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Archaeologists found an ancient Egyptian observatory

86 points by LinuxBender 2y ago

slythr 2y ago
I've seen enough Stargate to know where this is going.
- Tuna-Fish 2y ago
  Sadly, entirely wrong period. Seriously, though. There are a lot of open questions on dating old and middle kingdom events. The issue is not that there is no good chronology, it's rather that there are multiple reasonable and established chronologies that conflict. Entire careers have been made on basically arguing about dates. We can date important events after the 8th century BCE pretty well for the entire Levant, thanks to the hard work of Babylonian royal astronomers who around that time started systematically recording all celestial events on clay tablets, on which they also recorded the date and occasionally various major events. We can "run the sky backwards" and compare with their records to get a perfect correspondence between their calendar and ours. This is why we know the exact date of the death of Alexander the Great, among other things. An old or middle kingdom observatory with dated slabs that describe enough events to get us a few unambiguously fixed dates is one of those finds that archeologists dream of.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> "Everything we found shattered our expectations....suggesting the site had a dual role as both a spiritual and a scientific place. I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world. Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information. For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated. Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  ancient connections between religion and astronomy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
- codegladiator 2y ago
  The scientists of today are the priests of tomorrow. The only reason we don't use "religious" method is because science has taught us to only believe "data backed evidence". Also at the same time we are moving fast into the era where reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard and unlikely if not impossible. That "day-to-day" people neither read science papers in depth nor religious scriptures in depth is a common problem as well.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    This is simply false. Reproduction of papers is an academic issue but your claim is at the very least hyperbolic. The scientific method has proven to be by far the most successful method of investigating the world around us.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      Agreed. However, the method has ritualistic elements that can reproduced without following the method itself all that closely. When we use “accepted by a top journal” as a proxy for value, we are substituting social proof for actual value.
      - lazide 2y ago
        I think what you’re referring to is that a lot of traditional ‘hard’ science we are familiar with came out of a period of time when the most important thing was being provably correct (or not) - and it mattered in concrete ways - and so was enforced pretty heavily. Aka ~ early 1900’s to mid cold-war. When hard science and industrialization was a front and center, existential thing for society. A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted. Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many fields of Biology, and many others are all about social proof, since really what else can you use? There are too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any of it to make sense in a hard ‘verifiable’ way. And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify, rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also falling prey to ‘acceptability’ vs ‘verifiable correctness’. Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or people with rich rich sponsors - which also often required or provided social proof/acceptance. Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is marketable, and secrecy protects the ‘trade secrets’ so any sort of professionalism can be supported for further work or development. And because people need to eat.
8bitsrule 2y ago
> what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE... >an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found Hmmm. No suggestion of a period/era, despite that last claim of 'first'... Meantime, much farther up the Nile at Nabta Playa in the Nubian desert is a stone circle dated to circa 7,500 BP. https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy-of-the-nabta-playa-egyptian-stone-circle-c8ecb2800223 https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy...
stonethrowaway 2y ago
Yeah so, just to get this out of the way: Graham Hancock was right once again. He covers this in his BBC documentary (4 parts I think?)

86 points by LinuxBender 2y ago

slythr 2y ago

I've seen enough Stargate to know where this is going.

Tuna-Fish 2y ago
Sadly, entirely wrong period. Seriously, though. There are a lot of open questions on dating old and middle kingdom events. The issue is not that there is no good chronology, it's rather that there are multiple reasonable and established chronologies that conflict. Entire careers have been made on basically arguing about dates. We can date important events after the 8th century BCE pretty well for the entire Levant, thanks to the hard work of Babylonian royal astronomers who around that time started systematically recording all celestial events on clay tablets, on which they also recorded the date and occasionally various major events. We can "run the sky backwards" and compare with their records to get a perfect correspondence between their calendar and ours. This is why we know the exact date of the death of Alexander the Great, among other things. An old or middle kingdom observatory with dated slabs that describe enough events to get us a few unambiguously fixed dates is one of those finds that archeologists dream of.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> "Everything we found shattered our expectations....suggesting the site had a dual role as both a spiritual and a scientific place. I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world. Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information. For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated. Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.

082349872349872 2y ago
ancient connections between religion and astronomy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
codegladiator 2y ago
The scientists of today are the priests of tomorrow. The only reason we don't use "religious" method is because science has taught us to only believe "data backed evidence". Also at the same time we are moving fast into the era where reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard and unlikely if not impossible. That "day-to-day" people neither read science papers in depth nor religious scriptures in depth is a common problem as well.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  This is simply false. Reproduction of papers is an academic issue but your claim is at the very least hyperbolic. The scientific method has proven to be by far the most successful method of investigating the world around us.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Agreed. However, the method has ritualistic elements that can reproduced without following the method itself all that closely. When we use “accepted by a top journal” as a proxy for value, we are substituting social proof for actual value.
    - lazide 2y ago
      I think what you’re referring to is that a lot of traditional ‘hard’ science we are familiar with came out of a period of time when the most important thing was being provably correct (or not) - and it mattered in concrete ways - and so was enforced pretty heavily. Aka ~ early 1900’s to mid cold-war. When hard science and industrialization was a front and center, existential thing for society. A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted. Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many fields of Biology, and many others are all about social proof, since really what else can you use? There are too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any of it to make sense in a hard ‘verifiable’ way. And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify, rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also falling prey to ‘acceptability’ vs ‘verifiable correctness’. Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or people with rich rich sponsors - which also often required or provided social proof/acceptance. Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is marketable, and secrecy protects the ‘trade secrets’ so any sort of professionalism can be supported for further work or development. And because people need to eat.

8bitsrule 2y ago

> what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE... >an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found Hmmm. No suggestion of a period/era, despite that last claim of 'first'... Meantime, much farther up the Nile at Nabta Playa in the Nubian desert is a stone circle dated to circa 7,500 BP. https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy-of-the-nabta-playa-egyptian-stone-circle-c8ecb2800223 https://medium.com/@humanoriginproject/the-ancient-astronomy...

stonethrowaway 2y ago

Yeah so, just to get this out of the way: Graham Hancock was right once again. He covers this in his BBC documentary (4 parts I think?)