Each civilisation had a different way of looking at the stars. They found different patterns and linked them to a wide range of traditions, legends and stories.
What is amazing is not the patterns but the level of detail they were able to observe in the night sky. A few years ago the jolly, ebullient Khurshed Batliwala gave a talk listing out a few things ancient Indian scientists observed and recorded -
The Great Bear and Arundhati-Vashishta
The core pattern of this constellation is hard to miss. It looks like a giant kite with a long tail. The Greeks called it Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and saw a far more elaborate pattern - the quadrangle of the kite became the torso of the bear, the tail became its neck and head while the surrounding stars took the shape of a fat tail and spindly legs.
Ancient Indians, on the other hand, focused on the core form and called it the "Sapta Rishi" - the seven sages - Bhrigu, Vashista, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha and Kratu. Of these Vashista is of special interest because the ancients noticed that this bright spot in the sky was not one but two different stars in close proximity - a double-star. They named the second star after the sage's wife, Arundhati. Each of these stars correspond to the following Arab-Greek equivalents:
- Bhrigu - Benetnash
- Vashista ("most excellent) - Mizar ("girdle")
- Angiras - Alioth
- Atri - Megrez
- Pulastya - Phecda
- Pulaha - Phecda
- Kratu - Dubhe
Brightness of celestial objects is measured in Apparent Magnitude. This is on a reverse logarithmic scale, which means that the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. In the Great Bear constellation, the brightest star is Alioth (mag 1.76 - 33rd brightest in the sky), followed by Dubhe (m 1.79), Alkaid, Mizar / Vashishta (m 2.23), Merak, Phecda, and Megrez.
Note that Mizar / Vashishta is not the brightest, yet it is a well-known naked eye double star with the fainter star Alcor (Vashistha's wife, Arundhati - 'washed by the rays of sun'). This is the double-star, as Batliwala points out, that newlyweds in South India view formally because they rotate in perfect synchrony, and symbolise a balanced, harmonious, and lifelong marriage of mutual respect. References to this symbolic traditions are found in early Vedic literature, including the Rig Veda and especially the Brahmanas (like Taittiriya Brahmana). Out of the thousands of stars in the night sky how did the ancients decide to select this double star?
Batliwala goes on to describe other instances in ancient records and traditions that make us wonder about their perceptiveness:
- The depiction of Varaha avatara in iconography carrying a round earth, long before the Egyptians of Greeks discovered that the earth was round;
- Antares ("like-Mars"), the 16th brightest star in the sky was named "Jeshta" (biggest, eldest, oldest). How did they figure that this star is 40,000 bigger than the sun, ad one of the biggest stars known to man?
- Rust-proof pillars - the one displayed in Delhi and another the Kollur pillar, said to have been built by tribals to welcome Adi Shankaracharya (8th century CE)
- Metallurgy - Zinc extraction from ore was known for 4000 years . A difficult metal to extract because it liquifies at 997C and turns into gas at 1000C. So it had to be extracted within a 3 degree window. The ancients metallurgists did this by turning the furnace up-side down. This technology was copied by the Chinese and in turn, patented by William Champion (1709-89) in Britain
- The value of Pi up to 30 decimals encoded in a Krishna sloka in the KatapayaSankhya format where numbers associated with alphabets: (eg., 1 = ka, ta, pa, ya)
Recently a few more examples turned up in a post titled, "How Much did the Ancients Know ? It’s fascinating". It records the work of one Dharampal (1922–2006), an Indian Gandhian thinker and independent historian who became known for re-examining India’s pre-colonial society using British archival records.
Dharmpal notes that Hindu astronomers, many years BCE, represented the planets in ways that encoded precise astronomical knowledge. Jupiter was depicted with four dancing girls circling around it. Saturn was represented as a figure with seven arms, one of which grasped a ring.
- The Dancing Girls of Jupiter: Four moons of Jupiter were not known in Europe before 1609, when Galileo first observed them through his telescope. Even then, only the third and fourth satellites were occasionally visible to the naked eye, and only in the clearest atmospheric conditions. The fact that Hindu astronomical tradition represented Jupiter with exactly four attendant figures suggested a knowledge of these satellites that predated European discovery.
- The Seven Arms of Saturn: Until 1783, European astronomy recognised only five satellites of Saturn. The sixth satellite was not discovered until 28 August 1789, when William Herschel identified it. The seventh satellite was observed by Herschel only after he had completed his grand telescope of forty feet focal length, and was first seen on 17 September 1789.
There is no mention of lenses or telescopes in the scriptures and records, so how did ancient Indians see and record details of celestial bodies with such amazing accuracy?
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REFERENCES & LINKS
Katapayadi Sutra - https://www.eviolinguru.com/kadapayadi-sutra.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_(star)
How much did the ancients know? - https://substack.com/home/post/p-188261182
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