Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions, 601 B.C. to A.D. 1, at Five-day and Ten-day Intervals

Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions, 601 B.C. to A.D. 1, at Five-day and Ten-day Intervals

Author: Bryant Tuckerman

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9780871690562

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The need for these tables became pressing when hundreds of astronomical cuneiform tables in the British Museum became available for study, partly through the copies made in the 1880s and 1890s. All these texts originally came from some archive in Babylon which was discovered by Arabs in the middle of the 19th century. Most of the texts were written from about 330 B.C. to the first century A.D. Many of the texts are fragments of the original clay tables which have broken. In many cases, a fragment contains only parts of a few legible lines. Much of the information is of an astronomical character. It is evident that for investigations of these tablets the possibility of rapid scanning of accurately dated planetary positions is of primary importance.


Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions

Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions

Author: Owen Gingerich

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9780871695901

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These tables cover the period from the mid-17th to the 19th cent. when astronomical ephemerides were evolving most rapidly. These tables resemble those previously pub. by the APS: Tuckerman's "Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions, 601 B.C. to A.D. 1" and "A.D. 2 to A.D. 1649" and Goldstine's "New and Full Moon, 1001 B.C. to A.D. 1651." The tables contain features consistent with the almanacs and ephemerides pub. in this period: planetary positions are computed for 12 hours U.T. (noon); and the Julian day number is given for new and full moons. An analytical essay examines the theoretical and computational developments in almanac-making in the period that bridges between Kepler and Laplace.


Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions, A.D. 2 to A.D. 1649 at Five-day and Ten-day Intervals

Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions, A.D. 2 to A.D. 1649 at Five-day and Ten-day Intervals

Author: Bryant Tuckerman

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 860

ISBN-13: 9780871690593

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These tables for A.D. 2 to A.D. 1649 are an extension, with some improvements, of earlier ones for 601 B.C. to A.D. 1. As before, they give the geocentric positions (tropic celestial longitudes & latitudes, i.e. with respect to the mean equinox of date), in units of 0 degrees.01 for the Sun & planets, & 0 degrees.1 for the Moon, at 16h Universal Time - 4 P.M. Greenwich Civil Time - 7 P.M. local mean time of 45 degrees East longitude (Babylon), on the indicated dates, all in the Julian calendar, hence for Julian dates 5n + 1/6 for the Moon, Mercury, & Venus, & 1-n + 1/6 for the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, & Saturn. The same adaptation of the theories of Leverrier, Gaillot, & Hansen, with modified elements by Schoch, was used as before, except as noted below. The chief change has been to improve the positions of Jupiter & Saturn. Tables.


Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism

Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism

Author: Ian S. Moyer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-07-07

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1139496557

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In a series of studies, Ian Moyer explores the ancient history and modern historiography of relations between Egypt and Greece from the fifth century BCE to the early Roman empire. Beginning with Herodotus, he analyzes key encounters between Greeks and Egyptian priests, the bearers of Egypt's ancient traditions. Four moments unfold as rich micro-histories of cross-cultural interaction: Herodotus' interviews with priests at Thebes; Manetho's composition of an Egyptian history in Greek; the struggles of Egyptian priests on Delos; and a Greek physician's quest for magic in Egypt. In writing these histories, the author moves beyond Orientalizing representations of the Other and colonial metanarratives of the civilizing process to reveal interactions between Greeks and Egyptians as transactional processes in which the traditions, discourses and pragmatic interests of both sides shaped the outcome. The result is a dialogical history of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the great civilizations of Greece and Egypt.


Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Author: Sofie Schiødt

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1479823155

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Comparative insights on astronomy, divination, and medicine from ancient texts Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East presents a collection of articles by leading scholars on scientific practices in the ancient world, with emphasis on the fields of medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination. The essays engage with a wide variety of textual sources in many different languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. The contributors to this volume were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. This book will be of interest primarily to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.


Exploring Ancient Skies

Exploring Ancient Skies

Author: David H. Kelley

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-12-06

Total Pages: 623

ISBN-13: 038726356X

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Exploring Ancient Skies brings together the methods of archaeology and the insights of modern astronomy to explore the science of astronomy as it was practiced in various cultures prior to the invention of the telescope. The book reviews an enormous and growing body of literature on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, the Far East, and the New World (particularly Mesoamerica), putting the ancient astronomical materials into their archaeological and cultural contexts. The authors begin with an overview of the field and proceed to essential aspects of naked-eye astronomy, followed by an examination of specific cultures. The book concludes by taking into account the purposes of ancient astronomy: astrology, navigation, calendar regulation, and (not least) the understanding of our place and role in the universe. Skies are recreated to display critical events as they would have appeared to ancient observers - events such as the supernova of 1054, the 'lion horoscope' or the 'Star of Bethlehem.' Exploring Ancient Skies provides a comprehensive overview of the relationships between astronomy and other areas of human investigation. It will be useful as a reference for scholars and students in both astronomy and archaeology, and will be of compelling interest to readers who seek a broad understanding of our collective intellectual history.


The Revival of Planetary Astronomy in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian Europe

The Revival of Planetary Astronomy in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian Europe

Author: Bruce S. Eastwood

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1351744186

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This title was first published in 2002: Before the introduction of Greco-Arabic mathematical astronomy in the 12th century, what astronomy was there in the medieval West? While we know of developments in computus, which calculated with solar and lunar cycles to create Christian calendars, and in monastic time-telling by the stars, was anything known of the five planets? Using glosses, commentaries, and diagrams to the early manuscripts of four classical Latin authors - Pliny, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Calcidius - Bruce Eastwood provides evidence for the extensive development of the sixth liberal art, astronomy, from the time of Charlemagne forward, with a particular focus on the diagrams used and invented by Carolingian and later scholars. Learning to understand the motions of planets in terms of spatial, or geometrical, arrangement, they mined these Roman writings for astronomical and cosmological doctrines, in the process not only absorbing but also creating models of planetary motions. What they accomplished over three centuries was to establish a basic set of models that showed the reasoned order of the planets in the heavens.


The History of Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue

The History of Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue

Author: Gerd Graßhoff

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1461244684

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Ptolemy's Almagest shares with Euclid's Elements the glory of being the scientific text longest in use. From its conception in the second century up to the late Renaissance, this work determined astronomy as a science. During this time the Almagest was not only a work on astronomy; the subject was defined as what is described in the Almagest. The cautious emancipation of the late middle ages and the revolutionary creation of the new science in the 16th century are not conceivable without reference to the Almagest. This text lifted European astronomy to the high standard of knowledge on which the new science flourished. Before, the Ptolemaic models of the orbits of the sun, the moon, and the planets had been refined by Arabic astronomers. They provided the structural elements with which Copernicus and Kepler ushered in the era of modern astronomy. The Almagest survived the destruction of its epicyclic representation of the planetary orbits in the conceptual traces left behind in the theories of its successors. The clear separation of the sidereal from the tropical year, the celestial coordinate systems, the concepts of time, the forms of the constellations, and brightness classifications of celestial objects are, among many other things, still part of the astronomical canon even today.