Astronomy of the Ancients ed. by K. Brecher, M. Feirtag (review)

Book Reviews Astronomy of the Ancients. Edited by K. Brecher and M. Feirtag. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979. Pp. 224. $12.00. Recently I have been conducting research on the orientations of medieval Islamic religious architecture, which are not, as is commonly thought, correctly aligned toward Mecca. One conclusion of these investigations is that a substantial amount of this architecture is as­ tronomically aligned. For example, the Kaaba itself in Mecca and various medieval mosques are aligned toward the rising point of Canopus. While I was involved in this research I received a review copy of Astronomy of the Ancients and read with enthusiastic approval the introductory remarks of Philip Morrison concerning the im­ portance of Canopus in both ancient and modern astronomy. Canopus was used even for aligning some medieval Islamic religious architecture! I knew of the papers collected in this volume from their first ap­ pearance in Technology Review of December 1977; indeed, I had already distributed copies of two of them to an undergraduate class in the history of science in antiquity and medieval times. These were the articles by Sharon Gibbs and Owen Gingerich, distinguished not only by their excellence but also by the fact that their authors are both internationally known historians of science. Owen Gingerich’s article on Stonehenge is a sober account for the layman of what is secure about the astronomical orientation of the complex. Sharon Gibbs’s survey of ancient instruments is first-rate, and the interested reader would do well to pursue the references to Derek de Sofia Price’s studies of the Antikythera machine and the Tower of the Winds in Athens, as well as her own valuable survey of Greek and Roman sundials. The other articles in this volume are written also on a popular level by a series of scholars whose professions range from classics to as­ trophysics. One contributor, Fettvin, is a psychiatrist with a back­ ground that includes script writing for horror movies and nursing octopuses. John Eddy, an astrophysicist, writes on Plains Indian as­ tronomy and the astronomical alignment of the so-called medicine wheels. John Brandt, an astrophysicist, writes on pictographs and petroglyphs of the Indians of the Southwestern United States which Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. 300 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 301 depict a crescent and circle in close proximity. These he interprets as records of the Crab Nebula supernova of a.d. 1054, but all of the problems associated with such an interpretation, namely, dating and anthropological and ethnographic considerations, are discussed with frankness. Anthony Aveni, author ofseveral books and numerous arti­ cles on archaeoastronomy, writes on the use of naked-eye observa­ tions to generate astronomical models for predicting celestial phenomena as attested in both Old and New World astronomy. Ken­ neth Brecher, an astrophysicist, writes on historical references to Sirius and its color, up to and including the Dogon legends about Sirius and its companion star, hoping “to learn stellar evolution from the ancient myths of man.”Jerome Lettvin, who teaches experimental epistemology at MIT, draws from his earlier background in horror movies and octopus care to outline with considerable ingenuity a con­ nection between the legend of Perseus and the Gorgon sisters and the octopus common in Mediterranean waters, and to relate the eye of Medusa to the blinking star Algol. Harald Reiche, a classicist, writes on astronomical myths in general and the Atlantis myth in particular. Although these articles are intended for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one, some of the authors on occasion get carried away and allow themselves to make sweeping statements which are either without foundation or misleading in the extreme. Some examples: Mayan knowledge of the 584-day synodic period of Venus “suggests that the Maya were very close to understanding the orbit of Venus, and perhaps to making a map of the solar system” (Eddy, p. 3). “On the American continent, other races, entirely separated from those of the Old World, also created a sophisticated system, an astronomy of equal brilliance” (Aveni, pp. 61-62). Ptolemy’s work on astronomy was “translated by the Arabs under...