an older article, but that means it is available online for anyone to read; I found it when looking for Google searches relating to Babylonian zodiac, filtering my results for the edu domain only:

Title: The Zodiac and Early Astronomy
Authors: Dewdney, S. H.
Journal: Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 25 (1931): 400-408. Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data Section.

Dewdney begins with a discussion of the precession of the equinoxes. His hope is that if the original zodiacal seasons can be determined, it would also allow us to determine their time origin. We cannot rely on physical evidence to date the origins of the zodiac, because the physical evidence has simply not survived. The famous Denerah zodiac of Egypt, for example, dates at the earliest to 1300 BCE.

Indirect evidence, however, is provided by the zodiacal symbols themselves ( ♈ ♉ ♊ ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓ ), where the author thinks we can detect something of an evolution over time. The author sees Semitic, Egyptian and Greek elements at work, spread out over time, and he prefers the Babylonian origin, building on the legacy of Sumerian astronomy.

To establish the time period, he first focuses on what we call Capricorn (represented as half-goat and half-fish, the "Goat-Fish" of the Babylonians), Aquarius, and Pisces as belonging "to a great celestial sea occupying a quarter of the heavens" (406), with Libra as a balance suggesting the balance of the autumnal equinox. He links that celestial sea to the weather on earth: "The aqueous constellations suggest connection with an extensive rainy season such as visits the Indus and Ganges valleys in the track of the monsoons." For Libra to be in that position suggests an origin around 2000 BCE (407).

As for the vernal equinox, he contends that this was in Taurus (the "Steer of Heaven" of the Babylonians), and he notes that the "earliest recorded name for the zodiac is Pidnush Shame = The Furrow of Heaven, ploughed by the Bull of Light" (407). For Taurus to coincide with the vernal equinox would mean a time period between 2000 BCE and 4000 BCE, "probably about 2900 BCE" (408).

I'm not sure that we can ever be certain with this precarious interpretation of the symbols (i.e. contending that a "sea in heaven" corresponds to rain on earth), and the author himself confesses ignorance more than anything else in his closing sentences: "The zodiacal problem has been as yet practically untouched, in spite of the rich and varied field of research it offers and the historical challenge it presents. Until it is dealt with adequately our knowledge of early astronomy will remain a blank" (408). I wonder what progress has been made in the 80 years since this article was written!

Regardless of the author's inability to provide dates for the development of the zodiac, I found the information presented in this paper to be fascinating. I had no idea that we knew so little of just where the symbols of the zodiac come from, and I am impressed by the shared signs among the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. You can see the shared signs laid out clearly in a handy chart in the Wikipedia article about the Zodiac.

In the same way that many people are surprised that the names for the letters of the Greek alphabet are not Greek at all but Semitic, reflecting the Semitic origin of the alphabet (compare Greek alpha and Hebrew alef, Greek beta and Hebrew bet, etc.), I was surprised to learn not just that the science of the zodiac comes from Babylon, but the actual signs and symbols themselves also come from Sumerian and Babylonian culture. So, while people today might think they know nothing at all about Babylonian culture, they actually do... because they know the signs of the zodiac! We may given those signs Latin names now, but their origins are neither Roman nor Greek, but more ancient, reaching back into ancient Mesopotamia and the cultures of Sumer and Babylon.

The image below shows Capricorn, the goat-fish, in stained glass from England, circa 1400 (Wikimedia Commons):

Week 2: Interpretation Essay

My main interest throughout this week has been the zodiac, and I would contend that the Babylonians who gave us the zodiac were surely scientists. My previous understanding of the zodiac was entirely non-scientific, but now — especially after having struggled through the pages in Michael Crowe's Theories of the World devoted to the astronomy that led to the zodiac — I have to confess both my ignorance of how the zodiac really works (but I did try to understand!) and my absolute amazement that the ancient Babylonians were able to conceive of extra-terrestrial space in such a complex way. As I understand it, the Babylonian astronomers around the year 1000 BCE had already divided the ecliptic up into twelve zones to create something like a celestial map. I am very glad to say that I now understand the ecliptic, even if the zodiac itself is still beyond me!

For people who did not get a chance to read those pages in Crowe, he walks us through a geocentric understanding of the motion of the sun and the moon, starting with the notion of a starry vault which rotates around the earth on the earth's polar axis, so that for us Polaris is a fixed star, while the other stars rise and set. But then to understand the sun's path we need to conceive of the ecliptic, and thank goodness Crowe told us to think of an ant walking slowly down the side of a spinning basketball. So far, so good. I understand the ecliptic now, and it is very helpful in my quest to really understand how sundials work! Plus now I understand the solstices and the equinoxes, and I finally understand why it is so darn cold in the winter.

But then: oh no, here comes the zodiac, which is this astronomical space extending on either side of the ecliptic such that the sun, moon and the planets move within this space, allowing their movements to be charted and predicted (science!). Crowe tells us to imagine the zodiac like a belt that is unwrapped and laid out flat, and then we can chart the moon's path through the houses of the zodiac. At that point, my brain explodes. It's a very pretty chart, but I no longer have the ant on the basketball to help me. I am lost! Crowe's subsequent charts using the zodiac, like the chart showing the difference between the draconic and sidereal periods of the moon, completely baffled me.

But the Babylonians were not baffled. Not only did they understand the zodiac... they discovered it! Invented it! Whatever you want to call it, they did it, and I would declare it a scientific event.

It is also a mysterious event because of the many gaps in our historical reconstruction. The origins of the signs of the zodiac, for example, which are still used today, are lost in antiquity. I found a fascinating article — "The Zodiac and Early Astronomy" by S. H. Dewdney (Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 1931) — which provides an overview of the different theories as to the possible origins of those familiar zodiacal signs.

♈ ♉ ♊   ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓ 

So, the signs are familiar while the scientific concepts are formidable, and the origins of both are lost in time. Over the past thousands of years, I suspect there have been many people like myself who "know" the zodiac (that is, we recognize the signs and find meaning in them) but without understanding the science behind it. No surprise: the science is hard! But the signs themselves are beautiful and suggestive, and they have been part of diverse art traditions for many centuries. So, even though I am defending Babylonian science, I will finish with some art, sharing an item I found in the Wikimedia Commons area devoted to the zodiac and its signs.

This lovely image shows the labors of the seasons, along with the signs of the zodiac over the course of a year. Isn't it gorgeous? It is dated to around the year 1400 and comes from the Berlin State Library. I like the way it unites the everyday experiences of people at work with the astronomical dimension of our world in the skies above us. I think that if the ancient Babylonians could have seen this work of art, they would have appreciated it too!

(Faltkalender, circa 1400)

(I chose this personal style of essay because I am still hoping against hope that Janux will be a place for people to really get to know each other, person to person, in order to share in a social learning experience.)

Week 2: Origins of Ancient Astronomy

​Wouldn't it have been great if Stonehenge came with inscriptions...? I wonder what we would make of Mesopotamian culture without their discovery of cuneiform writing! I would definitely like to learn more about the origins of the zodiac, and I also very interested in the intersection between divination and astronomy. In the Lindberg book, I was really intrigued by his observations about Babylonian astronomy, and he put a big emphasis on the importance of divination in the development of what we would now call science. That makes sense, though: much of what we want science to do for us is to tell us about the future, to accurately predict (on the basis of scientific laws) what will result if we do (or don't do) such-and-such. That quest to know about the future prompted the practice of divination in cultures all over the world, but now we look to scientists to tell us about the future, like predicting the weather tomorrow, predicting our health if we undergo a medical treatment, predicting the future or our environment based on scientific claims about global warming, etc.

As for the zodiac, just this weekend I found a lovely inclusion of the zodiac animals in one of the sundials I have been working on (inspired by this class to do so!). So here it is as an image to include here... from ancient Mesopotamia to a Tyrolian sundial!

Week 2: Starting Assumptions... Mesopotamia!

A nice coincidence! The ancient Near East is also the topic in my Myth-Folklore class in Week 2! So, in answer to Kerry's questions, I know something about the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, and that is what the students are reading in my Myth-Folklore class. And of course I love ... LOVE ... that Star Trek episode of Darmok: kudos to Kerry for mentioning it in the video!!!

In terms of Mesopotamian science, my only knowledge is from a book I read by Dick Teresi, Lost Discoveries: The Multicultural Roots of Modern Science from the Babylonians to the Maya. It's a "history lite" type of book which would definitely not pass muster as a textbook for this class, but it was very engaging to read, and I especially liked the way it exposed the real lack of interest by the Greeks (and also the Romans) in computational mathematics, something which the Egyptians and also the people of Babylonia were experts in apparently. If you asked Plato what six times eight is, he would have been baffled! So, from Dick Teresi I gained learned that the way the Greeks pursued mathematics was quite different from that of their ancient neighbors. I'm guessing that mathematics will be part of the astronomical story that we will learn about this week, so hopefully I will have something more than Dick Teresi to rely on for this bit of knowledge!

The image below is from the Memory-Alpha.org wiki page for Darmok:

Week 1: Shape of the Earth Video Response

As Kerry points out in his Shape of the Earth video, there can be a great diversity of what we would call scientific knowledge (or lack thereof) in any given culture at any given time. So, for example, there can be flat-earthers who denied that the earth is round, or - more controversially even today - there can be climate-change-deniers or evolution-deniers today, etc. etc. We can probably never expect uniformity of scientific belief in any given culture exactly because science itself is always in motion, as Kosta points out, and we are never going to be aware of our own ignorance, so to speak.

As my contribution to this topic, I wanted to share two book recommendations. Both of these books provide a cultural and historical context for two scientific phenomena that we learn about as children and take for granted: the existence of dinosaurs as attested in the fossil record and the existence (if we can call it that!) of the number zero.

The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (2000, reissued  2011) by Adrienne Mayor

This is a book that explores in great detail the ancient Greek and Roman interpretations of the fossil bones that they discovered. It's a wonderful topic, and Mayor works with all kinds of textual evidence and also with visual evidence, such as this Greek vase painting shown on the cover of the first edition of the book (I was sad to see they changed the cover for the reissue in 2011; I liked the old cover so much better):

I should add that Adrienne Mayor came to speak at OU back in 2001 (I think that is the right year), and she has to be one of the most fascinating people that I have ever met!

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

What could be more obvious than zero... right? Wrong! This book is a wonderful overview of the long and slow discovery of zero! By the end of the book you will feel very smart that you grasp the number zero and understand it easily... but you shouldn't feel too smug about that: by seeing how long and how hard it was to come to grips with the idea of zero, it makes you realize that there are some other things that later generations will consider totally obvious that we have somehow failed to see at all!

A mathematician friend told me that there are better books about zero out there, but this is the one that I happened to read and I enjoyed it very much. If someone who knows more about history of math can comment here on that and recommend more "zero" books to read, that would be super! :-)

Week 1 Online Resource: Sundials (of course!)

For my online SUNDIAL resource, I decided to create two things: a meta-resource of sundial links at Diigo and a blog post compiling information about a specific sundial and its Latin inscription. I was inspired to work on sundials because the Stonehenge video really got me thinking about sundials; see my discussion contribution about Stonehenge for more about that: Stonehenge and Sundials.

DIIGO SUNDIAL LINKS

Diigo is a free social bookmarking service. It allows you to create bookmarks, access them online, and also share them. You can also download your bookmarks in order to have a local copy for back-up. So, I've bookmarked some sundial resources, labeled them (JanuxHSCI sundials) and I am now sharing my Diigo sundials link list here!

The main reason to use Diigo instead of just typing out a list of links to post here is that this Diigo list is DYNAMIC. That is really important! It means that if/when I add new links (which I hope to do; I am very excited about this project), you will see the latest links, and I can also clear out old links that go bad. I can annotate the links, too, as I work my way through them and learn more about them, and you will see my annotations. None of that is possible with a static list that I might type out here. Moreover, if I type out some list here inside Janux, I imagine it will be seen by maybe two or three people (???) and then thrown out at the end of the class (???). Rather than creating something with inherently limited value like that, I prefer to use a tool like Diigo to make my work more useful to myself and to others, both now and over time!

Here are the kinds of links I have included in my Diigo list (appx. 50 links at this time):

• Wikipedia articles (I am a big fan of Wikipedia, both for information and also as an image source)
• Online books from Internet Archive
• Online books from Google Books
• Useful websites, with a preference given to .edu websites

BESTIARIA LATINA SUNDIALS

I've got a long-running Latin blog called Bestiaria Latina, and I add new content to the blog based on topics of interest. So, I have always been interested in sundials and their Latin mottoes, but I never did a series of blog posts about that... but I have started a sundial series now, thanks to this class!

As my first item in the sundial series, I have posted about a lovely sundial from Cornwall, and I will try to add one or two sundials every week. The post has a picture of the sundial, the Latin inscription and an English translation, along with some commentary and additional references. I am really glad that this class prompted me to start this series. I was looking for a new content series to add to my blog this year, and I think sundials will be wonderful! They are a beautiful combination of text and object, and I hope during this class to learn more about the astronomical science of sundials as well.

Pereunt et Imputantur

Week 1 Discussion: Stonehenge

Unfortunately I was not able to view the video (timing out on me, argh!), but I was able to read the transcript (does everybody know how to access the transcript? it sure saved me tonight since the video kept timing out) - so my contribution to the discussion will be based on just reading the transcript. I was so excited that Kerry focused on one of my favorite topics: the constellations as stories! In the mythology course I teach, in fact, students have done some great class projects where they work with the stories traditionally associated with the named constellations. Here are some free public domain books at Google Books about the constellations and their stories if you are interested in that kind of thing!

As Kerry described the way that Stonehenge might have been used to "read" the motion of the sky, it immediately made me think of sun dials and how they work. I am really fascinated by sun dials as works of art and even as works of literature! I don't know if that is a topic we will be addressing in this class, but it is something that I enjoy. I'm intimidated by the armillary sphere (the idea of imagining the motion of the earth against the backdrop of the constellations in three-dimensional space over time is so confusing to me!), but a sun dial is somewhat easier to understand because for that I only have to understand the earth and the sun... which is still a stretch for me, but I can do that more easily!

As a contribution today, let me share a beautiful sun dial and inscription from Prinsenhof (Prince's Court) in Groningen. Here is a webpage about the sundial, and it is also the source of the image below:

If you Google the Latin inscription (iambic), it is a good way to find lots of pictures of the sun dial and to learn more about it. Here is the Latin:

TEMPUS PRAETERITUM NIHIL, FUTURUM INCERTUM,
PRAESENS INSTABILE, CAVE NE PERDAS HOC TUUM

Here is what it means:

Time past (is) nothing, the future (is) uncertain, the present (is) unstable, take care so that you do not lose this (time which is) yours.

Isn't that cool? Sun dial inscriptions are one of my favorite genres of Latin poetry. It is a shame that Stonehenge did not come with an inscription! :-)

Week 1: Starting Assumptions

For my Starting Assumptions, I would like to write about the woodcut, because Kerry has made such good use of that over the years. I love the large version of it that I bookmarked last fall when Kerry shared it as his blog - here is the big image; more about that in Kerry's blog post:

The details are just beautiful, and I will confess that my favorite details are the faces of the sun and of the moon in the "familiar" world: the sun is gazing upon the world which is full of greenery, water, homes where we live, while the moon is resting peacefully, slumbering just as we do in the night... all very unlike the strange and alien world which the person in red has glimpsed by going outside the bubble. There is a yellow and orange orb that might be the sun, but it has no face, and there is a blue orb that might be the moon, but again it has no face; there is no man in the moon in that view of the heavens.

The reason I am excited to take this course is that I spend my time in a world of stories and imagination, mythology and folklore, where the sun really can be a character in a story (like in this beautiful Cherokee legend about the origin of strawberries, which my own students are reading this week), and my own knowledge of science is not great. Well, linguistics - I know a fair amount of linguistic science. But ask me to tell you the evidence for the earth moving around the sun? Honestly, I could not tell you.

So, it's not like I see a face in the sun, and I know the sun is not a sentient being in the world. But... even though I "know" that, I could easily make up a story about a sentient sun (in fact, there's a great Doctor Who episode on that theme), while learning about the mathematics and the science of astronomy will be a challenge for me in this class. I really like the challenge of learning something about the science in a context that I find so congenial: the context of stories, just as Kerry has emphasized in the opening videos. So, I look forward to more to come and am very glad to be getting started.