fathy

The study of our Universe (astronomy) is one of the oldest sciences in the history of the mankind,

People have been looking up trying to explain the starts, the sun and the moon since time immemorial.

The earliest Astronomers were priests and holy men, studying the movement of celestial bodies to determine celebrations and planting cycles, and you can see that in ancient time most of the gods were based on astronomy. People used to wait for the patterns of the stars to predict their seasons and predict the planting time and floods and many more aspects of their lives.

In this essay we are going to look at the non-western contributions to astronomy and we are going to start with one of the oldest civilizations that some say it’s the cradle of civilization Mesopotamia.

While the Greeks contributed so much to astronomy the history of astronomy begins in Mesopotamia.

This civilization started between Euphrates and Tigris river which now days are Syria, Iraq, turkey and Iran. These countries were the land of three of the greatest civilizations; Babylonia, Assyrian, and Sumerians.

Mesopotamians were the first to create a written language which helped them a lot and saved a lot of their history that’s why we know so much about them. The sumerians were one amazing astronomers but a lot of their culture were lost and most of our knoledge about them comes from the babylonians where they wrote about the sumerians and their contribution to astronomy.

The Mesopotamian gods began with the Sumerians, and many of these Gods were tied to the planets that they were able to see in the sky, a tradition carried on by the Greeks and Romans after them The Sumerians also used the sexagesimal system of measurement; it’s a system which uses the number 60...

... middle of paper ...

...e Chinese separated astronomy from astrology. The chinese divided the year into 12 lunar months and calculated the year to be 365.25 days long they also divided the sky into 4 quarters and each quarters into 7 sections to give a total of 28 section and used them to tell the time of the day. The chinese were also the first people to record a solar eclipse and its said to be one of the earliest solar eclipses known to human kind.

They also calculated that Jupiter needs 12 years to calculate one revolution around its orbit, they also recorded the first nova and Haley comet and the first super nova and the first sun spot. In 1088 AD Shen Kuo introduced the idea of a magnetic compass to facilitate navigation. He also established in his Dream Pool Essays concepts that contradicted the flat earth theory using lunar and solar eclipse as proofs of the spherical earth theory.