212
decades. In this respect they differ markedly from the sun and the moon, whose size
and brightness otherwise naturally attract us to them over and above the tiny stars,
but their movements are very variable in space and time due to their proximity to the
earth. The sun shifts up and down the horizon with the seasons. While the moon
does this too, to further confuse us it rises and sets at considerably different times of
the month, making tracking it more complicated. With the stars being much further
away from the earth, on the other hand, all that changes in the course of the year, for
all practical purposes, is the period of visibility for each star. We can see the Pleiades
rise just before dawn in June, but at other times of the year they rise at other times
of the night or day. At some point people also realized that those stars that rise and
set are visible only in certain seasons but invisible in others. Therefore they could
be used as seasonal or monthly markers. The question is, of course, to what ends?
3 The Peopling of the Sky
In the ancient world, the mechanisms for marking time via the cosmic cycles are
usually found to be tied to religious beliefs and practices. We must mentally work
our way into a religious context, however hard that is now at the theoretical level—
what do we mean by ‘religion’?—let alone at the practical level. Fortunately, one
modern aspect of this investigation is in our favour. Our night sky is still populated
by constellations, many of whose names reflect their origins in Classical (or preClassical) antiquity. The Pleiades, Pegasus and Perseus are just a few of the ancient
Greek configurations which populate the modern celestial map. These names represent originally mythological figures, who were ‘catasterized’, or transformed into
stars, by the Greeks and Romans—a gradual process reflected in a long literary
tradition from the eighth century BCE onwards (Kidd, 1997; West, 1978), and perhaps of even earlier vintage, if one accepts that Aratus’s constellations represent a
fossilisation of much earlier, Bronze Age knowledge (Frank, 2014; see MacGillivray,
2004, 2009; Kyriakidis, 2005, Hannah and Moss 2003 for modern attempts to identify Bronze Age constellations). Of course, people from time immemorial appear to
have created pictures by joining the dots that are the stars in the night sky, although
the further back we go in time, the harder it is to be certain that the images we have
from the Paleolithic, Neolithic or Bronze Age periods do indeed constitute ‘star
charts’ of some sort or constellations, because the words which might tell us this do
not survive (cf. Magli, 2009). Even if the words did survive, would we understand
them, and how literally should they be taken?
In the western tradition, it is not until we get to Egyptian and Babylonian written
records that we can be sure that people were not only observing the night sky in a
systematic fashion, but were mapping it as well (cf. Hunger & Pingree, 1989). The
constellations which these peoples created, some of which were passed on to the
Greeks and then to the Romans and so to us, represent complex processes of comprehension, conceptualisation and categorisation, which have allowed observers
then as now to locate bodies in the celestial sphere (Hannah, 2002). In this regard,
R. Hannah
decades. In this respect they differ markedly from the sun and the moon, whose size
and brightness otherwise naturally attract us to them over and above the tiny stars,
but their movements are very variable in space and time due to their proximity to the
earth. The sun shifts up and down the horizon with the seasons. While the moon
does this too, to further confuse us it rises and sets at considerably different times of
the month, making tracking it more complicated. With the stars being much further
away from the earth, on the other hand, all that changes in the course of the year, for
all practical purposes, is the period of visibility for each star. We can see the Pleiades
rise just before dawn in June, but at other times of the year they rise at other times
of the night or day. At some point people also realized that those stars that rise and
set are visible only in certain seasons but invisible in others. Therefore they could
be used as seasonal or monthly markers. The question is, of course, to what ends?
3 The Peopling of the Sky
In the ancient world, the mechanisms for marking time via the cosmic cycles are
usually found to be tied to religious beliefs and practices. We must mentally work
our way into a religious context, however hard that is now at the theoretical level—
what do we mean by ‘religion’?—let alone at the practical level. Fortunately, one
modern aspect of this investigation is in our favour. Our night sky is still populated
by constellations, many of whose names reflect their origins in Classical (or preClassical) antiquity. The Pleiades, Pegasus and Perseus are just a few of the ancient
Greek configurations which populate the modern celestial map. These names represent originally mythological figures, who were ‘catasterized’, or transformed into
stars, by the Greeks and Romans—a gradual process reflected in a long literary
tradition from the eighth century BCE onwards (Kidd, 1997; West, 1978), and perhaps of even earlier vintage, if one accepts that Aratus’s constellations represent a
fossilisation of much earlier, Bronze Age knowledge (Frank, 2014; see MacGillivray,
2004, 2009; Kyriakidis, 2005, Hannah and Moss 2003 for modern attempts to identify Bronze Age constellations). Of course, people from time immemorial appear to
have created pictures by joining the dots that are the stars in the night sky, although
the further back we go in time, the harder it is to be certain that the images we have
from the Paleolithic, Neolithic or Bronze Age periods do indeed constitute ‘star
charts’ of some sort or constellations, because the words which might tell us this do
not survive (cf. Magli, 2009). Even if the words did survive, would we understand
them, and how literally should they be taken?
In the western tradition, it is not until we get to Egyptian and Babylonian written
records that we can be sure that people were not only observing the night sky in a
systematic fashion, but were mapping it as well (cf. Hunger & Pingree, 1989). The
constellations which these peoples created, some of which were passed on to the
Greeks and then to the Romans and so to us, represent complex processes of comprehension, conceptualisation and categorisation, which have allowed observers
then as now to locate bodies in the celestial sphere (Hannah, 2002). In this regard,
R. Hannah