Re: Why Seven Pleiades?

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 02:44:55 +0300, "Ioannis" <morpheus@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>> In their use, yes. In their development, I'm not so certain.
>
>How do you mean?

I simply mean that the system is complex, and required some serious
thought. The mechanics of the arithmetic are absurdly difficult. This
isn't counting pebbles in bags- someone did some serious development. To
my way of thinking, this probably involved what I'd call mathematical
abstraction.


>What "interesting" astronomical knowledge do you mean?
>http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/dailylife/astronomy.html
>
>"The Ancient Egyptians had a limited knowledge of astronomy. Part of the
>reason for this is that their geometry was limited, and did not allow for
>complicated mathematical computations..."

That is the party line of Egyptologists, going back about 200 years. I
don't think it is correct. I presented a paper related to this subject
last year at the annual conference of the American Research Center in
Egypt. In short, I offered the viewpoint that this belief has more to do
with animosities between Egyptologists and astronomers than it does with
any evidence (or lack thereof). In fact, the Egyptians carried out
calculations in their daily commerce of a complexity sufficient for
tasks such as measuring the circumference of the Earth, the distance to
the Moon, to predict lunar eclipses, and other things of a similar
nature. There is some (very limited) evidence that they knew of Saros
cycles and could predict lunar eclipses. More interesting is the
possibility that they could (at least partially) predict solar eclipses,
and may have been able to do so as far back as 4000 BCE.

To be clear, I am by no means asserting with any confidence that they
could do these things- only that they had the capacity to do so, and
there is a little bit of evidence- difficult to interpret- to support
it.


>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?

I don't see the connection. I'm simply saying that the Egyptian
arithmetic system was sufficient for reasonably complex astronomical
calculations. There are astronomical ideas that require little math
(detecting the precession of the equinoxes, for example), and there is
no requirement that a sophisticated mathematical system has to lead to
astronomical usage.



>I am not trying to discredit the Egyptian civilization. The Egyptians did
>what they could. I am just pointing out a discrepancy: The truth is many of
>the Greeks like Thales, Pythagoras and Plato studied under the Egyptian
>hierophants for years. But there is something "contradictory" about their
>mathematics. On the one hand they build the Ghiza pyramid, which in itself
>implies some monumental engineering effort in terms of accuracy and design
>and on the other hand no visible trace of abstract math survives to today.
>Don't you find this a bit strange?

No. I simply assume that the evidence hasn't survived. Very, very little
Egyptian documentation has. The stuff carved on rocks is mostly ritual,
or concerned with the royalty and aristocracy. What we have on papyrus
must represent only the tiniest fraction of Egyptian knowledge.
Astronomical knowledge (and possibly architectural knowledge, too) may
have been kept within certain guilds, or kept by priests, and would
therefore be even less likely to survive. And by the time the Greeks
were interacting with the Egyptians, Egyptian culture had changed
radically from what it was a thousand years earlier. Knowledge may have
been lost (this can happen when it is kept by only a few people), or it
may never have been shared with the scholars.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
.

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