Long before the advent of writing, people studied the appearance and movement of objects in the sky and used this information for a variety of purposes. Ancient hunters, herders, and farmers all regulated their activities in conformity with the cycle of seasons during the year so that they could follow the migrations of prey, find appropriate pastures for domestic animals, and perform vital agricultural tasks.
Ancient farmers drew upon an intimate knowledge of the night sky Hesiod (HEE-see-uhd), who lived around 700 b. c.e., composed a poem called Works and Days describing the annual cycle of tasks on a Greek farm. How did the ancient Greeks, with no clocks, calendars, or newspapers, know where they were in the cycle of the year? As Hesiod makes clear, they oriented themselves by acute observation of natural phenomena such as the movements of planets, stars, and constellations in the night sky. Hesiod gives the following advice for determining the proper times for planting and harvesting grain:
Pleiades rising in the dawning sky,
Harvest is nigh.
Pleiades setting in the waning night,
Plowing is right.
The Pleiades (PLEE-uh-dees) are a cluster of seven stars visible to the naked eye. The ancient Greeks observed that individual stars, clusters, and constellations moved from east to west and appeared in different parts of the sky at different times of the year. (In fact, the apparent movement of the stars is due to the earth's rotation on its axis and orbit around the sun against a background of unmoving stars.) Hesiod is telling his audience that, when the Pleiades appear above the eastern horizon just before the light of the rising sun makes all the other stars invisible (in May on the modern calendar), a sensible farmer will cut down his grain crop. Some months later (in our September), when the Pleiades dip below the western horizon just before sunrise, it is time to plow the fields and plant seeds for the next year's harvest.
Farmers such as Hesiod were primarily concerned with the seasons of the year. However, there was also a need to divide the year up into smaller units. The moon, so easily visible in the night sky and with clear phases, offered the unit of the month. Unfortunately, the lunar and solar cycles do not fit comfortably together, since twelve lunar months falls eleven days short of the solar cycle of a 365-day year. Ancient peoples wrestled with ways of reconciling the two cycles, and the months of varying lengths and leap years in our present-day calendar are the legacy of this dilemma.
The complex societies that arose from the fourth millennium B. C.E. onward had additional needs for information based on astronomical observation, and these needs reflected the distinctive characteristics of those societies. In ancient Egypt an administrative calendar was essential for recordkeeping and the regular collection of taxes by the government. The Egyptians discovered that a calendar based on lunar months could be kept in harmony with the solar year by inserting an extra month five times over a nineteen-year cycle. They also learned from experience that the flooding of the Nile River—so vital for Egyptian agriculture-happened at the time when Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, rose above the eastern horizon just before the sun came up.
The claim is often made that the Greeks had a strong predilection for abstract theorizing rather than experimental verification and practical application, experience was put to use in some fields. Archimedes° (ca. 287-211 B. C.E.) invented many mechanical devices, including the screw pump for extracting underground water, and developed a technique for determining the volume of an object. Galen° (ca. 129-210 c. e.), a Greek physician of the Roman era, conveyed the legacy of Greek medical knowledge to subsequent ages.
.Archimedes (ahr-kih-MEE-dees) Galen (GAY-luhn)
Greek residents of Alexandria enjoyed citizenship in a Greek-style polis with an Assembly, a Council, and officials who dealt with purely local affairs, and they took advantage of public works and institutions that signified the Greek way of life. Public baths and shaded arcades were places to relax and socialize with friends. Ancient plays were revived in the theaters, and musical performances and demonstrations of oratory took place in the concert halls. Gymnasiums offered facilities for exercise and fitness and were places where young men of the privileged classes were schooled in athletics, music, and literature. Jews had their own civic corporation, officials,
In the second millennium b. c.e., the Babylonians began to make and record very precise naked-eye observations of the movements of the sun, the moon, and the visible planets, of occasional eclipses, and of other unusual celestial occurrences. Believing that the phenomena they saw in the sky sometimes contained messages and warnings of disaster, the rulers supported a group of specialists who observed, recorded, and interpreted these “signs" from the gods. Using a sophisticated system of mathematical notation, they figured out the regularities of certain cycles and were able to predict future occurrences of eclipses and the movements of the planets.
Early Greek astronomy had somewhat different concerns. Whereas Babylonian science observed and recorded data, Greek philosophers tried to figure out why the heavenly bodies moved as they did and what the actual structure of the kosmos (Greek for an orderly arrangement of things) was. Aristotle pointed out that because the earth's shadow, as seen on the face of the moon during a lunar eclipse, was curved, the earth must be a sphere. Eratosthenes (eh-ruh-TOSS-thih-nees) made a surprisingly accurate calculation of the circumference of the earth. Aristarchus (ah-ris-TAWR-kiss) calculated the distances and relative sizes of the moon and sun. He also argued against the prevailing notion that the earth was the center of the universe, asserting that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun. Greek theorists pictured the earth as a sphere at the center of a set of concentric spheres that rotated, carrying along the seven visible “planets"—the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—with the outermost ring containing the stars that maintain a fixed position relative to one another.
As a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Mesopotamia came under Greek control and Greek astronomers gained access to the many centuries of accumulated records of Babylonian observers. This more precise information allowed Greek thinkers to further refine their models for the structure
Tower of the Winds, Athens, Second Century b. c.e. Designed in the Hellenistic period by the astronomer Andronicus of Cyrrhus, the eight sides are decorated with images of the eight directional winds. Sundials on the exterior showed the time of day, while a water-driven mechanism inside the tower revealed the hours, days, and phases of the moon. (Ronald Sheridan/An-cient Art & Architecture Collection, Ltd.)
And movement of celestial objects. The Greek conception of the universe, in the form set down by the second-century c. e. astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, became the basis of scientific thinking about these matters for the next 1,400 years in the Islamic Middle East and Christian Europe.
Source: From Hesiod: Works and Days and Theogony, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing, 1993), pp. 35, 37, 41. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
And courts and predominated in two of the five main residential districts. Other quarters were filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of ethnic groups from Syria, Anatolia, and the Egyptian countryside.
In all the Hellenistic states, ambitious members of the indigenous populations learned the Greek language and adopted elements of the Greek way of life, because doing so put them in a position to become part of the privileged and wealthy ruling class. For the ancient Greeks, to be Greek was primarily a matter of language and lifestyle rather than physical traits. In the Hellenistic Age there was a spontaneous synthesis of Greek and indigenous ways. Egyptians migrated to Alexandria, and Greeks and Egyptians intermarried in the villages of the countryside. Greeks living amid the monuments and descendants of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and western Asia were exposed to the mathematical and astronomical wisdom of Mesopotamia, the elaborate mortuary rituals of Egypt, and the many attractions of foreign religious cults. With little official planning or blessing, stemming for the most part from the day-today experiences and actions of ordinary people, a great multicultural experiment unfolded as Greek and Middle Eastern cultural traits clashed and merged.
World History
