From The Alpha and the Omega - Volume III
by Jim A. Cornwell, Copyright © July 20, 2002, all rights reserved
"Volume III - MUL.APIN"
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Volume III - MUL.APIN

    I found an interesting article in the November 2006 issue of Scientific American on page 96-101 regarding information on MUL.APIN.    So the following will be highlights of that article.

The Origin of the Greek Constellations
by Bradley E. Schaefer
(A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University,
on the editorial boards of the Journal for the History of Astronomy and of Archaeoastronomy.)
"Astronomy and archaeology have together uncovered the history of how the star pictures came to be -- and how people have used them over time."
    "In 1922, when the International Astronomical Union officially defined 88 constellations, it drew the bulk of them from Ptolemy's 'The Almagest', which was written around A.D. 150 and describe the traditions widespread among the Greeks.    These traditions had been popularized in the 'best-selling' poem 'The Phaenomena', by Aratus (275 B.C.).    The great astronomer Hipparchus's sole surviving book, 'The Commentary' (147 B.C.), tells us that Aratus's poem is for the most part a copy of a work with the same name by Eudoxus (366 B.C.), which no longer survives.    These books held the earliest descriptions of the Greek skies, and in them the constellations are already fully formed.    But where did the Greek constellations come from?"
    Paleolithic Hunters - Great Bear (or Ursa Major): "These seven moderately bright stars are known by other names -- the Big Dipper (or Drinking Gourd), the Wagon (or Wain) and the Plow.    Aratus calls the grouping both Bear and Wagon.    The wagon name must, of course, have come after the invention of the wheel (roughly the fourth millennium B.C.), but the bear name is undoubtedly much older.    Early societies throughout Eurasia recognized the Great Bear stars and myth.    The most common version was that the four stars in the bowl of the dipper were the bear, which was perpetually chased by the three stars in the handle, which represents three hunters."
    "The Greeks, Basques, Hebrew and many tribes in Siberia had this basic star/myth combination.    Suprisingly, the same bear stars and stories surfaced throughout North America.    With some variations, many tribes of the New World -- including the Cherokee, Algonquin, Zuni, Tlingit and Iroquis -- share the interpretaion of the bear followed by three hunters.
    How can we explain the close matching of widespread tradition between the Old World and the New?    The Bear is unlikely to be an independent invention, because the stars do not look like a bear.    The most logical explanation to connect the traditions hold that the first settlers of the New World carried the basic myth across the Bering Strait.
    Roughly 14,000 years ago Paleolithic hunters and gatherers first migrated across a land bridge that formed during the last ice age, when sea level was low, and connected Siberia and the Americas.
    The actual origin of the Bear constellation could have been very long indeed before this migration.    European cave paintings, artifacts and ensembles of cave bear skulls date to more than 30,000 years ago and suggest some kind of bear worship."
    Assyrian Priest: "The earliest direct evidence for the constellations comes from inscribe stones and clay writing tablets dug up in Mesopotamia (within modern Iraq).    A text called 'Prayer to the Gods of the Night' from old Babylon, dated to around 1700 B.C., mentions four constellations, including the Wagon, plus three individual stars and the Pleiades... the Mespotamians apparently had formed only a few constellations before 1300 B.C.
    Starting around 1100 B.C., cuneiform tablets list more than 30 constellation names from three bands stretching around the sky.    One series of three tablets called MUL.APIN contains long lists of observations about the positions and movements of almost all the Mesopotamian star groups.    MUL.APIN was copied repeatedly, with little variation, apparently as a textbook or almanac; surviving copies date from 687 B.C. to the third century B.C.
    MUL.APIN gives the relative positions of stars on the sky, and we can translate these into approximate dates.    For example, the tablets say that the spring equinox is in the eastern side of what we now call the Ram, and this reads as late in the second millennium B.C.    Many of the observations also depend on the latitude of the observer, and thus a full analysis can produce both a date and the observer's latitude.
    Hermann Hunger of the University of Vienna and the late David Pingree of Brown University analyzed several of the lists in MUL.APIN, in part by comparing them with a later accounting of star appearence dates from Ptolemy.    They derive a date of 1000 B.C. and a latitude of 36 degrees, suggesting that the observer - or observers - might have worked in Assyria (the northern part of Mesopotamia).    Because MUL.APIN mentions almost all the Mesopotamian constellations, which must have been formed before this date, it appears that the bulk of the Mesopotamian constellations were created within a relatively short interval from around 1300 to 1000 B.C.
    Independently, I have identified 114 observations in MUL.APIN that imply the date and latitude for the observations.    I find that the reports in MUL.APIN date to 1100 B.C. (with an uncertainty of 80 years) from a latitude of 33 degrees north (with an uncertainty of 1.5 degrees), which suggest a formative period of less than two centuries.    So the date shows a latitude of 33 to 36 degrees between 1300 and 1000 B.C., by people we would call Assyrians.
    The constellations in MUL.APIN are a curious mixture.    Some are gods, others represent animals, and the remainder depict everyday farm implements.    The text gives many omens based on the star groups and also uses them to form a calendar -- vital for any farming economy.    Omens, gods and calendars were the province of the priesthood, a persuasive clue that the constellations were developed by priests."
    Greek Scholars: "The Mespotamian groupings turn up in many of the clasical Greek constellations.    The stars of the Greek Capricorn and Gemini, for example, were known to the Assyrians by similar names - the Goat-Fish and the Great Twins.    A total of 20 constellations are straight copies.    Another 10 have the same stars but different names.    The Assyrian Hired Man and the Swallow, for instance, were renamed Aries and Pisces.
    The constellation called the Triangle provides a good example of how the Greeks adopted the Mesopotamian stars.    In MUL.APIN, the stars of the Triangle were designated the Plow (a name that had also been used for the Bear).    Thales (585 B.C.) brought geometry from Egypt to Greece, ... which culminated in Euclid's definitive book 'The Elements' (300 B.C.).    Only with this transformation would anyone seek to commemorate the triangle, as the basis of geometry, in the sky.    The Triangle is thus certainly a Greek renaming of a Mesopotamian star group between the time of Thales and Eudoxus or sometime in the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.
    The two earliest written sources from the Greeks - the epics of Homer (assumed to be eighth century B.C.) and the farmer's almanac of Hesiod (also dated to the eighth century) - both mention two prominent constellations (Orion and the Great Bear), two star clusters (the Pleiades and the Hyades), and two stars (Sirius and Arcturus).    But nothing more.    And all other Greek sources from before 500 B.C. are silent on the stars.
    The first complete discussion of the Greek skies comes from Eudoxus's fourth-century B.C. book, now known only through extensive copying by Aratus and Hipparchus.    Eudoxus contains many reports such as 'that head [of the Dragon] wheels near where the limits of setting and rising blend,' which is to say that the stars in the head of Draco are at a distance from the pole such that they skim the northern horizon.    This observation is true only for a given latitude that varies with date.    Eudoxus also writes, 'At the rising of the Scorpion in the East Orion flees at the Western verge'; in other words, the Scorpion and Orion appear simultaneously on opposite horizons.
    The two constraints can be combined to derive a unique date and latitude for the observations, but with a poor accuracy.    I identified 172 statements in Eudoxus that depend on the latitude and epoch.... result in a final uncertainty that is 0.9 degree (100 kilometers, or 62 miles) in latitude and 80 years in time.    I find that all of Eudoxus's lore is consistent with coming from one time and place -- 1130 B.C. at 36 degrees latitude, which would have been in Assyria.
    The derived time and place match well with those determined for the MUL.APIN observations.    I conclude that the set of constellations was largely complete by sometime around 1100 B.C... sometime after this and before the existence of Eudoxus's book (366 B.C.), the Greeks received the Mesopotamian star groups.    We know from textual evidence that the Babylonian zodiac system came to Greece around 400 B.C.
    Despite the heavy reliance on Mespotamian star groups, the Greek system of constellations still has 18 star pictures with no roots in the East nor anywhere else that we can discover.    Moreover, the nature of these constellations is characteristically Greek.    There is the quintessential Greek hero Hercules, for example, joined in the sky by other constellations that represent creatures the great warrior had defeated - Leo and Draco among them.    Ophiuchus, carrying the Serpent, is there as well, and the Dolphin, as would be approriate for a seafaring people such as the Greeks.    Six of these constellations depict a tableau from Greek mythology concerning Perseus's rescue of Andromeda.    Most likely, these 'new' star pictures were invented by the Greeks themselves."
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MUL.APIN Tablet 1
MUL.APIN Tablet 1
    As seen on my page at Andromeda Star Names under the following star name in Andromeda is:
g Almach or Almak the bottom southern star of the A shape.