Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 30

be deduced. Eudoxus obtained the sphere in Egypt - “a discontin-
ued line” as Roy put it - and probably they obtained it from the
seafaring Minoan civilization [ 24 ].
The sphere dated from around 2800 b.c. and was made on
the latitude of Crete and Thera. If the Egyptians had done it, they
would have put in stars further south, ones that they could see
from Egypt. Archie Roy suggested that the site might have been
Santorini (formerly Thera), the volcanic island that sustained an
advanced culture before it was destroyed in an explosion about
1450 b.c. Thera may well have been the inspiration for the Atlan-
tis legend - hence Roy's title - as well as the Biblical story of the
Exodus [ 25 ] . It was a worse disaster than Krakatoa, in its initial vio-
lence and its consequences, since the tidal waves were produced
within the waters of the Mediterranean, and survivors from the
island civilizations may have founded the cities in Greece and Asia
Minor that were to fall out a few centuries later in the Trojan War.
However, ancient Egypt, primarily an inland civilization, escaped
largely unscathed, and Roy argued that they fell heir to the Thera
model of the sky. His colleague, the late Prof. Michael Ovenden,
considered that the most 'important' constellations, the 12 houses
of the zodiac within which the Sun, Moon and planets move (plus
Ophiucus, the Serpent-Bearer), were designed when those figures
were 'upright' with respect to the equator - about 2700 b.c.
There's another clue. The polar constellations of the Egyptians
were different, featuring a hippo, a crocodile and the leg of an ox,
not the Lion, Bears, Dragon and Boötes, the Herdsman, as we know
them, nor the Plough. Henri Frankfort, who compiled a respected
reference work on cylinder seals in the 1930s, thought these
figures couldn't be constellations because Draco, the Dragon, is so
faint. He didn't realize that in those days Draco housed the pole
and the sky turned around it! When he took that into account,
Roy noted that Draco also encloses the ecliptic pole, around which
the Sun's apparent motion is centered. Draco must have seemed
much more important when it housed both the major hubs of the
sky. And since the major civilization of the time in the right lati-
tude was the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia, whose early art
showed the figures of the polar constellations that we know, Roy
changed his thesis and ascribed the drafting of the constellations
to them [ 26 ].