A symposium about ancient astronomy brought professors from across Canada to U of T recently. The symposium concentrated on skywatching in the ancient Near East, focusing on ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (present day Iraq).
Dr. Robert Chadwick, a McGill professor who lectures on the religions of the ancient Near East, began the symposium by explaining the difference between an ancient skywatcher and an astronomer. The main job of the ancient skywatcher was to give names to the sun, moon and planets, to create calendars and tell time using the stars, while still viewing stars not as existing physically, but as “gods of the night.” The stars had a “big influence on theological beliefs,” Chadwick said, using the example of the ancient ziggurats—step pyramid structures with a temple at the top—which were used to make offerings to the celestial deities.
By the eighth century B.C., the stars had become a major factor in divination. The Babylonians and Assyrians created and referenced a detailed work to interpret signs from above. The phenomena they recorded were often seen as evil omens—especially the appearance of an eclipse.
Once the Babylonians were able to predict the occurrence of an eclipse, drastic measures were taken. “They didn’t want [the] evil of [an] eclipse to fall on the king. They would replace the king with a substitute,” Chadwick said. The unfortunate substitute and his entourage were killed when the evil had departed.
Dr. John Steele, a U of T specialist in ancient astronomy, explained that predicting evil omens was considered so important that by 700 B.C., Babylonians began keeping continual astronomical records. This marked the beginning of astronomy, because the record keeping did not mention gods but simply stated the facts in a bland, matter-of-fact manner. Steele quoted an entry from these records, from the death of the Persian King Darius III, defeated by Alexander the Great: “29th King Dead. Clouds.”
Steele also explained the importance of horoscopes in furthering astronomical knowledge. The ancients needed to use mathematical theories and past observations to know where the planets had been on the day a person was born, and so began to be acquainted with the cycles they saw in the sky.
When asked why he felt the ancients had such an interest in the sky, the chair of the symposium, Chadwick said something which seems to connect today’s lovers of the sky to those from over three thousand years ago: “[it is] a feeling of awesomeness of the heavens—it is an awesome thing to behold.”
