ASTRONOMY ACROSS CULTURES

SCIENCE ACROSS CULTURES: THE HISTORY OF NON-WESTERN SCIENCE

V O L U M E 1 A S T R O N O M Y ACROSS C U L T U R E S

Editor:

HELAINE SELIN, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts USA

ASTRONOMY ACROSS CULTURES

The History of Non-Western Astronomy

Editor

HELAINE SELIN Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

Advisory Editor

SUN XIAOCHUN University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-94-010-5820-9 ISBN 978-94-011-4179-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4179-6

Printed on acid-free paper

A l l rights reserved © 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000

N o part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owners.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES SCIENCE ACROSS CULTURES: THE HISTORY OF

NON-WESTERN SCIENCE

In 1997, Kluwer Academic Publishers published the Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non- Western Cultures. The encyclopedia, a collection of almost 600 articles by almost 300 contributors, covered a range of topics from Aztec science and Chinese medicine to Tibetan astronomy and Indian ethnobotany. For some cultures, specific individuals could be identified, and their biographies were included. Since the study of non-Western science is not just a study of facts, but a study of culture and philosophy, we included essays on subjects such as Colonialism and Science, Magic and Science, The Transmission of Knowledge from East to West, Technology and Culture, Science as a Western Phenomenon, Values and Science, and Rationality, Objectivity, and Method.

Because the encyclopedia was received with critical acclaim, and because the nature of an encyclopedia is such that articles must be concise and compact, the editors at Kluwer and I felt that there was a need to expand on its success. We thought that the breadth of the encyclopedia could be complemented by a series of books that explored the topics in greater depth. We had an opportunity, without such space limitations, to include more illustrations and much longer bibliographies. We shifted the focus from the general educated audience that the encyclopedia targeted to a more scholarly one, although we have been careful to keep the articles readable and keep jargon to a minimum.

Before we can talk about the field of non-Western science, we have to define both non-Western and science. The term non-Western is not a geographical designation; it is a cultural one. We use it to describe people outside of the Euro-American sphere, including the native cultures of the Americas. The power of European and American colonialism is evident in the fact that the majority of the world's population is defined by what they are not. And in fact, for most of our recorded history the flow of knowledge, art, and power went the other way. In this series, we hope to rectify the lack of scholarly attention paid to most of the world's science.

As for defining science, if we wish to study science in non-Western cultures,

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vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

we need to take several intellectual steps. First, we must accept that every culture has a science, that is, a way of defining, controling, and predicting events in the natural world. Then we must accept that every science is legitimate in terms of the culture from which it grew. The transformation of the word science as a distinct rationality valued above magic is uniquely European. It is not common to most non-Western societies, where magic and science and religion can easily co-exist. The empirical, scientific realm of understanding and inquiry is not readily separable from a more abstract, religious realm.

The first two books in the series are Astronomy Across Cultures: the History of Non-Western Astronomy, and Mathematics Across Cultures: the History of Non- Western Mathematics. Each includes about 20 chapters. Most deal with the topic as it is perceived by different cultures: Australian Aboriginal Astronomy, Native American Mathematics, etc. Each book also contains a variety of essays on related subjects, such as Astronomy and Prehistory, or Logic and Mathematics. The next four in the series will cover Medicine, Nature and the Environment, Chemistry and Alchemy, and Physics and Optics.

We hope the series will be used to provide both factual information about the practices and practitioners of the sciences as well as insights into the world views and philosophies of the cultures that produced them. We hope that readers will achieve a new respect for the accomplishments of ancient civiliza­tions and a deeper understanding of the relationship between science and culture.

To Annie Kuipers editor extraordinaire

with affection and admiration

Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

Introduction

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sky Tales and Why We Tell Them E. C. Krupp

Astronomy and Prehistory Lawrence H. Robbins

Astronomy and the Dreaming: The Astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians

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31

Roslynn D. Haynes 53

Useful and Conceptual Astronomy in Ancient Hawaii Michael E. Chauvin 91

Ancient Astronomical Monuments in Polynesia William Liller 127

A Polynesian Astronomical Perspective: the Maori of New Zealand Wayne Orchiston 161

The Inca: Rulers of the Andes, Children of the Sun David S. P. Dearborn 197

Mesoamerican Astronomy and the Ritual Calendar Johanna Broda 225

Native American Astronomy: Traditions, Symbols, Ceremonies, Calendars, and Ruins Von Del Chamberlain 269

Birth and Development of Indian Astronomy Sub hash Kak 303

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x TABLE OF CONTENTS

Remarks on the Origin of Indo-Tibetan Astronomy Yukio Ohashi

Indo-Malay Astronomy Bambang H ida yat

A Cultural History of Astronomy in Japan Steven L. Renshaw and Saori Ihara

History of Astronomy in Korea Park, Seong-Rae

Crossing the Boundaries Between Heaven and Man: Astronomy in Ancient China Sun X iaochun

Astronomical Practices in Africa South of the Sahara Keith Snedegar

Astronomy in Ancient Egypt Gregg De Young

Babylonian Astrology: Its Origin and Legacy in Europe Nicholas Campion

Hebrew Astronomy: Deep Soundings from a Rich Tradition Y. Tzvi Langermann

Mathematical Astronomy in Islamic Civilization David A. King

Islamic Folk Astronomy Daniel Martin Varisco

Index

341

371

385

409

423

455

475

509

555

585

615

651

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have had a great deal of support in the making of this book. My thanks go to Maja de Keijzer, my reliable and dependable editor at Kluwer Academic Publishers. I would also like to thank Alexander Schimmelpenninck, now at Kluwer's Amsterdam branch, for easing my economic burden and making it possible for me to buy a purple iMac. My colleagues at the Hampshire College Library are incredibly generous; I thank them for putting up with me and for listening to my tales. And mostly I thank Bob and Lisa and Tim, the center of my universe.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

HELAINE SELIN (Editor) is the editor of the Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) and Science Librarian and Faculty Associate at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In addition to editing the new series, Science Across Cultures, she has been teaching a course on the Science and History of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

SUN XIAOCHUN (Advisory Editor; Crossing the Boundaries Between Heaven and Man: Astronomy in Ancient China) received his Master's degree in Astronomy from Nanjing University and his Ph.D. in History of Astronomy from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently an associate professor in the CAS-Institute for the History of Natural Sciences. He held the position of Vice President of the International Society for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in East Asia from 1996 to 1999. He has published primarily on the history of Chinese astronomy, especially on star catalogues and maps. His book, The Chinese Sky during the Han, was published by Brill in 1997. His current research interests go beyond ancient Chinese astronomy into Chinese science in general and its comparison with other civilizations.

JOHANNA BRODA (Mesoamerican Astronomy and the Ritual Calendar) was born in Vienna, Austria. She holds the Ph.D. in Ethnology from Vienna University. Since 1980, she has been Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas) and member of the Postgraduate Department of the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. Her research has focused on Aztec ritual and society, Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, cosmovision and the observation of nature. She is author of numerous specialized publications on these subjects, articles as well as books. She is co-author of The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World (Berkeley, 1987), co-editor of Arqueoastronomia y Etnoastronomia en Mesoamerica (Mexico, 1991) and Graniceros: Cosmovision y meteorologia indigenas de Mesoamerica (Mexico, 1997).

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xiv ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

NICHOLAS CAMPION (Babylonian Astrology: Its Origin and Legacy in Europe) read history at Cambridge, then pursued graduate studies in history and politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and international relations at the London School of Economics. His main research areas include the relationship between cosmology and politics, and the history of astrology, particularly its political and social uses. His major work is The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism and History (Penguin, 1994), a study of the relationships between astronomical ideas and theories of history. He is currently based in the Study of Religions department at Bath Spa University College, England, pursuing research into prophecy, cosmology and the New Age movement. He is the editor of Culture and Cosmos, the biannual journal on the history of astrology and cultural astronomy.

VON DEL CHAMBERLAIN (Native American Astronomy: Traditions, Ceremonies, Symbols, Calendars, and Ruins) has an undergraduate degree, with a major in physics, from the University of Utah and a Masters degree in astronomy from the University of Michigan. During the initial lunar explora­tion years he was director of Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, and he experienced the beginning of planetary exploration by spacecraft at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. As the Hubble Space Telescope began revealing stunning images of the grand cosmos he was director of Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, a post he held until he retired in 1996. He is known for his research on Native American ethno­astronomy, is the author of many papers and the book When Stars Came Down to Earth: Cosmology of the Skidi Pawnee Indians of North America. Currently he teaches university classes, lectures, and writes.·

MICHAEL CHAUVIN (Useful and Conceptual Astronomy in Ancient Hawaii) is the Director and founder of Hawaiian Skies, an astronomy education business. He received his degree, with a thesis on cosmology, from Cambridge University. He has lectured at the Bishop Museum Planetarium in Honolulu, and in recent years has developed and taught several astronomy courses with cultural and historical contexts for the University of Hawaii. He has received awards from NASA and the American Astronomical Society, and his work has appeared in the Hawaiian Journal of History and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming Hoku-lo'a: the British 1874 Transit of Venus Expedition to Hawaii.

DAVID S. P. DEARBORN (The Inca: Rulers of the Andes, Children of the Sun) is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and has held positions at the Copernicus Institute in Warsaw, the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, The California Institute of Technology, and the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is currently a research physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has worked extensively in nucleosynthesis, stellar evolution, and astro-particle physics. In addition, he has designed nuclear explosives, won awards for laser hohlraum development and radar analysis, as

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xv

well as working on non-seismic methods for treaty verification. Since 1980, he has spent 8 field seasons in Peru (and Bolivia) working to understand the astronomical practices of the Inca. This work culminated in a book written with an archaeologist, Brian Bauer, entitled Astronomy and Empire in the Ancient Andes. He is a full member of the Institute for Andean Studies, a founding member of the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC), and an editor for Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy News.

GREGG DEYOUNG (Astronomy in Ancient Egypt) received his Ph.D. in History of Science in 1981. In 1990 he joined the Science Department of the American University in Cairo. He teaches a survey of science and technology in ancient Egypt, as well as interdisciplinary courses in the Core Curriculum Program. His professional research interests focus on the history of mathematics and astronomy, cross-cultural transmission of knowledge, and the role of education in transmitting scientific knowledge.

ROSLYNN HAYNES (Astronomy and the Dreaming: the Astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians) is Associate Professor of English at the University of New South Wales. Having completed her first degree in science she worked as a research biochemist before studying literature. Her doctoral thesis from the University of Leicester, UK, on the influence of science in the work of H. G. Wells, resulted in her first book, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (1980). As a result of her cross-disciplinary background she has continued to explore cultural interfaces and diverse perspectives. Her other published books include: High Tech, High Co$t?: Technology, Society and the Environment (1990), From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (1994), Explorers of the Southern Sky: A History of Australian Astronomy (1996) (co-authored) and Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film (1998). She is married to radio astronomer Raymond Haynes and is currently researching the influence of scientific debates on Australian literature and art.

BAMBANG HIDAYAT (Indo-Malay Astronomy) obtained his Ph.D. in 1965 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He was Director of the Bosscha Observatory in Indonesia from then until 1999 and Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at the Institute of Technology, Bandung. He has been a Vice President of the International Astronomical Union since 1994. His research has recently been in the fields of binary stars and galactic structure.

SAORI IHARA (A Cultural History of Astronomy in Japan) is a professional translator of Japanese and English. She received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Science from Kochi University. Her graduation thesis included translation and analysis of Japanese star lore related to Subaru (Pleiades). Having a love for astronomy from childhood, she finds the translation of astronomical work

xvi ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

conducted in Japan to be a most rewarding way to communicate her native culture to others.

Articles by Renshaw and Ihara have appeared in Sky and Telescope as well as several Astronomical and Archaeoastronomical Society publications. In addition, they maintain a web site on Astronomy in Japan; its URL is http://www2.gol.com/users/stever /jastro.html

SUB HASH KAK (Birth and Early Development of Indian Astronomy) is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He has authored ten books and more than 300 journal articles in computer science, physics, neural networks, and history of science. His books include The Nature of Physical Reality (Peter Lang, 1986), The Astronomical Code of the Rigveda (Aditya, 1994), In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest Books, 1995), and Computing Science in Ancient India (USL Press, 1996). In addition to his continuing work on Indian astronomy, his current research includes quantum theory and theories of consciousness.

DAVID A. KING (Mathematical Astronomy in Islamic Civilisation) studied Mathematics at Cambridge University, Education at Oxford, and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and History of Science at Yale. He was director of a research project at the American Research Center in Egypt during 1972-79 and Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New York University during 1979-85. Since 1985 he has been Professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University. His publications, notably Islamic Mathematical Astronomy, Islamic Astronomical Instruments, and Astronomy in the Service of Islam, deal mainly with the history of mathematical astronomy and folk astro­nomy in the Islamic world and investigate the applications of this science for the regulation of the lunar calendar, the organisation of the times of prayer, and the orientation of religious architecture.

E. C. KRUPP (Sky Tales and Why We Tell Them) is an astronomer and Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. After attending Pomona College as an undergraduate, he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy at u.c.L.A. He is the author and editor of five books on ancient, prehistoric, and traditional astronomy, including Beyond the Blue Horizon, a worldwide comparative study of celestial mythology. His most recent book is Skywatchers, Shamans, & Kings: Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power (1997). He collaborates with his wife on astronomy books for children, and he writes a monthly column on astron­omy and culture for Sky & Telescope. He has visited more than 1500 ancient and prehistoric sites throughout the world.

TZVI LANGER MANN (Hebrew Astronomy: Deep Soundings from a Rich Tradition) is Associate Professor of Arabic, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel and Senior Research Associate, Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Jerusalem. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. His current research interests center around Science and

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Philosophy in Jewish and Muslim cultures. His latest books are Yemenite Midrash (HarperCollins, 1997) and The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages (Ashgate-Variorum, 1999).

WILLIAM LILLER (Ancient Astronomical Monuments in Polynesia) is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the non-profit Easter Island Foundation and Associate Director of the Instituto Isaac Newton of the Ministry of Education of Chile. He was the Willson Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University from 1960 to 1983 and also taught astronomy at the University of Michigan, from which he holds a Ph.D. His major fields of interest are astro­nomy and astrophysics of stars and star clusters, nebulae, and comets, as well as archaeoastronomy. He has almost 200 published scientific papers.

YUKIO OHASHI (Remarks on the Origin of Indo-Tibetan Astronomy), of Tokyo, Japan, is interested in the History of Astronomy in the East. He has recently written papers on the introduction of Indian astronomy into China, the cylindrical sundial in India, and the prediction of eclipses in ancient China.

WAYNE ORCHISTON (A Polynesian Astronomical Perspective: The Maori of New Zealand) recently retired as Executive Director of the National Observatory of New Zealand. He formerly worked at the Division of Radiophysics, CSIRO, in Sydney; at Sydney Observatory; and headed the Astronomy Group at Victoria College, Melbourne. In 1985 he was a Visiting Fellow at Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, Canberra. Wayne is on the Organising Committee of Commission 41 (History of Astronomy) of the International Astronomical Union, and his research interests lie mainly in the history of Australian and New Zealand astronomy, astronomical education, and meteoritics. He has published extensively, and his book, Nautical Astronomy in New Zealand: The Voyages of James Cook, appeared in 1998.

PARK, SEONG-RAE (History of Astronomy in Korea) received his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1977. Since then, he has been a professor in the history department at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. He has been President of the Korea History of Science Society and is a Member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.

STEVE RENSHAW (A Cultural History of Astronomy in Japan) is associate professor of Intercultural Communication at Kochi University. He received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of North Texas, M.A. in Communication Theory and Mathematics from North Texas, and Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in Intercultural Communication with 'cognates' in Social Psychology and Statistical Methods. His present academic research has now turned full force toward archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy, specifically that of Japan. He sees this study as a primary base for understanding the complexities of ancient and modern culture as well as a mode for forming a communication bridge between Japan and the West.

xviii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

LAWRENCE H. ROBBINS (Astronomy and Prehistory) is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. His special interest is in African archaeology; he has excavated in the Lake Turkana area of Kenya, southern Karamoja in Uganda, and in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. He discovered the prehistoric fishing settlement of Lothagam, west of Lake Turkana. He has recently been working on Later and Middle Stone Age rock shelters, as well as rock art and prehistoric mining at the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana. His research has been supported by grants from NSF, Fulbright and the National Geographic Society. Dr. Robbins is the author of numerous journal articles, as well as Stones, Bones and Ancient Cities, published by St. Martin's Press in 1990.

KEITH SNEDEGAR (Astronomical Practices in Africa South of the Sahara) earned his doctorate in Modern History from Oxford University. In 1994 he was granted a fellowship at the University of Cape Town to conduct research into African astronomical traditions. His articles on this subject have appeared in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Mercury, and Vistas in Astronomy. He co-authored the South African Museum's 'African Nights' planetarium show, and is serving as consultant for a TV documentary entitled 'Cosmic Africa'. He currently teaches history of science at Utah Valley State College.

DANIEL MARTIN VARISCO (Islamic Folk Astronomy) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY). He con­ducted doctoral dissertation research in 1978-1979 on irrigation agriculture in a highland Yemeni valley. In Yemen he has worked as a consultant in develop­ment and also specialized in medieval agricultural and folk astronomical texts. Medieval Agricultural and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan (University of Washington, 1994) is an edition, translation and annotated narrative of a 13th century Yemeni agricultural almanac. Medieval Folk Astronomy and Agriculture in Arabia and the Yemen (Ashgate, 1997) contains 16 articles with an emphasis on medieval Arab folk astronomy and traditional Yemeni agriculture. He has edited Yemen Update since 1991 and serves as webmaster for Yemen Webdate for the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.

INTRODUCTION

The study of the sky is arguably the first science. People had to make sense of what they saw in the sky and used the sky to make sense of the rest of the world. They studied the movement of celestial objects to help them keep time, to guide them in hunting, navigating and planting, to determine principles of leadership and community, and to predict and explain terrestrial events. Astronomy was essential for regulating the calendar and eventually for navigat­ing and mapmaking. Astronomy was also part of the triumvirate of stars, beings, and spirit that dominated the cosmology of many ancient cultures. And even though astronomic study was a common activity across the globe, we have a vast literature on European sites such as Stonehenge but much more limited scholarly work on the rest of the world. In part, this is a problem of data; history, after all, is not what happened, but what gets recorded and told. 1

But we also face a barrier to a more complete understanding: our single-minded view of the way to do science, and indeed our definition of science. This has restricted our ability to understand other astronomies and other ways of doing science and has kept most of the world out of our scholarly reach. This imbalance is slowly being rectified, and this volume is a part of that rectification.

Some themes are apparent in virtually all of the articles in this collection. One is that culture defines what astronomical activities will take place and how the results will be interpreted. Since Western society regards itself as rational and material, we view time and space as objectively measurable. For other cultures, such as Australian Aboriginal people, distance was dependent on the time it took to get someplace, and that was dependent in turn on what happened along the way. There was no need to have an objective measure of time and distance. Island and coastal cultures needed the sky for inter-island voyages, but land-based cultures used the sky in much the same way to travel overland. It seems obvious to us that the sky can alert agricultural peoples to auspicious times for planting, but hunters and gatherers also followed the sky, as it guided them in knowing which plants were ripe or which animal eggs were being laid. For African !Kung bushmen, the appearance of Canopus and Cappella marked the advent of the rainy season, a signal to disperse into smaller groups.

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H. Selin (ed.). Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non· Western Astronomy, xix-xxiii. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

xx INTRODUCTION

Several essays describe myths of origin and creation and their connection to the sky. The Egyptians believed that the sky was formed by the arched body of the goddess Nut; Hawaiians believed that the god Kane made the sun, moon, and stars and placed them in the empty space between heaven and earth. In one Inca myth, Manco Capac and his brothers and sisters were actually children of the sun. Navajo myth held that the sun was formed from a perfect piece of turquoise and the moon from a perfect piece of white shell.

Another theme is the connection between power and the sky. Some societies, notably the Inca and the Chinese, recognized a connection between heaven and earth and then used that connection to endow their leaders with heavenly mandates. The more a ruler could demonstrate his astronomical knowledge, especially with regard to predicting events such as eclipses or comets, the more earthly power he could wield. The line between religious and secular was either very narrow or non-existent, and, much as is the case today, those with the most sophisticated science and technology had the highest status and the most power.

The theme of the confluence of religion and everyday life is also evident in much of the scholarship on ethnoastronomy. We can see in India that, although the system of astronomy was very mathematical and abstract, it was developed to serve religious purposes. The need for altar construction led to the observa­tions that preceded the development of geometrical astronomy. This leitmotif is also evident in Islamic and Hebrew astronomy.

There is evidence of the use and development of calendars in virtually every culture represented in this volume. Calendars revealed the order, regularity, and cyclic rhythms of the universe. There were luni-solar calendars, solar calendars, and lunar calendars. In Mesoamerica, the calendar was a 365-day solar calendar that was combined with a 260-day lunar ritual calendar and the Venus cycle of 584 days. Some were used entirely for religious and ceremonial purposes; some were much more secular in orientation. Some new years began with the rising of the Pleiades or the first faint view of the crescent moon. Some had two seasons and were not divided into months; some were much closer to the Gregorian calendar. The Aztecs followed a system of eighteen months of twenty days, with a remainder of five days. All calendars had to deal with making up the intercalary month; this was done in novel ways in different civilizations. Some were amazingly accurate given the limited tools people had to construct them.

Cultures such as the Polynesians and the Arabs developed intricate systems for navigating the open seas. Others were surprisingly uninterested in using the sky as a wayfinder. There is a great deal of evidence that suggests that many cultures - Egyptians, Incas, Polynesians, Native North Americans, Muslims - aligned some buildings and temples so that the light would hit at the summer or winter solstice or in some way that demonstrates astronomical knowledge. Polynesia, for example, is scattered with monuments used for religious and navigational purposes. For the most part, lacking a written record, we have little exact knowledge of why so many structures were aligned with astronomical events.

INTRODUCTION xxi

In most of the cultures represented in this book, knowledge of the stars was interrelated with portents. Astrologers were astronomers; in some languages the word was the same. Astronomy was developed, in cultures such as Babylonia, China, and Korea, to be able to predict future events. The power of prediction lent legitimacy to the ruling elite. The distinction we see between what we would call superstition and science did not exist; each fed the other. And, if we are to judge from the horoscopes in newspapers in the West today, the ancient art did not fade entirely when science began its ascendancy.

Most astronomy was carried out with naked eye observation. Even in some cultures with observatories, like the Inca, there was little use of instruments. On the other hand, the Muslims, the Indians and the Chinese developed an advanced astronomical science, highly mathematical and technical. Many of the instruments we use today, and many of our star names, are gifts of the Arabs. The Egyptians combined a surprisingly accurate observational science with very little mathematics.

Another question posed by many of the authors in this collection has to do with the intercultural transmission of astronomical knowledge. We know that communication can not have been easy, and certainly we are talking about vast stretches of the globe, but there is evidence of transmission between India and Babylonia, and among China, Japan, and Korea. And of course the advanced science of the Islamic world spread to Europe. Less well known is the data showing transmission of ideas between the Arab world and Africa south of the Sahara.

How do we know what we know about the astronomical activities of the ancient cultures of the world? For some - the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, the Hebrews and the Maya - we have written documentation. For others, we have to interpret the evidence from engraved bones, tombs, and megaliths or else rely on the accounts of the first European explorers. In the latter case, many documents were destroyed, and the explanations were colored by the Europeans' often prejudiced views of what they saw. The question of interpret a­tion will always be part of this field of study, as we can only conjecture what the evidence suggests. Because we still have hunting and gathering societies today, we can also make some extrapolations based on their uses of the sky.

Books on the history of astronomy have tended to start with the Greeks, with a passing mention of the Arabs as translators of Greek science. This has changed in recent years. The emergence of the discipline of ethnoastronomy, a blend of archaeoastronomy and cultural astronomy, has given new life to the study of astronomy in other cultures. There have been 6 Oxford International Conferences on Archaeoastronomy, and the publication of the proceedings from those conferences has lent scholarly credence to the discipline.2 The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non­Western Cultures, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997, included many articles on world astronomy, including cultures such as Australian Aboriginal people that had been previously ignored.

This book is an extension of that encyclopedia. Our aim is to add depth to the articles that, as encyclopedia articles must, covered the subjects as broadly

xxii INTRODUCTION

as possible. We cannot hope to bring all the material together into a coherent whole; there is too much ground to cross and too much time to cover. The differences among cultures are as noteworthy as their similarities. When you assume that everyone in the same hemisphere was looking at the same sky, it is striking how different their interpretations are.

The book begins with two cross-cultural essays, setting the stage for the chapters on individual cultural areas. E. e. Krupp's 'Sky Tales and Why We Tell Them' discusses celestial myths and how they have been used to account for the creation, structure, development, and destruction of the cosmic order, the physical universe, and human institutions. Lawrence Robbins explores the roots of astronomy in prehistory, both in Europe and the rest of the world, by studying some aspects of the hominid record through time.

Roslynn Haynes describes the Aboriginal Australians' complex systems of knowledge and beliefs about the heavenly bodies that developed over more than 40,000 years, perhaps the most ancient of the cultures studied here. Michael Chauvin's exhaustive account of useful and conceptual astronomy in ancient Hawaii situates myth and navigational practices within the Hawaiian's worldview. William Liller takes on all of Polynesia in his study of astronomical monuments used both for religious and navigational purposes. And Polynesia is also represented in Wayne Orchiston's essay on the Maori of New Zealand. David Dearborn examines the relationship between power and authority and astronomy in Inca practices and building. Johanna Broda provides a compre­hensive survey of the calendar in Prehispanic Mesoamerican cultures, relating the calendar to what she calls cosmovision - a system that explained the known universe and reconciled it with social behavior. Von Del Chamberlain attempts the daunting task of exploring Native American astronomy by focusing on the Skidi Pawnee and the connection between ceremony, the calendar, and ruins.

The chapters on Indian astronomy, by Subhash Kak, and on Indo-Tibetan astronomy, by Yuki Ohashi, demonstrate the mathematical orientation of those cultures. Although we know that much of their astronomy had religious signifi­cance and was developed for religious reasons, the religion generated an advanced mathematics. Bambang Hidayat describes Indo-Malay astronomy and its development both in relation to Indian mathematical astronomy and to the celestial myths of the area. Steven Renshaw and Saori Ihara take on a similar task with Japan, reconciling the lack of indigenous astronomical prac­tices with the rich cultural tradition evidenced in star lore, mythology, and other aspects of cultural astronomy. Korea was also largely influenced by China, and Park Seong-Rae discusses this, and the connection between astrology and astronomy, in his essay on the history of astronomy in Korea. Chinese astronomy, one of the most ancient sciences in the world, can be dated to the 24th century Be. Sun Xiaochun deals primarily with the correlation between astronomy and society; he demonstrates how astronomy grew out of cosmology and created a link between the state and the Chinese people.

Keith Snedegar's essay explores time reckoning and astronomical practices as indicators of cultural exchange in Africa South of the Sahara, an area which has had too little attention paid to it, especially as our species originated there.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

Gregg DeYoung details the complexity of Egyptian astronomy, which reached a high plateau in its development of the calendar, timekeeping, and the orienta­tion of buildings. One noteworthy fact is that many tombs were decorated with astronomical ceilings; it is fascinating that star maps have also been discovered recently on the ceilings of tombs in Japan. Nicholas Campion provides a different perspective in his essay on Babylonian astrology; although divination is mentioned in many of the other essays, Campion demonstrates the complete interrelationship of astrology and astronomy. Tzvi Langermann supplies another distinct view in his paper on Hebrew astronomy, analyzing both extant cosmo graphical texts and others that demonstrate computational astronomy. Again we see astronomy in the service of religion, a theme very much elaborated in David King's paper on Islamic mathematical astronomy and its counterpart, Daniel Varisco's on Islamic folk astronomy.

It is easy, given how far observational and mathematical astronomy have progressed in recent years, to dismiss the astronomical practices of other ancient cultures, especially when their astronomy was not a precursor to our own. But in a curious way, walking on the moon and having satellite pictures of Mars have not brought us any closer to an understanding of the connection between the earth and the sky in anything but the coldest scientific way. The cultures in this volume used the sky to guide them in their daily lives - to lead the way, count the hours, predict disasters and situate their place in the cosmos. We hope this excursion into the astronomical achievements of the cultures of the world will open the eyes of scholars everywhere.

NOTES

Helaine Selin Amherst, Massachusetts

November, 1999

1 This idea comes from David Malouf's column in The Sydney Morning Herald, 23rd November, 1998, p. 17. 2 See Anthony F. Aveni, ed. Archaeoastronomy in the New World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; World Archaeoastronomy: Selected Papers from the 2nd Oxford International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; and Clive L. N. Ruggles and Nicholas J. Saunders, eds., Astronomies and Cultures: Papers Derived from the Third Oxford International Symposium on Archaeoastronomy, Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993.