The mystery of life - birth, growth, death, is almost certainly behind the ancient efforts to precisely know the seasons. They knew when to plant, and when to harvest - they didn't need any help there, and only a professor who never spent a day on a farm could think that.
And so the "ancient observatories" like Stonehenge aren't observatories at all. They're Cathedrals.
Happy Solstice. Grill something with your dad to celebrate. Photo from the always amazing NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day.
"They knew when to plant, and when to harvest..."
ReplyDeleteHow, without a calendar?
"And so the "ancient observatories" like Stonehenge aren't observatories at all. They're Cathedrals."
They're both.
Wolfwalker, there are lots of signals that people could use to predict planting and harvest time, rather than astronomical ones. Temperature, number of rainy days, various sorts of animal activities, etc.
ReplyDeletePre-literate societies would have an oral tradition that encapsulates this - sort of an unwritten Farmer's Almanac.
Agreed that the henges do have a celestial measurement function. I don't think that I made my point clearly, which is that what drove all those people to construct them is the mystical aspect, just as the mystical aspect drove the construction of cathedrals in the High Middle Ages.
Borepatch,
ReplyDelete"there are lots of signals that people could use to predict planting and harvest time, rather than astronomical ones. Temperature, number of rainy days, various sorts of animal activities, etc."
Nope. All of these vary unpredictably from year to year. There are a handful of known exceptions -- ancient Egypt, for example, where the Nile flood came at pretty much the same date every year -- but over most of Earth, the reliable low-tech methods of measuring time all depend on astronomy.
True, but if you're still getting frosts, it's too early to plant - even if it's the Equinox.
ReplyDeleteKnowing the date is actually only a help in places like Egypt, but even there they used other markers that were at least as important as the date (for example, how high the flood waters were, how quickly they were receding, etc).