this group as Virgo the maiden , and this specific bright star is Spica , which is the Latin word for an ear ( of wheat ), another agricultural connection . The neighboring star group ( constellation ) Boötes the plowman is yet another link to what was at the time new technology — mythological lore says that it is the very inventor of the plough , who was laid on the celestial sphere after his death so that he would be remembered forever . By studying how different societies represent the skies , anthropologists have been able to trace back mass migrations across continents and millennia , but also the origin of some constellations . For example , many nations see Ursa Major , the greater bear , as this animal , which hints at a time when they lived together in a single place , rather than in different countries or even continents nowadays . Crossing this information with genetics — for example , the analysis of mitochondrial DNA — allows us to estimate this era as having taken place some 30,000 to 50,000 years ago . As writing was invented only around 3500 BCE , it is obvious we never could have figured out the genesis of this celestial figure merely by looking for written traces of it .
Multiplying Mindpower Despite its temporal limitation , writing was , however , a very if not the most powerful tool for humans — and for astronomy . The earliest writing systems appear to be cuneiform , in Mesopotamia ( modern-day Iraq ), and hieroglyphs , in Egypt — it is rather difficult to identify which was first , and there might have been communication between peoples of these areas , further complicating the inquiry , although it seems that cuneiform predates hieroglyphs by about a century . Not much later , early forms of another writing system appeared in what is now China — which makes Chinese characters the longest-running form of writing , still being used to this day , albeit in a slightly different form , whereas cuneiform and hieroglyphs have long been relegated to history books . Cuneiform was invented by the Sumerians , who spoke a language related to none other that is currently known . But quickly , it was picked up by their Akkadian neighbors , with whom the Sumerians gradually assimilated . Assyrian itself split in two dialects — Assyrian and Babylonian — by the 10th century BCE . Written on clay tablets , which were sometimes baked to make them harder , thus more durable , it left documents which easily traversed through millennia and can be found sometimes only slightly damaged even now . And quite a corpus of it was left ; historians estimate there might be around 300,000 clay tablets lying dormant in museum collections around the world — most of which remaining unread by modern eyes . Many of those that have been read —“ deciphered ” is a more correct term — have to do with astronomy . Through the studies of Asger Aaboe , Teide de Jong , Hermann Hunger , Otto Neugebauer , Mathieu Ossendrijver , David Pingree , Francesca Rochberg , and John Steele , among others , we now have access , for example , to reports of Venus observations around the year 1000 BCE or to how Babylonians of the fourth to first centuries BCE were able to predict planetary movements , laying the foundation for the modern science of astronomy .
Who Cares How It Works ? One of the main points about Babylonian astronomy is that they didn ’ t seem to care how the skies work — they were just interested in patterns and repetitions , if any were to be found . And find , they did : For example , they realized that Mars takes 780 days to return to the night
IMAGE CREDIT : landscape-horizon-architecture-sky-morning-hill-545972-pxhere . com . jpg
The stone circle at Stonehenge is thought by archaeologists to be one of the oldest astronomical observatory in the world . Located in the plains of the Wiltshire , England , it was erected in multiple steps from around 3100 BCE to around 1600 BCE , but traces of occupation dating back to around 8000 BCE have been found and may have an astronomical connotation . It was thought to have been used by Celtic druids , but these lived much more recently . Some rocks at Stonehenge are aligned in such a way as to point the place on the horizon where the sun rises or sets at the winter solstice or at the summer solstice , for example . More than an observatory , it was rather a sort of calendar .
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