Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 31

Around 3000 b.c. Mesopotamia also saw a major new form
of architecture: the evolution of the Ziggurats, stepped pyramids
oriented to the cardinal points, north, south, east and west. This
was after the creation of the great stone circles in Orkney, soon
after the building of Newgrange in Ireland and not long before
work began at Stonehenge I. Other cultures, too, had their eyes
on the sky. Apart from the Plough (the Big Dipper, in the United
States) and Orion's Belt, most people can recognize the Pleiades
or “Seven Sisters,” above Orion to the right. In 3000 b.c. they
were on the celestial equator, rising due east, and are so described in
the Sanskrit Satapatha Brahmana . But, fascinatingly, the Aryan
culture was not then in India but still concentrated in the Middle
East - at the place and time that the constellations were being
devised [ 27 ] . The Pleiades were then very close to the vernal equi-
nox, and maybe they continued to be associated with them until
the Aryan entry into northern India, between 1500 and 1200 b.c.
We still call the vernal equinox 'the First Point of Aries,' as a nod
to ancient Greek astronomy, and most astrologers still treat Aries
as the first sign of the zodiac, although the equinox has been in
Pisces for most of the Christian era - hence the fish as an early
Christian symbol - and the musical play Hair notwithstanding, it
has not yet reached Aquarius.
Nearly 3,000 years after the Ziggurats, the emperor Ch'in,
who united China (named after him), built the Great Wall and was
buried with his army of terra-cotta figures, ordered a great burn-
ing of topics because he claimed to have rediscovered the ancient
knowledge and found later texts to be corrupt. Surviving texts date
the origin of the world to 2850 b.c. (contemporary with Stonehenge I)
and the origin of astronomy to 2500 (contemporary with comple-
tion of the Great Pyramid of Giza). Ch'in himself was buried in a
great pyramid made of earth, which has still to be opened.
An American missionary named Geil, who walked the Great
Wall in the early 1900s collecting legends of its origin, wrote that
the stories told nearest the center of the empire - perhaps the most
reliable - held that the Wall was built as an image of something in
the sky [ 28 ]. Geil considered the idea that the Wall and the dragons
of Chinese art both represent Draco, but like Henri Frankfort later,
he thought it couldn't be true because Draco is too faint. He failed
to realize that between 2850 and 2500 b.c. the pole star was