Ancient Greek Astronomy and Astrology

The History of Celestial Observations in Greece

De: Charles River Editors

Narrado por: Steve Knupp

In virtually all fields of human endeavor, Classical Athens was so much at the forefront of dynamism and innovation that the products of its most brilliant minds remain not only influential but still relevant to this day. To the ancient Greeks, the cosmos was ordered and harmonious. Consequently, reason and intellect were considered the architects of all art and craftsmanship. The absolute perfection of form was sought in everything and the Greek passion for simplicity, elegance, harmony, and beauty is to be found everywhere, particularly in architecture.

Religion also played a role in the development of Greek culture and technology. For the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, sky watching served religious or practical purposes, but for the Greeks, it was also theoretical. They wanted to know why heavenly bodies moved as they did, and for that reason, the Greeks added mathematics, geometry, and philosophical reasoning to the crucial foundational data of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Egyptians.

Over hundreds of years, various Greek innovators explored the underlying mechanics of the universe, leading to the first physical models of the cosmos. By the 5th century BCE, Pythagoras proposed that the world was not flat, but a sphere, Anaxagoras explained why eclipses happened and described meteorites, and Leucippus and Democritus wrote that tiny, invisible atoms were the building blocks of the entire universe. By the 3rd century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos taught that Earth rotated on its axis each day and revolved around the Sun each year. Eratosthenes used geometry to calculate the distance around Earth from pole to pole, and he came unbelievably close to precisely accurate measurements.

Thanks to these scientific pioneers and their works, the Greeks laid the cornerstone of modern astronomy.

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