The dawn of astronomy : a study of the temple-worship and mythology of the ancient Egyptians / by J. Norman Lockyer.

  • Norman Lockyer
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dawn of astronomy : a study of the temple-worship and mythology of the ancient Egyptians / by J. Norman Lockyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    422/476 (page 400)
    the priucipal parts of Taurus and Scorpio appeared before the sun at the equinoxes. If my suggestion be admitted that the Babylonians dealt not with the daily tight but with the yearly fight between light and darkness—that is, the antithesis between day and night was expanded into the antithesis between the summer and the winter halves of the year—then it is clear that at the vernal equinox Scorpio setting in the west would be watching the sunrise ; at the autumnal equinox rising in the east, it would be watching the sunset; one part would be ^dsible in the sky, the other would be below the horizon in the celestial waters. If this be so, all obscurity disappears, and we have merely a very beautiful statement of a fact, from which we learn that the time to which the fact ap^^lied was about 3000 B.C., if the sun were then near the Pleiades. Jensen, in the above-quoted passage by implication, and in a subsequent one directly, suggests that not all the zodiacal constellations were established at the same time. The Baby- lonians apparently began with the easier ^^roblem of ha^dng six constellations instead of twelve. For instance, we have already found that to complete the present number, between Scorpio Capriconius Pisces we must interpolate Sagittarius Aquarius. Aries and Libra seem also to be late additions according to Jensen, who writes :— We have already above (p. 90) attempted to exj^lain the striking phenomenon that the Bull and Pegasus, both with half- bodies only, i]ix'noixoi^ enclose the Ram between them, by the assumption that the latter was interposed later, when the sun at tlie time of the vernal equinox was in the hind parts