Re: Why Seven Pleiades?

Ioannis wrote: 
The way I see it, even if those historians are wrong, astronomy and
mathematics are (and always were) connected at a very basic level. If indeed
the Ancient Egyptians, (as you claim) had some "interesting" astronomical
knowledge, then they should have also had the math to back it up. Where is
it? How are Egyptian Fractions related to Egyptian astronomy?

And mind you, I am not talking about the really advanced stuff like
spherical trigonometry and the like. Just the basic stuff will do: Simple
trigonometry, simple distance measuring and basic algebra. Where is it? How
did their astronomy develop without the essential math behind it? Or perhaps
you have something else in mind?

I don't agree and here's why: measuring the people at the time by their written mathematics is rather like claiming a person who is illiterate can't think. Mathematics is as much a language as anything else; it's an expression of human abstract thought. A lack of language skills (mathematics) does not imply that humans were less capable of abstract thought in the past than they are today. It merely says they had no way to express themselves, which limited the complexity of that thought somewhat. Getting back to the topic, it seems reasonable to me that this property that makes 7 special (what we'd call a prime number) *could* have been the reason many cultures consider it lucky.

As an aside: I'm no anthropologist, but I've always suspected that the science of anthropology consistently underestimates people of the past. Whether this is due to what I call the "caveman mentality" or simple scientific conservatism is debatable. What I mean by "caveman mentality" is the bias that people who lived in caves were less intelligent than the people of today. There is no biological evidence for this. This bias clearly infested the science in its infancy and I wonder if it still exists only in much more subtle ways. To be specific, I think anthropologists greatly underestimate the ability of ideas and technology to spread among uncivilized peoples. As a result I think the simple minded notion that the peoples of the Americas received no influence from cultures on other continents is, well, simple minded. There seems to be an underlying assumption that nomadic groups very seldom interact significantly. While it is silly to claim that ideas about things like constellations were carried directly by individuals from one continent to another, I see no reason such ideas couldn't travel from group to group, eventually making their way to other continents, perhaps on a timescale as short as hundreds of years. It seems to me that if you assume the influence of one culture on another distant culture is very weak rather than entirely nonexistant, it would be sufficient to explain the similarities (and differences) we observe between these cultures.

Clear skies,
Greg

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Greg Crinklaw
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