The Stars Were NOT What You Think: Ancient Myths vs. Reality

Go outside tonight, find somewhere dark, and look up. What you see is essentially the same sky every human who has ever lived has seen. The same stars, the same patterns, the same Milky Way spreading across the dark. But for most of human history, nobody knew what any of it was. No telescopes, no science, no physics. Just a sky and a brain intelligent enough to know it was looking at something important. • The most widespread belief about stars in the ancient world, appearing independently across cultures that had no contact with each other, was that the stars were the souls and spirits of ancestors. The ancient Egyptians believed a pharaoh's soul ascended to become a star. Their word for the circumpolar stars that never set was the indestructibles. The Norse believed warriors taken to Valhalla shone as stars. Aboriginal Australians held that good people were set among the stars by a creator figure after death. Indigenous peoples across North America knew the Milky Way as the path of souls. Cultures that never met, never traded, all looked at the same sky and reached the same conclusion. • The Pleiades, a cluster of seven stars in Taurus, appear in the myths and rituals of every inhabited continent on earth. Ancient Greeks called them the Seven Sisters. Aboriginal Australians independently called them the Seven Sisters and told stories of their pursuit across the sky that researchers believe describe real stellar movements observed for over 60,000 years. The ancient Japanese called them Subaru. The oldest physical star map ever found, a 3,600-year-old bronze disc from Germany called the Nebra Sky Disc, depicts the Pleiades as its most prominent feature. • The ancient Greeks around the 5th and 6th centuries BC began asking not what the stars were spiritually but where they were physically. Their answer: the sky was a great transparent crystalline dome, with stars as jewels embedded in its inner surface, rotating around an Earth at the centre of everything. Elegant. Orderly. Almost entirely wrong. And held for nearly 2000 years. • In 2018, researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent compared cave paintings from Turkey, Spain, France and Germany, radiocarbon dated to between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, with the positions of star constellations at the time of painting. They found that the animals were not just animals. They were star maps. The animal figures represented constellations as they appeared in the sky, used as a calendar to record dates and events, including what researchers believe may be records of comet impacts. The study also found evidence that ancient humans understood the precession of the equinoxes, previously credited to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC. • Today, roughly a third of all people on earth cannot see the Milky Way from where they live. On a clear night in a city you might see 20 or 30 stars. Ancient humans on a clear night could see several thousand. For most of human history the night sky was the most complex, most reliable, most consistently present thing in a person's world. It was a calendar, a compass, a map, a religion, and a connection to everyone who had ever died. We now know the stars are not souls. They are distant suns, many larger than our own, separated from us by distances so vast that the light we see tonight left its source hundreds or thousands of years ago. Some of the stars you can see right now no longer exist. Ancient humans did not know that. But they knew the sky mattered. They were right about that. What did you think stars were as a child, before anyone told you what they actually were? 👇 Let me know in the comments, and yes I actually read them! ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🛑 WATCH NEXT: What Did Ancient Humans Do When They Were Bored? 🛑 WATCH NEXT: Did Ancient Humans Dream the Same Things We Do? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES Rappengluck, M. A. (2004). Ice Age people find their way by the stars. Astronomy and Geophysics, 45, 16-17 Hamacher, D. W. & Norris, R. P. (2010). Bridging the Gap: Astronomical concepts in the oral traditions of Aboriginal Australians. Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 13(2), 135-144 Sweatman, M. B. & Tsikritsis, D. (2017). Decoding Gobekli Tepe with archaeoastronomy. Athens Journal of History, 3(1), 47-69 Gaffney, V. et al. (2013). Time and a Place: A luni-solar time-reckoner from the 8th millennium BC. Internet Archaeology, 34 Hesiod (c.700 BC). Works and Days. Translated by H.G. Evelyn-White (1914). Loeb Classical Library ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ For business enquiries: [email protected] ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #humanhistory #archaeoastronomy #anthropology #astronomy #evolution