THE FIRST ASTRONOMERS
Who were the first astronomers? And who wrote the first treatise on
astronomy, oldest of the sciences?
Questions not easy to answer in our day. With the progress of
archaeological research, or inquiry into the civilization and monuments
of early peoples, it becomes certain that man has lived on this planet
earth for tens of thousands of years in the past as an intelligent,
observing, intellectual being; and it is impossible to assign any time
so remote that he did not observe and philosophize upon the firmament
above.
We can hardly imagine a people so primitive that they would fail to
regard the sun as "Lord of the Day," and therefore all important in the
scheme of things terrestrial. Says Anne Bradstreet of the sun in her
"Contemplations":
What glory's like to thee?
Soul of this world, this universe's eye,
No wonder some made thee deity.
To the Babylonians belongs the credit of the oldest known work on
astronomy. It was written nearly six thousand years ago, about B. C.
3800, by their monarch Sargon the First, King of Agade. Only the merest
fragments of this historic treatise have survived, and they indicate the
reverence of the Babylonians for the sun. Another work by Sargon is
entitled "Omens," which shows the intimate relationship of astronomy to
mysticism and superstitious worship at this early date, and which
persists even at the present day.
As remotely as B. C. 3000, the sun-god Shamash and his wife Aya are
carved upon the historic cylinders of hematite and lapis lazuli, and one
of the oldest designs on these cylinders represents the sun-god coming
out of the Door of Sunrise, while a porter is opening the Gate of the
East. The Semitic religion had as its basis a reverence for the bodies
of the sky; and Samson, Hebrew for sun, was probably the sun-god of the
Hebrews. The Phoenician deity, Baal, was a sun-god under differing
designations; and at the epoch of the Shepherd Kings, about B. C. 1500,
during the Hyksos dynasty, the sun-god was represented by a circle or
disk with extended rays ending in hands, possibly the precursor of the
frequently recurring Egyptian design of the winged disk or winged solar
globe. Hittites, Persians, and Assyrians, as well as the Phoenicians,
frequently represented the sun-god in similar fashion in their sacred
glyphs or carvings.
For a long period in early human history, astronomy and astrology were
pretty much the same. We can trace the history of astrology back as far
as B. C. 3000 in ancient Babylonia. The motions of the sun, moon, and
the five lucid planets of that time indicated the activity of the
various gods who influenced human affairs. So the Babylonian priests
devised an elaborate system of interpreting the phenomena of the
heavens; and attaching the proper significance in human terms to
everything that took place in the sky. In Babylonia and Assyria it was
the king and his people for whom the prognostications were made out. It
was the same in Egypt. Later, about the fifth century B. C., astrology
spread through Greece, where astrologers developed the idea of the
influence of planets upon individual concerns. Astrology persisted
through the Dark Ages, and the great astronomers Copernicus, Tycho,
Kepler, Gassendi, and Huygens were all astrologers as well. Milton makes
many references to planetary influence, our language has many words with
a direct origin in astrology, and in our great cities to-day are many
astrologers who prepare individual horoscopes of more than ordinary
interest.
It is difficult to assign the antiquity of the Chinese astronomy with
any approach to definiteness. Their earliest records appear to have been
total eclipses of the sun, going back nearly 2,200 years before the
Christian era; and nearly a thousand years earlier the Hindu astronomy
sets down a conjunction of all the planets, concerning which, however,
there is doubt whether it was actually observed or merely calculated
backward. Owing to a colossal misfortune, the burning of all native
scientific books by order of the Emperor Tsin-Chi-Hwang-Ti, in B. C.
221, excepting only the volumes relating to agriculture, medicine, and
astrology, the Chinese lost a precious mass of astronomical learning,
accumulated through the ages. No less an authority than Wells Williams
credits them with observing 600 solar eclipses between B. C. 2159 and A.
D. 1223, and there must have been some centuries of eclipses observed
and recorded anterior to B. C. 2159, as this is the date assigned to the
eclipse which came unheralded by the astronomers royal, Hi and Ho, who
had become intoxicated and forgot to warn the Court, in accord with
their duty. China was thereby exposed to the anger of the gods, and Hi
and Ho were executed by his Majesty's command. It is doubtful if there
is an earlier record of any celestial phenomenon.