44 comments

[ 37.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread
Couldn't a zodiac be dated through the configuration of the stars?
Probably not. It's not really a star chart and astrologers tend to not update their zodiac as precession causes drift over time.

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-the-zodiac...

That’s a good link. Sidereal time is interesting. Like a Mercury day is longer than it’s year. Wild
This intrigued me, so I looked it up. Sadly, your memory doesn’t seem to be correct. Mercury’s day is 59 earth days and its year is 88 earth days.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/planet-mercury.html

It depends on the definition of a “day” that you use, but due to Mercury’s elliptical orbit sunrises and sunsets are weird. [1] It takes 59 Earth days for the planet to revolve once around its axis, but from the surface it takes 176 Earth days to observe the sun making a complete circuit of the sky.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mercury/in-depth.amp

This is the weirdest thing at that link:

> But when Mercury is moving fastest in its elliptical orbit around the Sun (and it is closest to the Sun), each rotation is not accompanied by sunrise and sunset like it is on most other planets. The morning Sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again from some parts of the planet's surface.

There are two different definitions of "day". The sidereal day is the time it takes for a body to complete a full 360° rotation about its axis. The synodic day is the time between success zenith passings of the parent body. If the body rotates in the same direction as its orbits, the synodic day is longer than the sidereal day; if its rotation is in the opposite direction, the sidereal day is longer.

On Earth, the synodic day is 24 hours long, and the sidereal day is about 4 minutes shorter. In the case of Mercury, the sidereal day is 59 Earth days and the synodic day is 176 Earth days. Note that the synodic day is the one we on Earth use to define the length of a day for timekeeping purposes--it's a lot easier to measure synodic time than sidereal time.

Your wikipedia link indicates that the current dating of the Dendera zodiac is based on the configuration of the planets within it.
I didn't read it. I was interested in a better image.

Though planets used to be called wandering stars, stars and planets are not the same thing. If this piece actually contains a planetary configuration, that's a fairly reliable means to identify a timeframe, yes.

At least one article about exactly that process has appeared on HN before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943509

Zodiac is the wheel of signs based on constellations and the word is not synonymous with "astrological chart."

[flagged]
It's going to be fun when Christians lean into grievance culture and leverage hate speech laws to include blasphemy.
> Christians .. 6000 years ago

The Jewish New Year 5784, also known as Rosh Hashanah, will begin at sunset on September 15, 2023, and end at nightfall on September 17, 2023.3 It is the first of the High Holidays or Yamim Noraim, celebrated ten days before Yom Kippur.03 Rosh Hashanah means "head of the year" and falls on the biblical Feast of Trumpets.2 It is described in the Torah as Yom Teruah, a day of sounding the Shofar.3 In 2022, Rosh Hashanah began on September 25, 2022, and ended on September 27, 2022.01

[flagged]
Whew, glad someone is keeping track. Are there any other superstitions to know about? Be sure to do a Tell HN if anything changes in the world of who’s problematical.
Yo. This us vs. them is bullshit. Stop it.
I understand your POV and where it comes from but not all Christian’s believe in a theocracy or that those things you mentioned are even bad necessarily. Your lumping a lot of people in one group.
The Mayans believed creation to be 11 August 3114 BCE

Hindus? 3050 BCE or 3102 BCE

Chinese? 39,000 BCE

Egypt? 39,575 Or 28,000 BCE

Babylonians? 400,000–200,000 years before their own time

No one got it right.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_creation

You got the hindu date wrong. The Hindu cosmology actually has scales comparable with what modern cosmology believes.
Someone should correct Wikipedia then. It’s got errors for sure sometimes.
What your Wikipedia link says is already correct, ie that 3000BC is when kaliyuga started. The start of kaliyuga is not when the universe was created. Kaliyuga is just the last four hundred thousand years of a four million-year cycle, at the end which all the evil folk get purged and then the next cycle starts with a high quantity of good again.

The universe as a whole is created and destroyed in four billion-year cycles (one kalpa each). We're currently in the middle of the cycle, ie the universe was created two billion years ago. And Brahma the creator god lives for a longer time than that - three hundred trillion years - and we're halfway through that period as well.

Of course all these numbers are entirely "beautiful" mathematical constructions, and don't have any actual basis in observations or reality.

That's clearly from an Ancient Cartouche from the Goa'uld era, before Ra left the earth and the stargate was buried. The symbols are clearly chevrons! That places it at least pre-2995 B.C. which is predynastic, not even Old Kingdom yet.
For anyone who doesn't understand the above comment, it's a reference to the movie Stargate, where the pyramids end up being primitive landing pads created by human slave labour for parasitic aliens posing as human gods.

It sounds like a generic Hollywood knockoff of newage psuedoscience, but it ends up being an enjoyable sci-fi series centred on wormhole travel and how technologically superior civilisations can fall.

> It sounds like a generic Hollywood knockoff of newage psuedoscience, but it ends up being an enjoyable sci-fi series centred on wormhole travel and how technologically superior civilisations can fall.

That's what the US Air Force intended all along! #FalseFlag

there's even an episode about them making TV show based on the Stargates as a cover-up, completing the cycle of meta.
>> France’s Elgin Marbles?

The Louvre has several Parthenon marbles. I don't know where they got them from but I don't understand why nobody is asking that they be returned like the ones looted by Elgin. They absolutely should.

Also, they have the Nike of Samothrace and the Aphrodite of Milos, both of which are Greek archeological treasures that should be returned to Greece. And many more besides from Egypt and mesopotamia (the Lamassu from the palace of Sargon II!) that don't belong in, nor, to France.

(comment deleted)
“Joseph Fourier is now famous for the scientific equations that bear his name, but two centuries ago he was prominent in the world of Egyptologists.”

In fact, as it’s related, it was at Fourier’s house that Champollion first saw the hieroglyphs as an early teen, and, hearing that no one can read them, decided to dedicate his life to their decipherment.

An interesting tangential thought inspired by the article: nowadays it’s common for scientists to be lectured that in addition to truth they also need to consider how their findings will be used; that, if it’s possible that a finding may bolster the wrong argument, maybe it’s better not to undertake that research. I wonder what Champollion thought about this, given how his dating of the artifact supported the religious side that he knew was wrong.

> that, if it’s possible that a finding may bolster the wrong argument, maybe it’s better not to undertake that research

Really? That's horrific.

I suspect it is a paraphrase of the Nature (journal portfolio) "research ethics guidance" published in 2022. That guidance claims an ethical imperative to avoid "indirect" causation of "harm". Here is a quote from the editorial announcing the update:

> Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health). -- Nature Human Behaviour

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

Hence, according to the publishers of the Nature journal portfolio, if a finding could be used to support a policy which would cause a negative effect for some "vulnerable human group", or which might cause them to be subject to further stigmatization, then there is a moral imperative to not undertake or to not publish that scientific research.

If you are interested in those who have critiqued the editorial and the new guidance, I'd refer you to this post at Heterodox STEM:

https://hxstem.substack.com/p/ideological-mandates-in-publis...

Alternatively, the editorial staff at Nature offer their endorsement of their own policy here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01607-0

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.
Building rockets for military purposes is quite different from scientific research.
I think this is a distortion between "factually incorrect" and "morally wrong", a reminder to be very careful about results on humans which are going to be used as pro-discrimination arguments.
> For the rest of his life, what happened next remained a closely guarded secret between Champollion and his elder brother. As he gazed at the remaining inscriptions, he realised that all the cartouches were empty – and that included the one supposedly carrying the crucial word autocrator. Champollion had unwittingly been putting forward false arguments that strengthened the position of his opponents.

> It remains unclear whether the perpetrators of this error simply made a mistake or intentionally faked the evidence. Even so, Champollion has since been vindicated: the Zodiac is now believed to have been created in the first century bc during the reign of Cleopatra VII

Given that the drawings were made by people who could not read the text, I don't see how it can be unclear whether they intentionally faked the evidence? In that scenario, what would they have thought they were doing?

Champillon was lucky to come out alive. Crawling into confined spaces in high temperatures risks finding yourself compromised, heat stressed and in low oxygen environments.

They never show you Indy dropping down into the tomb and collapsing due to excess CO2.

Yeah, or inhaling the few thousand years of bone dust etc. in environments with minimal to no air flow.
Still they are on point for rats and snakes
At first I thought there was a controversy about zodiac-based dating being a thing in ancient Egypt.
What's with "bc" being lower case in the article?

I thought we'd all settled on BCE now anyway?