Archaeoastronomy and Ancient Technologies (Jul 2014)
Astronomical situation in the starry sky in the Neolithic-Chalcolithic in northern latitudes
Abstract
The starry sky has been one of the central ancient sources of human knowledge - reflected in myths, religious practice, the arrangements of stone monuments, designs on stone and ceramics, and in the spatial orientation of ancient settlements. We can recreate a picture of the sky as it appeared in ancient times with the help of astronomy software, and try to relate to ourselves the meaning of features known from ancient monuments. Humanity's transition from Neolithic to Chalcolithic culture, when everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere there emerged new geometrical symbols, such as crosses, circles, the wheel, etc is exceedingly important and relevant to people of today. The apparent universality of symbolic phenomena permits our search for answers to questions posed by such findings to be transposed from one picture of the sky onto analogous observations on Earth throughout the entire Northern Hemisphere. One suggestion is based on the fact that, as a result of continuous precession affecting the orientation of the celestial pole, Alpha Draconis [Thuban] - as an ancestral Polaris - helped to show the center of rotation of the northern sky. It was the Dragon that pointed toward the Earth's axis, which should be sufficient cause for its consideration as a new solar deity, ruling over the daily cycle of the Earth in relative to the apparent path of the sun in the ideas of ancient people. Often, solar symbols performed the indicative role as proxies for circumpolar constellations - taking the form of sacred animals, as if carrying the sun across the sky at night: the deer, the horse , the elk, etc. This celestial pole, in the constellation Draco, had long been known to humanity as the ecliptic axis orienting a circumpolar picture of the sky - a point equidistant from all other points on the ecliptic - by which the apparent motion of the sun, moon and planets, revered as lunar and planetary deities, is observed. In the monuments of that time, there are commonly two fixed centers of astronomical observation that seem consistent with provisions for these two polar positions in the sky. Conversely, a southerly directionality was observed for inhabitants of middle-northern latitudes at the time - about 1600 BCE - in the ascent of the southern sky constellation Southern Cross [Crux], plausibly reflected in the funerary symbolism common to culturally-interacting peoples. The exact position of north and south on the horizon would assist the exact orientation of east and west. This could be the original cultural-iconographic source for the equilateral cross symbol, and the reconstruction of its coeval orientation could also help clarify calendars, many of which were created at the time.
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