Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 29

the start of the Christian era [ 20 ] . Also, from the outset, they
show figures in the landscape, human and divine, and over them
shapes in the sky that we recognize - the Lion, the Bear, the Bull,
the Plough and the long Dragon.
There's nothing inevitable about the patterns. They look very
different in different latitudes, and in ancient China for instance
the sky was divided up in quite a different way. Still nearer the
equator the tendency is not to form figures at all but 'ropes' of
stars running in parallel lines across the sky from east to west.
Such 'star-ropes' were later used by the Polynesian cultures to
achieve their amazing feats of navigation between islands widely
separated in the Pacific [ 21 ] . It's interesting that in ancient Sumer-
ian cosmology, the model of the universe was an equatorial one - a
half-cylinder running north to south, unkindly compared to a Nis-
sen Hut by the late Arthur Koestler [ 22 ]. The implication is that
some of them, at least, must have lived much nearer the equator at
a still earlier date, and indeed standing stones with lunar and stel-
lar alignments have been found far to the south in the Rift Valley
(though apparently much more recent, dated to 300 b.c.) [ 23 ]. Yet
the Sumerians' constellations had the forms we know. In Mesopo-
tamia, they were far enough north to see the stars wheeling around
the celestial pole, and indeed the constellation Draco - in which
the pole was located at the time - features on cylinder seals with
the Plough, the Lion and the Bear.
What we now call the classical constellations came to us from
ancient Greece, with a considerable input from the Arabs, who
were the foremost astronomers meantime. Although the Greeks
devised the versions which we still use today, much of their star
lore came largely from Egypt - but not all of it. In a thesis entitled
The Lamps of Atlantis Prof. Archie Roy of Glasgow University
argued that the major clue was a poem, “The Phenomena,” written
by Aratus in 250 b.c., putting into verse a description of the celes-
tial sphere by Eudoxus a century earlier. The remarkable thing is
that the description of the constellations fits the Mediterranean
of 2,000 years before; in the meantime precession had shifted the
pole and the equator a long way against the stars. Eudoxus and
Aratus describe stars that couldn't be seen from Greece or Egypt
in their time, and leave out stars that were then visible; from that,
the compilation date and the latitude of the sphere's creation can