-
Bone carvings keep track of phases of Moon. Early people engraved patterns of lines on animal bones to keep track of the phases of the Moon.
-
Mesopotamian ziggurats serve as observatories. Mesopotamian astronomers made careful observations from the tops of pyramid-like towers called ziggurats.
-
The Temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak, Egypt was built so that its main axis points to the sunset at the summer solstice.
-
The oldest known recording of a lunar eclipse took place at Ur more than 4000 years ago
-
The Babylonians used their long record of eclipses to see regular patterns of eclipses. They used these patterns to predict lunar eclipses.
-
Hesiod's poem The Works and Days contains practical astronomical advice for navigation and for agricultural activities.
-
Sun, Moon, stars. Anaximander's model was the forerunner of later Greek attempts to explain the heavens in non-mythological terms.
-
The model of Pythagoras used circular paths for the celestial bodies and assumed most celestial bodies are spheres.
-
Herodotus reasoned that it would have taken millenia for the annual Nile flood to have produced the Nile delta. p.160.
-
Eudoxus explains retrograde motion. Eudoxus's explanation involved the rotation of spheres in opposite directions. This geocentric model had the Earth at its center
-
Aristotle used a number of proofs that the Earth is a sphere, including the observation that its shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses is always a circle.
-
Aristarchus concluded that the Earth was much smaller than the distances to the celestial bodies. He also invented a heliocentric (Sun-centered) model for the solar system.
