Abstract
The Holocene warming – which fits quite well with predictions based on the Milankovitch cycle – marked the end of the last Ice Age, just about 10,000 years ago.1 It brought with it momentous changes in plant and animal life together with changes in the ways of humans depended upon them, as well as changes in their relationship with the sky. These changes preceded the Neolithic – or Stone Age – the most important manifestation of which was the agricultural revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
There are several cycles involved. The most important is the obliquity or “tilt” cycle, with a period of about 41,000 years, over the course of which the tilt of the Earth’s axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5°. About 10,000 years ago, the Earth was at its maximum tilt of 24.5°, and the Northern Hemisphere experienced maximum heating. Added to this was the fact that 10,000 years ago the Earth was at perihelion during the boreal summer rather than winter. In combination, these effects would have provided about 8% more solar radiation to the Northern Hemisphere in summer.
Admittedly, though the warming trend fits well with prediction, the maximum climate response was delayed – probably owing to feedbacks related to ice from the previous Ice Age whose maximum ended only 18,000 years ago – and the warming period occurred earlier in some locations, especially in the far-southern areas, than in others.
- 2.
Thom Hartmann, Attention Deficit Disorder: a different perception. Grass Valley, CA: Underwood Books, 1997, p. xxvii.
- 3.
Ibid., p. xxviii.
- 4.
E. O. Wilson, The Creation, p. 11.
- 5.
Robin McKie, How prehistoric farmers saved us from new Ice Age. The Observer, March 6, 2005: “Computer models of climate developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicate that the rise in carbon dioxide and methane would have had a profound effect on Earth’s climate; without man’s intervention, the planet would be 2°C cooler than it is now, and spreading ice caps and glaciers would affect much of the world.”
- 6.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, p. 75.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 143 ff.
- 8.
Ian Hodder, “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük,” Scientific American, January 2004, 77–83.
- 9.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: the nature of religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959, p. 49.
- 10.
Compare the belief of the Chukchee of northeast Asia. They hold that “there are several worlds situated one above another, in such a manner that the ground of one forms the sky of the one below. The number of these worlds is stated to be five, seven, or nine.”
- 11.
See Eliade, op. cit., pp. 56–57: “The house is not an object, a ‘machine to live in’; it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony.” He adds (pp. 57–58) that “the most ancient sanctuaries were hypaethral or built with an aperture in the roof – the ‘eye of the dome,’ symbolizing break-through from plane to plane, communication with the transcendant.”
- 12.
Lewis-Williams and Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind, pp. 95–96.
- 13.
So did the ancients manage to make out the planet’s crescent phase? There are a number of credible – but many more not credible – reports of naked-eye achievement of this difficult feat in modern times. But though the phase can be easily detected with binoculars, personally I can’t believe that it is possible with the naked eye, or that this is the most plausible explanation for figures of Venus with horns dating from antiquity. On the whole I am inclined to agree with Lick Observatory astronomer W. W. Campbell that ancient descriptions of Venus as a crescent was a “pure lucky guess, probably made under the influence of the crescent Moon.”
- 14.
Albert Einstein has noted that as long as human beings were tied to the Earth, our observations could never directly reveal to us the “true” planetary motions, but only the intersections of the lines of sight (earth-planet) with the “fixed-star sphere.” These intersections first began to be consistently observed during the Neolithic. Forward to Stillman Drake’s translation of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd revised edition, 1967, p. xv.
- 15.
Alex A. Gurshtein, “Prehistoryof Zodiac Dating: three strata of Upper Paleolithic Constellations,” Vistas in Astronomy, vol. 39 (1995), pp. 347–362.
- 16.
The term Mesopotamia properly refers to the area of the “fertile crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, north and northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad in modern-day Iraq; by extension it is used to describe the whole region from the Zagros Mountains on the northeast to the Arabian desert on the southwest.
- 17.
Alex A. Gurshtein, “On the origin of the zodiacal constellations,” Vistas in Astronomy, vol. 36 (1993), pp. 171–190.
- 18.
David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 21.
- 19.
Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, pp. 61–62.
- 20.
Otto Neugebauer. The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. New York: Dover, 1969 reprint of 1957 ed., p. 81.
- 21.
Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq: a concise history. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 2–3.
- 22.
A survey of ruined settlements around ancient Hatra, about 300 km north of Hatra, has shown that the southern limits of the zone in which agriculture is possible without artificial irrigation has remained unchanged since the first settlement of Mesopotamia.
- 23.
Among the Sumerian cities was Ur, the Biblical “Ur of the Chaldees,” the birthplace of Abraham, which was excavated by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley; also Kish, Erech, Nippur, Larsa, Eridu, Lagash, Umma, Tello.
- 24.
Joy Griffiths, Wild: an elemental journey. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006, p. 34. The villains are wild animals and rustic people. Griffiths notes (at p. 35) that the word “villain” (a Middle English variant of villein, “peasant”) once meant a rustic, and “the root of the word is in villa – originally the word was merely a simple description of where someone dwelled. The word gradually shifted, coming to mean criminal.”
- 25.
Henry David Thoreau, The Moon. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927, pp. 10–11.
- 26.
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic. New York: Henry Holt, 2006, pp. 52–53.
- 27.
History of Mesopotamia and Iraq; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition.
- 28.
George Steiner, “The Retreat from the Word”; in: George Steiner: a reader, p. 297. Elsewhere he points out that “an explicit grammar is an acceptance of order: it is a hierarchization, the more penetrating for being enforced so early in the individual life-span, of the forces and valuations present in the body politic.” “Future Literacies,” in ibid., p. 431.
- 29.
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 51. What happened there and elsewhere – for instance, Babylon – during the American occupation makes extremely depressing reading. According to Johnson, pp. 51–52, though U.S. military ruined Ur for further archaeological research, “they did, however, erect their own American imperial ziggurats. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the army and air force ‘opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home.’” The American record elsewhere in Iraq was equally execrable. Thus at Babylon, says Johnson, “American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum’s authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, reported that, on a visit in December 2004, he saw ‘cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate’ and a ‘2600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicle’s.’” The one part of what George Bush and Tony Blair had called, on April 8, 2003 “the patrimony of the people of Iraq,” protected by the oil-obsessed Bush Administration was the country’s oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. One can only say, Alas!
- 30.
History of Mesopotamia and Iraq; op. cit.
- 31.
Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, p. 48.
- 32.
According to the note in D. Winton Thomas, ed., Documents from Old Testament Times, p. 14: Apsu was the great “male” ocean, especially the large tidal lake which anciently surrounded the city of Eridu in Southern Babylonia – consisting of marshes and waters of the subsoil. The word comes from the Sumerian Abzu, the first element being ab (“sea”); it appears in Greek as abussos.
- 33.
Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, p. 59.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
S. N. Kramer, The Sumerians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; illustration after p. 64.
- 36.
Fevzi Kurtoglu, Turk Bayragi ve Ay Yildiz. Ankara: Truk Tarih Kurumu Yayinlari, 1992, p. 25.
- 37.
Paradise Lost, I, 437–440. She was also referred to as the “torch of heaven.” Sir Henry Layard found a representation of Astarte at Nineveh, bearing a staff tipped with a crescent.
- 38.
S. N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology. American Philosophical Society Memoirs, vol. XXI. Philadelphia, 1944, pp. 86–93.
- 39.
A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy. New York: Dover, 1989 reprint of 1961 ed., p. 33.
- 40.
Because Venus’s orbit is tilted slightly to that of the Earth, usually Venus passes either slightly above or slightly below the Sun at inferior conjunction. This is why transits of Venus are so rare. The 8-year period is the reason why transits of Venus occur 8 years apart. Thus the June 8, 2004 transit will be followed by another transit on June 6, 2012. One can also understand why such a long interval (more than a century) must pass between pairs, since a transit can occur only when Venus is near one of the two nodal points of its orbit and it takes that long before Venus and the Sun align again near a node.
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Sheehan, W. (2010). Innana’s Antics. In: A Passion for the Planets. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5971-3_4
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