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Register a new userThe Pleiades: the celestial herd of ancient timekeepers
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Authors
Amelia Sparavigna
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In the ancient Egypt seven goddesses, represented by seven cows, composed the celestial herd that provides the nourishment to her worshippers. This herd is observed in the sky as a group of stars, the Pleiades, close to Aldebaran, the main star in the Taurus constellation. For many ancient populations, Pleiades were relevant stars and their rising was marked as a special time of the year. In this paper, we will discuss the presence of these stars in ancient cultures. Moreover, we will report some results of archeoastronomy on the role for timekeeping of these stars, results which show that for hunter-gatherers at Palaeolithic times, they were linked to the seasonal cycles of aurochs.
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In this work we consider some old hypotheses according to which remarkable mesolithic village Lepenski Vir (9500 -- 5500 BC) at the right (nearly west) Danube riverside in the Iron gate in Serbia was an ancient (one of the oldest) Sun observatory. We use method recently suggested by A. C. Sparavigna, concretely we use freely available software or local Sun radiation direction simulation computer programs. In this way we obtain and discuss pictures of the sunrise in the Lepenski Vir during winter and summer solstice and spring and autumn equinox in relation to position of the mountains, especially Treskavac (Trescovat) and Kukuvija at left (nearly east) Danube riverside (in Romania). While mountain Kukuvija represents really the marker for the Sun in date of the winter solstice, mountain Treskavac, in despite to usual opinions, does not represent a real marker for the Sun in date of the summer solstice. Sun rises behind Treskavac, roughly speaking, between 22.April and 1. May. It corresponds to year period when heliacal rising of the Pleiades constellation occurs, which by many ancient cultures, e.g. Celts of northern Europe, denotes very beginning of the year. All this, in common with some archeological facts (house-shrine No.47 in the Lepenski Vir holds seven signs beside hearth which would correspond to the seven Pleiades stars), opens a possibility that Lepenski Vir was an ancient Pleiades constellation observatory.
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