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It’s late afternoon and I’m skiing through the Southforest in the direction of the Midforest mountain, when the darkness suddenly falls down from the sky. Fear creeps in and I stop in a forest glade. It is not becoming completely dark. Up there the stars sparkle and the moon is full and her pale glow is filtered between the trees, glimmering in the snow.
The place is magical and I’m a statue with thick wooled socks sticking up from clumsy boots, wide wooden skis, bamboo poles with leather rod straps, looking at the uncountable stars. I stand perfectly still until the sweat on my back goes cold, as does my wrist in the gap between the knitted woolen gloves and the jacket sleeve. I haven't the faintest idea how it all goes together, those sparkling fireworks in the sky. I probably believe in God.
So, of course humans and animals have stared for millions of years without even trying to understand what is going on up there. A crackling mystery. The sun rises every morning, the moon goes through its phases. The sun goes down, the stars come out. They blink and that's natural. Are they telling us something? People believe in gods.
There is not much time to investigate the natural phenomena when everyone is busy hunting and looking for food, but civilisations begin to take hold, in North Africa and the Middle East, mainly on the banks of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris. The Fertile Crescent.
The farmers follow the changes of the seasons and improve the methods. A lot goes by itself. Sheep tell when they need food. Cows when to be milked. Hens lay eggs, regardless of the positions of the stars. The wheat shows when to harvest, and the surpluses make the lords of the farmers richer and ideas grow. Large projects, dam construction, canals. The greater ideas, the more need of planning.
No, it is not enough. Following the seasons like the farmers is not enough. Rituals begin to form in the worship of the gods and eventually their representatives on the earth, with symbols, great temples in dreams longing to be materialised. Thousands of people must be coordinated. All this requires planning, advanced leadership and coordinating meetings. The days and the hours must be counted more precisely and the eyes go up to the gods in the sky. Can they arrange it?
Appointed observers start to record the regularity of the sky on papyrus and clay tablets. It’s good but still not enough. The rulers also want to know what the gods have to say. With the naked eye, the rulers can see that stars sometimes come very close to each other. They stand in conjunction. What are they talking about? What are their plans? Sometimes they stand opposite each other, in opposition. Maybe in an argument.
A new kind of professionals enters, freed from labor on the river beds: the astrologers. For hundreds of years, they will carefully record the positions of the sun, moon, planets and stars. Day after day.
Most concerned are the Babylonians. They develop algorithms that make it possible to predict recurring phenomena, such as solar eclipses. The predictions are used in planning, to await star constellations that are particularly favourable for war. Unlike the Egypts they don’t have a single ruler, but many that are ready to fight to get larger shares of the affluence along the river beds and canals.
The measurements are made with the eye and simple wooden tools that make it possible to read angles between celestial bodies, and with the horizon as a reference point. It will take thousands of years until the first telescopes appear, but the measurements stand up well over time.
So, when the Greeks appear in our history books in 650 BC, they have a lot of material to work with. Egyptians and Babylonians provide them with mathematics, geometry and algorithms, which make it possible to predict the timing of celestial events. It’s an invaluable treasure: hundreds of years of observations and a reliable storage media in the form of the clay tablets.
It is not enough, however. The Greek natural philosophers bring in a new and crucial element: curiosity. It is not enough to passively regard celestial phenomena as the work of the gods. They want to understand how everything is connected, how nature works, and will ponder this for hundreds of years.
Several hundreds years later, Aristotle sends a thank you to both the Egyptian and Babylonian astronomers in his essay "On the Heavens”, which he writes in 350 BC. They have given him the data he needs to make a theoretical model of the cosmos, how it works. It is fundamentally flawed but will stand for more than 2,500 years.
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