All ancient, city-building civilizations were founded on agriculture. As any farmer and many of the rest of us know, agriculture relies upon the energy provided by the sun. Whether those ancient ancestors’ primary crops were wheat as grown by the Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians and Persians of the Middle-East; the olive groves of the Greeks and Romans of southern Europe; the Mayans, Incas, Aztecs and Ancestral Pueblo Dwellers fields of maize, beans and squash in the Americas; the Chinese and Thai empires rice paddies grown on terraces provided by their modifying their terrain; or the wheat and barley produced in an artificially, irrigated Indus valley by the Harappans in 3000 BC, all such agriculture relied on the life-giving rays of the sun.
It is therefore no surprise that the pantheons of gods devised by the elite of these ancient civilizations were almost always dominated by a “Father” god who either was the sun or was strongly represented by the sun in some way. Nor was it beyond them to devise technologies to watch, monitor and measure the sun’s movement across their skies and throughout their year.
Without the science and technology of glass-making and lens shaping, their solar astronomy required the building of monumental structures to help them track and record the sun’s passage, usually in combination with studying the moon and other prominent astral bodies in their skies. Agriculture enabled them to live together in the numbers needed to build these astronomical monuments. Some of the physical remains of these observatories’ are still available to our study today.
While the hieroglyphs or pictographs found at these sites, being painted symbols, have often faded to illegibility, the significant solar transits were more often carved into the rock of these monuments, allowing descendants to follow the wisdom of their ancestors. Perhaps because of this, many of the details of their calendars were recorded in petroglyphs, writing carved into the rock instead of the more usual painted pictographs.
In the USA, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet, known as the Four Corners, we find the remains of the civilization of one of the Ancestral Pueblos commonly known today as the Anasazi; although this is the name the Navajo gave them, meaning “ancient stranger or enemy.” These people were probably the ancestors of the Hopi and perhaps, therefore, known to themselves as the Hisatsinom. Regardless, these people were great builders. They were building the first apartment buildings in the US 500 or more years before Cristobal Colon (Columbus) sailed westward from Spain in 1492. Their religion and astronomy were firmly entwined, and focussed at Fajada Butte, the upper reaches of which were extensively remodeled to allow the priesthood to study the skies.
The most famous ancient observatory in the world today is Stonehenge, in the main because of its mystery; how it differs from all the others. While appropriated and used by the Celtic druids along with other henges in the British Isles after their arrival in approximately 1000 BC, who actually built Stonehenge and others, why and how they were able to is unknown. Recent carbon dating suggests Stonehenge was build over hundreds of years, between 3000 BC and 1500 BC.
The purpose of Stonehenge for the original builders remains unknown and may well stay so, but it is built on a solar orientation, with the sun setting directly over the heel stone on the evenings of the summer and winter solstices. Yet unlike all other ancient monuments with connections to solar astronomy, there are no ruined or buried cities nearby to tell us of the lives of the builders. The food producing plants native to the British Isles would not have allowed the development of an agrarian, city-building civilization.
For a relatively scattered, subsistence population to labor to bring massive 3-ton stones 240 miles from the Preseli mountains in Wales to Salisbury Plain beggars belief. Although it does explain why it took them so long to do so. Without a supportive agriculture to provide a large population, diverting the efforts of so many to transport stones would have been an ongoing trial, constraining most of the community to an otherwise unnecessary poverty. What could possibly have driven a neolithic, tribal culture to do it? Unfortunately, we may never know.
While Stonehenge and its fellows are, and will probably remain, a mystery, the other ancient monuments to solar astronomy found around the world are not. Enough is left of the cultures that built them for us to decipher the pictographs and petroglyphs of their writing. To learn something of how they lived, their relationship with the sun and how they created tremendous structures to observe and frequently worship the most important object in their skies.
