Episode 142 - Star-Struck by Ancient Astronomy

People in the past looked up at the stars and planets, too. How did ancient cultures perceive the night sky? How did they explain the movement of celestial bodies? How did astronomy figure into ancient religion, calendars, city planning, and more? Was it aliens? Nope, but it was pretty much all math. Sorry.

• Decoding European Palaeolithic Art: Extremely Ancient knowledge of Precession of

• Decoding Göbekli Tepe With Archaeoastronomy: What Does The Fox Say? (Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry)

• Celestial Fertility Guide (Science)

• GIFs Show Constellations Transforming Over 150,000 Years (Wired)

• The world's oldest observatory? How Aboriginal astronomy provides clues to ancient life (ABC)

• Nabta Playa: The World's First Astronomical Site Was Built in Africa and Is Older Than Stonehenge (Discover)

• Nabta Playa and Its Role in Northeastern African Prehistory (Journal of Anthropological Archaeology)

• Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt (Nature)

• Satellite Imagery Measures of the Astronomically Aligned Megaliths at Nabta Playa (Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry)

• Five Solstice Sites That Aren’t Stonehenge (Sapiens)

• Three thousand years of sexagesimal numbers in Mesopotamian mathematical texts (Archive for History of Exact Sciences)

• The History of Trigonometry- Part 1 (NRICH)

• Enuma Anu Enlil (Tablet 50) (British Museum)

• The Theory of Knowledge and the Practice of Celestial Divination (Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World)

• Knowledge of Planets in the Third Millennium BC (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society)

• Vedānga Jyotisha (Encyclopedia.com)

• Vedānga Jyotisha (Indic Civilization Portal)

• Chinese astronomy: a guide to ancient stargazing in China (BBC Sky At Night Magazine)

• July 4, 1054: Crab Nebula Makes a Spectacular Debut in the Heavens (Wired)

• The Dunhuang Star Atlas (International Dunhuang Project)

• Book copied on silk, Divination by Astrological and Meteorological Phenomena (Hunan Museum)

Image: “Orion tablet,” Paleolithic carved mammoth ivory, Geißenklosterle Cave, Germany