The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple-worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians

When we inquire among which early peoples we are likely to find the first cultivation of astronomy, whatever the form it may have taken, we learn that it is generally agreed by archæologists that the first civilisations which have so far been traced were those in the Nile Valley and in the adjacent countries in Western Asia.

The information which we possess concerning these countries has been obtained from the remains of their cities, of their temples—even, in the case of Babylonia, of their observatories and of the records of their observations. Of history on papyrus we have relatively little.

Not so early as these, but of an antiquity which is still undefined, are two other civilisations with which we became familiar before the treasure-houses of Egypt and Babylonia were open to our inquiries. These civilisations occupied the regions now called India and China.

The circumstances of these two groups are vastly dissimilar so far as the actual sources of information are concerned; for in relation to China and India we have paper records, but, alas! no monuments of undoubtedly high antiquity. It is true that there are many temples in India in the present day, but, on the authority of Prof. Max Müller, they are relatively modern.

The contrary happens in Egypt, for there monuments exist more ancient than any of the inscribed records; monuments indicating a more or less settled civilisation; a knowledge of astronomy, and temples erected on astronomical principles for the purposes of worship, the astronomers being called "the mystery teachers of Heaven."

We go back in Egypt for a period, as estimated by various authors, of something like 6,000 or 7,000 years. In Babylonia inscribed tablets carry us into the dim past for a period of certainly 5,000 years; but the so-called "omen" tablets indicate that observations of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena had been made for some thousands of years before this period. In China and in India we go back as certainly to more than 4,000 years ago.

When one comes to examine the texts, whether written on paper or papyrus, burnt in brick, or cut on stone, which archæologists have obtained from all these sources, we at once realise that man's earliest observations of the heavenly bodies in all the regions we have named may very fairly be divided into three perfectly distinct stages. I do not mean to say that these stages follow each other exactly, but that at one period one stage was more developed than another, and so on.

For instance, in the first stage, wonder and worship were the prevalent features; in the second, there was the need of applying the observation of celestial phenomena in two directions, one the direction of utility—such as the formation of a calendar and the foundation of years and months; and the other the astrological direction.

Supplied as we moderns are with the results of astronomical observation in the shape of almanacs, pocket-books, and the like, it is always difficult, and for most people quite impossible, to put ourselves in the place and realise the conditions of a race emerging into civilisation, and having to face the needs of the struggle for existence in a community which, in the nature of the case, must have been agricultural. Those would best succeed who best knew when "to plow and sow, and reap and mow;" and the only means of knowledge was at first the observation of the heavenly bodies. It was this, and not the accident of the possession of an extended plain, which drove early man to be astronomically minded.