"When the Egyptians want to be precise, they are."

An object long considered a mystery to our modern sensibilities has recently been the subject of some interest in archaeological circles. The ‘decorative case’ from the tomb of the Ancient Egyptian architect Kha resembles an ornate box of unusual design, and most have simply agreed that it is merely that. Of late, however, the idea that it is in fact an early protractor has been put forwards.

While that, in itself, is reasonably interesting, it is not this fact that draws my attention. Rather, in the article discussing the object, there is a marvellous rebuttal:

But Kate Spence, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who specialises in ancient Egyptian architecture, is not convinced and maintains the object is simply a decorative case. She says that unlike those on known measuring instruments, the markings in question are not particularly accurate: "When the Egyptians want to be precise, they are."

What Dr Spence here refers to is in line with my ongoing passion – the device they claim to be a protractor is simply not accurate enough. While it’s entirely possible that it is some sort of crude protractor (and likely the first of its kind), the measurements apparently defined upon its surface are clearly not up to the extraordinary works for which the Ancient Egyptians are famed.

Now, while it is likely there are those who would (foolishly) argue that this proves the ancient peoples of the world could not have built their pyramids, I would reply only that your own school protractor is almost certainly not up to the task either.

Words from Oxyrhynchus

This week, I should like to quickly highlight a marvellous innovation made by scholars at Oxford University: using the internet to help translate an ancient archive of knowledge. On the website, you are able to assist in the documenting of many thousands of manuscripts from the city of Oxyrhynchus.

It may seem a trivial thing to wish to discover what people wrote about many thousands of years before, but recall that in the future, we would doubtless like people to understand what it was that made us as a people.

I can only recommend that you assist these Oxford scholars – the more we understand of our history, the better we can appreciate the magnificence of mankind’s works.

The Fourth Moon of Pluto

It was recently announced that a fourth moon of Pluto has been discovered. In these heady days of sky-watching, it has become a surprisingly common thing to read – a new moon, dwarf planet, stars – but I recall in my youth being quite certain of the number and names of all the moons in our solar system.

As a child, I distinctly recall being inordinately pleased with myself for remembering the names and order of Jupiter’s sixteen moons. Three had recently been discovered, and then all was quiet for twenty years. It was a strange thing to discover that our local universe, which we had believed to for so long to have been mapped quite successfully, could conceal not merely surprises, but quite literally dozens of them.

We know now that Jupiter has at least sixty-four moons, and that, including IAU-approved dwarf planets, there are at least thirteen major objects in orbit around our sun. Recent findings have, of course, made astronomers much more reticent to assert numbers, or even upper limits. It is possible, in fact, that our solar system – stretching from the sun to the reaches of the Oort cloud nearly a light year away – could contain several thousand planets, dwarf or otherwise.

How can these enormous objects be concealed, we might ask – but the answer is all too simple: an object the size even of the sun would be a mere pinprick of light from the system’s edge, much as are the stars we see at night. If, at that distance, we struggle to perceive an orb of such luminosity, what chance do we have to see a planet so far away, and so concealed by the dust and asteroids of the Kuiper belt?

A Future Among the Stars

It is a sad time for those of us who see our future beyond the mere limits of our atmosphere. With NASA’s cancellation of the space shuttle programme, we see the slow but inevitable decline in our passion for space. To those at NASA who fought to keep the space shuttle programme running for as long as it has, and also to those who watched with genuine fascination when the shuttles were launched, or waited eagerly for the latest news from orbit, I can only offer my sympathies.

I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that man would find a path to Mars within my lifetime. As a child, there were many television shows that looked into our future and proposed a vision that, while often ludicrously ambitious, implied that we as a race were upon the cusp of moving beyond our world.

All is not completely lost, however, and DARPA are seeking petitions from private agencies and corporations to look into the problem of long-distance space travel. While this comes with a host of problems – not least the lack of a real financial motive for private concerns – several individuals have stepped forwards already to examine the problems at hand.

Significantly, J. Craig Venter has proposed a method to transmit our genome across the gulf of space, and to thus grow a fresh colony at a great distance. This is comparable in many ways to the work of the Gemini Somatics Corporation, who have proposed just such a method, albeit without reference to DARPA’s latest initiative.

Who knows what manner of man will be the first to set foot among the stars?

The Folly of Rose-tinted Spectacles

I was recently informed of a new movement arising – or, rather, the resurgence of an old idea: that the Sun orbits the Earth. In the sixteenth century, Galileo Galilei raised the ire of the Catholic church by suggesting the inverse, and today it is considered a matter of simple fact that he was right – even among the majority of the most staunchly devout Catholics.

Such ideas are akin to those who believe that society should regress to the 1950s, in the mistaken belief that everything was better then. Of course, the 1950s included the rise of the Cold War to the public consciousness, the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, and so on, but these are not the images such lovers of antiquity favour. Rather, they seek to re-establish the power systems that once ruled – in the case of those who would see the Earth return to the centre of the universe, they refer to the power that the Catholic church once held.

Naturally, this is foolish. As much as I sing the praises of cultures of old for their remarkable ingenuity, I do not wish to live in a Mayan society, nor among the Babylonians or Polynesian seafarers. I am always aware that, despite my regard for those times, I am quite comfortable living in a society that, aside from occasional glitches such as this, does seem on a perpetual route towards intellectual enlightenment.

Looking for Life Among the Stars

Apologies for my absence of late, but I was in my native Ukraine conducting a lecture tour regarding archaeoastronomy for undergraduates – it is a fascinating field of study, and the more interest we can arouse in the subject, the greater our understanding shall grow.

Something that struck me, however, was the interest in aligning ancient achievements with the interference of extraterrestrials. Had Erich von Däniken not written his fanciful Chariots of the Gods, I wonder if so many people would express an interest in denigrating our ancestors?

It is not hard to look for life beyond our world, nor is it hard to imagine that it does indeed exist – myself, I believe that the universe is large enough and magnificent enough to hide lifeforms in a multitude of places, and that it is reasonably probable that we are not alone among the ‘intelligent’ and ‘advanced’ species of the universe. What is difficult to imagine, however, is the reason why we must seek to assign a higher intelligence to achievements of our own people?

Like the myths of Atlantis, it seems that mankind is perpetually in pursuit of some lost wisdom, granted to us in ancient days by those from beyond our own star. This pursuit is equalled only by the same beliefs that the cataclysm of the end-times is upon us. Following these twin beliefs – perched between a wondrous, forgotten past, and a terrifying oblivion – one must wonder if this is the state of all life in the universe.

Beyond the Orbit of Saturn

Sir William Herschel – one of the truly great astronomers – is little heard-of these days, but tales of his achievements were among the inspirations that led me upon my own path into archaeoastronomy. Much like the Glass Bead Game players in Hesse’s brilliant novel, Herschel approached the sciences and the arts through a combined interest – originally interested in music, its mathematical processions and order led him to study that subject, followed by optics and lenses in particular. This, naturally, led to his interest in astronomy, for which he is best known.

Although his most famous discovery is that of Uranus, this remarkable man also discovered binary and multiple star systems, using a ‘simple’ (by modern standards) optical telescope. His continual and precise observations enabled him to catalogue no fewer than eight hundred such arrangements, which has provided us with much of the background in our current understanding of multiple star systems.

More fascinating than his discoveries, however, is the origin of his interests mentioned in the opening paragraph. A man who can see beyond the raw details and the niches of his line of study can see more of the beauty inherent in the universe than those around him. For a man whose interest in the stars stems from a love of music, the harmonies must be remarkable.

The Death of a Star

In further news from NASA, their scientists believe they have discovered extremely strong evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes – by observing a star being torn apart. Although the light that allows us to observe this is now four billion years old, the event was one trillion times brighter than our own sun.

Black holes exert extraordinary gravity, as is relatively common knowledge, but – like all sources of gravity – it grows weaker with distance. A star passing close to a black hole finds itself falling gradually within the black hole’s sphere of influence. Being potentially millions of kilometers across, however, the star’s own gravity is capable of maintaining itself for a time. Rather than being instantly destroyed, it instead warps and stretches, being pulled out of shape towards the black hole.

As the star observed by NASA moved slowly closer to the black hole, the force pulling at it grew stronger, until the black hole’s gravity exceeded the star’s ability to hold itself together. At this moment, the star’s mass was torn from it, being wrenched into the black hole and quite literally torn apart.

The light we observe is caused by the enormous energies exciting the star’s atoms, throwing off vast quantities of light throughout the visible and invisible spectra – truly, this must be one of the most dazzling displays the universe has to offer us.

The Light of a Billion Suns

Merely a brief post this week to let you all know about the recent discovery of a super-luminous supernova. The description supplied in the article elegantly describes the magnificence of these astronomical marvels:

“At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the Sun. It emitted enough energy in one second to satisfy the power needs of the United States for one million times longer than the universe has existed.”

If ever we need to be reminded of the awe with which our ancestors looked upon the stars at moments of such change, we need only look at those stars we now see through the lens of our technology. Our means of watching have changed, as has our understanding, but simple human wonder remains constant.

The Music of the Spheres

It is popularly known, predominantly courtesy of Holst’s The Planets, that people throughout the course of human civilisation have assigned musical patterns and harmonies to the movements of the stars and planets. This “musica universalis” sees early use in Hebrew mythology, which explains the cosmos as having movements and harmonies that are designed to sing the praises of the creator-deity. In that mysticism, there is an intriguing emphasis upon the interrelatedness of many aspects of the universe, including language, mathematics, music, astrology and the demiurge.

This search for such relationships is not, of course, unique to the Jewish people, as can be easily determined from my earlier blogs – constellations and the ‘study’ of astrology are, if anything, elegant proof of this desire. Of particular interest, however, is the fact that there is actually some validity in this particular belief.

Johannes Kepler, who gave us the laws of planetary motion, was a firm believer in a divinely-designed resonance between the planets, and used his observations and calculations to seek it out. Kepler’s great gift to astronomy was the realisation that planets orbit elliptically, rather than circularly, creating what are called the perihelion (greatest distance from the orbital centre) and the aphelion (shortest distance from the orbital centre). The variation in distance also, however, results in changes in a planet’s angular velocity, as it speeds up while closer to the orbital centre.

In his Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World), he observed that the ratio between a planet’s least and greatest angular velocity relates to a musical harmony. Kepler found that maximum and minimum velocities of Saturn formed an almost perfect ratio of 4:5 (a major third in music). The motions of Jupiter differ by a 5:6 ratio (a minor third). Mars differs 2:3 (a “diapente”); Earth differs 15:16 (a semitone); and Venus differs 24:25 (a “diesis”, which is, intriguingly, the smallest difference considered generally audible to the human ear).

Kepler also discovered that nearly all of the ratios of the maximum and minimum angular velocities of neighbouring planets produce musical harmonies. The orbits of Mars and Jupiter represent the single exception, being a less flattering (or disharmonic) 18:19 ratio – in his defence, however, this dissonance could be explained by the presence of the main asteroid belt, which was not discovered for a further 150 years. Had a visible planet orbited there, it is feasible to believe that this pattern of harmonies could well have continued.

Lines in the Sand

Much is written of the Nazca and their miraculous, monumental art etched into the arid plains of their Peruvian lands – and, alas, much of it is pseudo-scientific at best, and outright fallacious at worst. These writings range from the feasible attachment of those icons to the constellations (although the sheer mass of lines and figures makes such associations inevitable, rather than necessarily accurate), through to the ludicrously overblown claims that they could not possibly have been made without the assistance of extraterrestrials. Like the crop circles revealed to be hoaxes, rumours of miraculous coincidences and grand feats overwhelm the verifiable facts.

Rather than introduce something miraculous to the works of early civilisations, these theories do little but denigrate our ancient ancestors. As I have discussed on many occasions – and the general purpose of this blog is to continue to do so – I must assert the ingenuity of those who came before us. It is a simple matter, in days when gadgets we can fit into our pockets do much of our work for us, to assume that because we do not need to consider how to achieve such feats that it must have been impossible for people thousands of years earlier. In fact, it is worse than simple: it is an arrogance of modern society.

It is comparable, if you will, to imagine someone a thousand years from now looking upon the Eiffel Tower and, assuming records have been lost, believing that it simply could not have been achieved through the technology available at that time. It was, of course, possible, but required Gustave Eiffel to invent new means of construction; new varieties of crane to hoist the vast pillars of metal into place; it was possible, but accompanied by one of the very greatest of our achievements – which is to say, our incomparable desire to innovate.

The fact of the matter is, of course, that archaeologists have been able to replicate the Nazca designs using tools available to the culture of the era, with few people involved, and in relatively short order. That being said, of course, these symbols are magnificent works – truly remarkable feats of ingenuity and a manifestation of man’s desire to see their imagination and their works wrought large across the flesh of the world, as if in ink.

Clouds that Give Birth to Stars

Nebulae are relatively widely-known as astronomical figures, but this was not always the case – rather, the term was indistinct, referring to a wide range of celestial objects. In fact, even into the early twentieth century, the term referred to those distant objects that we now know are whole galaxies.

Despite this early confusion, nebulae were always notable as objects to those cultures that paid close attention to the night sky. The earliest records of them as such come from the Maya and the Greeks, who noted that some areas of the sky appeared to glow with a diffuse light, as if many tiny stars were clustered in a small region. It was, however, many centuries before their true nature could be correctly defined.

There are three broad types of nebula, according to their ‘emissions’, which is to say, how they behave in accordance with light. Absorption (or ‘dark’) nebulae are clouds without stars within or nearby, and thus are characterised by their dampening effect on the light from stars beyond. Reflection nebulae have nearby stars whose light illuminates the gases of the nebula. The final, and more interesting kind, are called emission nebulae, and are the birthplaces of stars and planets.

Emission nebulae are regions of space in which matter comes together, forming dense pockets that, following all of the usual laws of gravity, gather other matter into themselves. As these gain further mass, their relative gravity continues to increase, faster and faster with the increase of mass and, thus, gravity. In the fullness of time, these pockets gain so much mass that the gravity holding it in place, condensing matter into such a confined space, results in the ignition of the matter, thus giving birth to a star.

If this were not enough, emission nebulae are also among the most beautiful of all astronomical phenomena – the Orion Nebula and Carina Nebula are worthy of special mention, while the Trifid Nebula is composed of emission, reflection and absorption nebulae, creating its wondrous lobed structure.

Tales of the Stars

The stars are a common source of myth and legend – possibly the greatest source, if one considers the number of tales about the Sun, let alone the Moon and the other stars, which, combined, must surely dwarf the size of the Bible. Today, I’ll be presenting a few of my personal favourites.

In the mythology of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori, all of the stars, the Sun and the Moon were thrown into the sky by the god Tane, to decorate his father’s cloak. In the beginning, his father (Ranginui, the sky father) and his mother (Papatuanuku, the earth mother) clasped themselves to each other, giving their children little room to move. Tane’s brother, Tumatauenga, argued that they should kill their parents, but Tane, showing the strength of his legs, lay upon his back and forced them apart. Later, as an act of contrition for this, he threw the stars up to decorate his father and to give his mother a beautiful image of the husband she would never again embrace.

In ancient Canaan, Venus, the Morning Star, was called Athtar, and was a particularly ambitious deity. Upon the death of Baal, who sat upon the throne of the gods, Athtar attempted to take his place, but was rebuffed (either by the throne itself, or by the other deities – there are several versions), and thus returned to his place. This myth neatly explains why it is that Venus cannot be seen at midnight – it is the time that Athtar attempts to steal the throne. (The real reason, of course, is that Venus lies closer to the Sun than Earth, and, thus, is below the horizon at midnight.)

In Ukrainian folklore, the Pleiades were once seven maidens who were utterly devoted to the gods. Each day, they would dance and sing to honour the gods, and, as one might expect, the gods took notice of their devotion and their beauty. When they died, the gods made them nymphs, and took them into the sky, where they set the stars to be their new homes. To this day, the seven maidens continue their dancing, which explains why the Pleiades cross the sky as one.

Not forgetting that the sun itself is a star, the Chinese tell a story providing the reason that the cock crows at dawn. In ancient times, the cock had horns and the dragon did not, which was a source of great shame to the dragon as he could not fly without them. The dragon came to the cock and begged for the horns, which it promised to return the next day – obviously, the dragon, resplendent with his new horns, elected to break the deal, and to this day the cock each morning watches the dragon follow the sun across the sky and demands, “Dragon! Give back my horns!”

The Light of the Gods

One of the most fascinating areas of archaeoastronomy has less to do with measurements and the appreciation of genius in ancient man, but is rather the way that common man related to the stars. In almost all ancient cultures, the symbolism ascribed to the stars equated them with gods, in often startlingly different ways.

While one culture may elevate the sun to be the representative of their supreme deity^* (such as the Egyptians under Akhenaten), another may not ascribe the sun so much importance, and instead look to the stars to provide them with a playground of the gods. In this way, the night sky is useful – if you do not wish to make a single deity so powerful and significant, you place them among their peers, where the brightness of their presence indicates their relative positions.

In terms of importance, then, it is worth noting the modern names of our planets, in particular those that were known to the ancient astronomers: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These, being the visible planets in our solar system were selected especially in order to take the names of gods. This is due to their seemingly remarkable ability to move across the sky relative to the stars – all other stars remain relatively stable, moving only gradually, and certainly not in a manner notable over the course of a lifetime. Their special ability to move, then, granted them the significance of gods.

While it is obvious that there are other symbols man could have chosen for their gods (and often did) – such as volcanoes, great trees, mountains – stars have a single feature that gives them divine credence: they are eternal. Any symbol found upon the earth can disappear from view, but a star can always be seen on a clear night.

^*Even Christianity co-opts the power of this symbol, by aligning God with light itself – beautifully illustrated in medieval art, in which the halo is not merely a golden circle indicative of the sun, but may also include rays of light.

The Astronomy of the Pacific

In the field of archaeoastronomy, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands are a curiosity – they evidently had an understanding of the stars, key dates throughout the year were marked by the appearance of different stars and constellations, and they were able to navigate vast distances even during the night...and yet only a single culture of the Pacific islands ever developed a written language, and that was upon Easter Island, far to the east and many thousands of miles from the origin of the Polynesian peoples.

Given the evidence that the Polynesians regularly travelled across the Pacific, how did the navigators manage to reliably travel to disparate locations without star maps or written directions? The answer, of course, is in a lifelong training and the memorisation of oral records. For the navigators, it was less essential to know the precise location of stars relative to each other so much as the location a star should be at a given location and a given time. For instance, the stars of Arcturus, Spica and Sirius are perceived to sit directly above Hawaii, Samoa and Tahiti respectively, while Polaris disappears beneath the horizon when you cross the equator.

Further, the navigators of Polynesia did not rely solely upon the stars. Migratory paths, prevailing winds and tides all played their part – it was not a system of navigation dominated by the stars, but an holistic approach that accepted the roles of many factors in establishing routes. As David Lewis, author of We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, once wrote, they “were not merely in tune with their environment...they were literally a part of it.”

The Polynesians are unique in this regard – no other culture (or, more accurately, group of related cultures) lacking a written language ever crossed such vast distances by sea.

Why We Watch the Stars

“The movements of the heavenly bodies are an admirable thing, well known and manifest to all peoples. There are no people, no matter how barbaric and primitive, that do not raise up their eyes, take note, and observe with some care and admiration the continuous and uniform course of the heavenly bodies.” Bernabé Cobo, 1653.

Cobo was an early 17^th century explorer of Latin America, and in his many journeys and encounters with the people there, he was able to gain an appreciation for just how important the stars were to those cultures. As he rightly states, there is no state of man so primitive that we are not compelled to look into the sky in wonderment.

It has been an enduring fascination of mine, and with all the same fervour that doubtless compelled the religious leaders of the ancient world to ascribe supernatural powers to the stars. Their permanence in the night sky; wandering slowly and in accordance with one another; their apparent formation into meaningful figures: these are the causes for a very human fascination.

With the full awareness that the stars are not gods, that they do not orbit the Earth (although research shows that a great many early astronomers had already deduced this), nor place humans at the centre of the universe – even now, we find ourselves under a clear night sky, far from the light pollution of the cities, and we stare upwards into the belts of the Milky Way at pinpricks of light that have travelled millennia to reach us.

As you can imagine, then, the appearance of the brightest celestial phenomenon in history must have caused quite a stir. In 1054 AD, the Crab Nebula was born, and for nearly two years it was a feature of the night sky (in fact, for twenty-three days, it was even bright enough to be seen in daylight). This event is often used as a sort of “proof of age”, as it is a widely-recognised event that was of note to the whole of humanity. As such, finding references to its appearance provides us with a reasonable estimate of the date upon which that reference was made – whether in the written form or in “mere” pictograms such as those used by the Anasazi of North America.

The Proof of Ages

As you may know, I am a man who is constantly astounded by the ingenuity of ancient astronomers, and I have as part of my career relied upon a belief in their talents in order to ascertain the dates of events in the past. Naturally, then, as an academic, I must believe in the proof that these astronomers were more than simple men, but were great men possessed of genius, whose measurements are reliable.

It is true that few people can read Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan pictograms or Sumerian cuneiform, and that I must rely for the most part upon their translations, providing an extra barrier of proof to be overcome. It is, however, also true that each of these cultures composed – independently or otherwise – what is called the ‘Saros cycle’, which is an accurate calendar that can predict such events as solar and lunar eclipses. While to the layman this must seem bewilderingly complex, it is, in fact, a very simple thing to achieve, because they follow precise patterns.

The remarkable achievement, therefore, is not that they were able to calculate this – all that is required is observation – but that their records were such that they were able to observe the period of those cycles. Lunar eclipses are much more common than solar eclipses, and are visible to the whole of the night side of the Earth, which should make their task simple, except for the reason that there are a variety of types of lunar eclipse, depending on its completeness (which is to say, how much of the Moon is occluded by the Earth’s shadow). This, naturally, requires a much longer period of observation.

Consider, then, that in these civilisations, the average age of even the wealthy may not exceed 50 or 60, and that a full cycle lasts around 18 years, and, further, that to accurately predict all eclipses requires a sequence of Saros cycles that forms a Saros series, lasting between 1200 and 1500 years... Needless to say, the fact that their calculations are accurate in predicting both lunar and solar eclipses makes it a simple, awed response to appreciate the beauty of their measurements.

Stars and their Catalogues

Throughout the ages, man has endeavoured to catalogue all that they see in the night sky. Until relatively recently, however, we were broadly incapable of maintaining an accurate record of all of the stars visible to the naked eye – they may be too faint, or too difficult to distinguish from another star nearby; they may become confused with other stars as they cross the sky. To the ancient astronomer, then, a catalogue was necessary in order to judge which star was which.

If you have some familiarity with astronomy, you may know of the Messier catalogue of 1771, which was compiled by Charles Messier in order to remove objects from the sky. Messier was a comet hunter, and discovered that many celestial objects had the appearance comets at certain times of year, and his list of 45 objects that were not comets (which he later expanded to 103) became the pattern for European star catalogues. In ancient Babylon, however, there was an equally impressive catalogue.

The MUL.APIN is a Babylonian record, containing detailed information about 71 stars and constellations in extraordinary detail. This record includes all of our modern zodiacal constellations, as well as expansive information regarding the Sun, Moon and other planets’ positions within them, not to mention enormous additional information that would bewilder the common man.

While this is obviously of interest to astronomers – being able to see the origins of their art centuries before the birth of Christ – it is also of great interest to historians, who, knowing the predilection for mapping of the stars, can rely upon such accurate records to determine the dates of other events.

For instance, a partially complete Babylonian star chart (copied from a much older record) noted a remarkable event proposed to be an asteroid impact or a near-Earth comet, and was able to provide sufficient information to provide a precise date of the 29^th of June, 3123BC. Further, it has been argued that there is sufficient information to calculate the actual trajectory of the object itself!