Excerpt:
Dogons knew existence and description of Sirius B invisible to naked eye.
Dogons knew existence and description of Sirius B invisible to naked eye.
For a long time, two separate lines of thought governed our perceptions of tidal friction. Empirical evidence from observations of solar eclipses made as early as in Antiquity pointed to a secular acceleration of the mean angular motion of the Moon amongst the stars which was first noted by Edmund Halley in 1695. However, according to the solitary theoretical speculations of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1754), oceanic tides retarded the rotation of the earth. When did these two lines of thought converge?
A century ago, at the height of what might be referred to as the "canal furor," Camille Flammarion published the first volume of his great work, La Planète Mars, which summarized what was then known about the planet. In his preface he described how he hesitated between two methods of presenting the state of Martian knowledge---in special chapters dealing with topics such as continents, seas, polar caps, and so on; or chronologically, in the order in which the facts had been obtained. He at length decided on the latter approach, "mainly," he wrote, "because it seemed to me to be the more interesting . . . and also because it provides a better account of the gradual development of our knowledge." So it has seemed to me, and I have done likewise.
The Sumerians and ancient greeks were expert astronomers. I have not got much data on Sumerian astronomers, but suffice to say that they gave us the degree as a unit of angular measurement as they liked a sexagesimal system and 360 was almost the same as the number of days in a year. The Greeks came later but on quite a few of them I can find enough data to help me fill this page. Among them we find the following people:
These links were collected mainly from postings to the ASTRO Mailing List,
the VIDEOASTRO Mailing List and the History of Astronomy Mailing List (HASTRO-L )
Searchable archives of Astronomy Related Mailing Lists are available here.
Eclipses of the Sun and Moon have always left a deep impression on their viewers. The loss of the Sun, the bringer of life for ancient people, was considered a bad omen. Many ancient people—including those in the Caribbean and the islands of the Pacific— believed that during an eclipse a monster or dragon was eating the Sun. The time of an eclipse was one of prayers, sacrifices, and noise as they attempted to make the dragon drop its prey—and the dragon always did!
This is timeline of the effect eclipses have had on certain groups of people in various times and places. The information is anecdotal and not especially useful except possibly to give an interesting example of how people's attitudes toward nature have changed with the growth of science.
The ancient Roman religion known as the Mithraic mysteries has captivated the imaginations of scholars for generations. There are two reasons for this fascination. First, like the other ancient "mystery religions," such as the Eleusinian mysteries and the mysteries of Isis, Mithraism maintained strict secrecy about its teachings and practices, revealing them only to initiates.
We are on the verge today of a much greater appreciation for the scientific achievements of the world's most ancient civilizations and an understanding of the workings of the ancient mind. At a time when it is still fashionable for scientists to dismiss the possibility that the learned men of remote antiquity, long before the classical-period Greeks or the later Romans, could have known about phenomena like precession (the extremely slow wobble of the Earth's axis of rotation) without modern instruments, or about the spherical shape and dimensions of our planetary spacecraft or its orbit about the Sun as the center of a solar system, a few lone investigators have recently found traces of a very high degree of scientific sophistication and knowledge of the natural world preserved in a metaphorical code which we call myth.
This library guide was compiled for use by Saint Louis University students enrolled in Dr. James H. Korn's (www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/PSY/faculty/korn/index.html) History of Psychology course. Call numbers and other location notations pertain to collections in the University's Pius XII Memorial Library . Assume all URLs to begin with "http://" unless noted.
This is a large, well organized bibliography that has been divided into 14 categories such as contextual perspective, autobiographical recollections, and finding aids to manuscript collections. Many sections have brief, but helpful, comments from the author and links to online resources. This site would be extremely helpful to a researcher looking for a place to start.
This is an encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, legends, and more. It contains over 6100 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.
This encyclopedia of mythology and folklore contains sections divided geographically. The entries cover a wide range of cultures in six regions: Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. The site also offers a section on folktales, an image gallery, lists of legendary beasts and heroes, and genealogies.