gnostic
The Lost One
We don’t know what the prehistoric people think (referring to the people of the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods) because they left no writings that communicate their thoughts, however they sometimes do leave hints in works of arts, eg paint, figurines, but the saying “picture worth a thousand words”, lead to multiple interpretations, we really still don’t know what they think and believe.
And even when writings became available to the ancient people, like Bronze Age Sumerians and Babylonians, and the Egyptians, the stargazers may have the abilities to understand and even calculate periodic astronomical events (eg monthly, seasonal, annual) of the sun, moon and star alignments at specific times, neither the Egyptians, nor the Mesopotamians were ever capable of explaining what any of these objects were, nor how they seemingly move.
And in the 2nd millennium BCE (Middle and Late Bronze Age), both Babylonians and Egyptians thoughts the Earth itself were flat disk with edges, hence the Flat Earth.
They both also thought the Earth was static, fixed and stationary, while the sun, moon and stars moved in their vaulted dome, hence the notion of the geocentric planetary motion. Of course, geocentric model were never fully explained during this period (Bronze Age), not until Claudius Ptolemy wrote his treatise on astronomy.
The ancient Greeks during the classical and Hellenistic periods understood some things better, as they were the first to assume the Earth, sun, moon and planets were spheroid bodies, not like flat disks.
And the Hellenistic Aristarchus of Samos (mid-3rd century BCE) was the first to propose the heliocentric model over the geocentric model. However, the geocentric model would remain popular for another, over 1500 years, until the geocentric model were finally debunked by Galileo.
My points are that both ancient Bronze Age civilizations held views about astronomy that were so popular, and yet their knowledge were also so wrong.
But everything changed, even more so revolutionary than with Galileo and Isaac Newton, when in 1919, Edwin Hubble discovered the Milky Way wasn’t the only galaxy. From the 20th century to the present we continued to learn more, more so than the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, the Indians (referring to those of India) and the Mayans, and even more than Hubble himself.
I am not denying the ancient people contributions to astronomy, but they didn’t understand what they were really observing at the time. I think you place too much credits to the ancient people, who had no REAL understanding what the planets, stars and Milky Way - of what they really were.
Last edited:
