In spite of astrology, the ancients accumulated a surprisingly large body of astronomical knowledge. This age-old love of stars bridges time and space. Most importantly, it reminds us of just how little we are.
10 Babylonian Jupiter Tablet
The ancient Babylonian people in what is now modern-day Iraq obsessed over the stars long before the birth of Christ. A set of ancient tablets from the early centuries BC have revealed planetary math that was previously credited to 14th-century Europeans.
The Babylonians followed heavenly bodies across the sky and appointed them as prognosticators of Earthly events, birthing “modern” astrology and the 12 zodiacal signs.
They also tracked Jupiter with beautiful precision, yet it took a good deal of detective work to figure it out. For some time, lead researcher Mathieu Ossendrijver poured over four mysterious cuneiform tablets that bore no direct mention of mighty Jupiter.
Instead, the tablets prattled on about an arcane branch of trapezoidal mathematics. Ossendrijver believed that the data might be astronomical in nature. It just felt spacey, but he was otherwise stumped.
In 2014, a colleague sent him a photograph of a fifth tablet. When Ossendrijver translated the image, he found that it detailed a geometric calculation of Jovian motion.
The tablets recorded Jupiter’s movements across time to ascertain the distance traveled by our most prominent gas giant. It’s an ancient position versus time graph that was used for the serious business of predicting fruitful harvests and other agricultural milestones.
9 Buena Vista
Buena Vista, the western hemisphere’s oldest observatory, is tucked away in the Peruvian Andes several miles from Lima. At 4,200 years old, it predates the Incan civilization by a whopping 3,000 years. It also predates fire-hardened pottery. It’s so aged that archaeologists can’t even identify its Andean creators—only that they were 800 years ahead of the curve.
Thankfully, the observatory’s collection of temples and carvings emerged from the ground mostly intact and untouched by tomb raiders—though just barely. Looters did attempt entry into the site but gave up several inches too soon.
Since the original builders preferred to keep their grandest creations in mint condition, they carefully buried the site 6 meters (20 ft) deep while it was still fresh. Considering that the region is virtually free of rain, it was a perfect storm of preservation.
Buena Vista is spread over 20 barren acres of hilltop property. The observatory itself is perched atop a pyramid measuring 10 meters (33 ft) in height. Apparently, Buena Vista was used as a celestial agricultural calendar, marking the summer solstice planting period and the winter solstice harvest.
In addition to a monolithic frowning face, animal carvings decorate the complex, including culturally ubiquitous llamas as well as foxes. Legend has it that these animals taught indigenous peoples the art of farming.
8 Astronomical Wine Cup
Astronomical inscriptions have turned up in all sorts of unexpected places, including ancient drinking vessels. A 2,600-year-old skyphos (double-handled cup) was pulled from a ditch at the Halai acropolis outside Thebes and seems to combine the two traditional Greek pastimes of stargazing and drinking.
The wine cup depicts a seemingly random zoological mishmash. On it, we see a bull, a snake, a large feral cat (possibly a lion or panther), a scorpion, a hare-dog creature, and most unexpectedly, a dolphin. At first glance, the cup displays the common motif of a hunting scene. However, that blasted dolphin voids this hypothesis.
Instead, University of Missouri researchers posit that the animals represent constellations. The relative positions are inaccurate but only because ancient artisans organized the constellations by season and not their placement in the night sky.
The discovery opens up the exciting possibility that other astronomical depictions have gone unnoticed in plain sight—just as the cup itself languished in obscurity at the Lamia Archaeological Museum in Greece.
