From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Wed Sep 24 1997 - 18:09:02 MDT
Eric Watt Forste wrote:
>
> danny asks:
> > anyone know how long its been called dogstar?
>
> It seems that the Greeks started calling it that shortly after (or
> while) learning about it from the Egyptians and other nearby peoples.
> That was going on during the 7th or 6th centuries BCE (600s and
> 500s BC) give or take a century. (The Greeks were just
> emerging from a major cultural collapse, or "Dark Age", during
> the two or three centuries before that time. First they came up
> with Homer, and then they got interested in astronomy and
> stuff.)
>
> This probably means that the Egyptians were calling it the Dog Star
> before then. The name derives from the fact that the star is set
> in a constellation called the Great Dog. Many constellation names,
> especially animals in the zodiac, seem to go back as far as the
> time writing first came into use (around 3000 BCE, give or take a
> millenium), so they may have oral histories much much older and
> we'll probably never know. I don't know how old the name "The
> Great Dog" is. The constellations along the zodiac probably had
> names long before the constellations in the other parts of the sky.
> The Great Dog is not part of the zodiac. Orion was probably named
> first (but after things like Leo and Scorpio and Virgo), and then
> Canis Major as an afterthought.
>
> Sirius, by the way, means "Scorcher" and is thought to refer to
> the hot weather of late summer that happens during the time of
> year that Sirius rises just before Sol does. This was called
> the heliacal rising, and the Egyptians used to watch for it so
> they'd know in advance when the season of Nile flooding was
> about to begin.
>
Another good question to ask is what orientation the Dogon astronomical
centers have with the pyramids at Giza. Since its been proven that
egyptian monuments of the Giza era all are positioned to represent stars
of the constellation Orion, and their own preoocupation with Sirius, as
well as their domination of most of NE africa, there could be a link
there, where the locals simply picked up on the religion of the
Egyptians while acting as guides to Egyptian surveyors trying to place
the proper postion of a Sirius monument with relation to Giza. Many more
primitive cultures on the fringes of major civilizations tended to act
as cultural and mythological packrats (witness the early Hebrews).
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?
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