Published on 03/01/2013
Question:
I cannot get any clear answers to what should be a simple question. "What percentage accuracy do the ancient astronomers have in fixing dates for the first millennium BCE?"
I am researching the period 1000BCE to 00BCE.
There is a wealth of information about Sumerian and Babylonian astronomical dating.
The "Kings lists" are constantly mentioned.
I simply want to have a reasoned answer to the following:
Allowing for human error, scribal miscopying etc - did the ancients in 1000BCE to 00 accurately observe and plot the planets so that we can retrospectively today recognise that which they recorded and afford it absolutely certain dates (to the nearest five years or so)
Do we know, from the positions that they give a planet in the sky that they called X, that it was that which we call, say, Mars.
Are there examples which clearly establish this e.g.
Carved in stone –
“In the 4th year of King X reign Planet V appeared in the west (whatever) and then moved behind the full moon to disappear in the northeast" - this today our computers tell us is exactly a description of Venus on 4th December 560BCE
Carved in stone –
In the 56th year of the reign of King W planet H did rise in the east and set at midnight one step into the quarter west(whatever) - this is an exact description of Mars on 4th January 500BCE"
Carved in stone –
King X was replaced by King W in his eighth year.
That is - we now know these astronomical events were indeed 60 years apart, they could be seen exactly like that from Babylon and it is clear that this was indeed the 60 years from King X 's 4th year to King W's 56th year.
There is much discussion of accuracy and more of eclipses. The only solid facts must surely come from verifying planet observation and then tracking those dates and comparing them to those given by the ancients.
Or as usual am I being simple minded?
As you have found astronomical observations can indeed be used to help provide support for chronologies of the ancient world, no method is perfect however and there are problems with this.
All astronomical observations one can make related to the Solar system contain many layers of cycles. Everything of course varies on the cycle of a year as the Earth orbits the Sun, however due to the motion of other bodies and slow periodic changes in Earth's orbit there are also longer period cycles. For example the times at which Venus rises and sets has a cycle of about 8 years (as well as other longer ones). In general the shorter cycles are the most prominent while distguishing where an observation falls in a longer term cycle is more difficult.
The end result is that for your example stone carving there might be a match with 560BCE, 552BCE, 544BCE, 536BCE or 528BCE. Sometimes knowing that it must be one of those dates might be sufficient to combine with other data and pin down an exact match, and sometimes even being able to pin it down within 5 cycles or whatever the case may be might be superior to what was known before, but gaps and inaccuracies in ancient records make it difficult to pin down exact dates from historical astronomical observations.
The most accurate records tend to be those of eclipses (because they are hard to miss and have a short duration), which helps with placing individual eclipses within the longest eclipse cycles and so providing more precise dates. There are still problems with gaps simply because the further back you go the fewer records have survived whether or not they were originally taken, and scribal errors accumulate over time and are difficult to account for.
An additional problem is that in early history (and even comparatively recently) the calendars were not constant. Many ancient calendars, such as that used by the Babylonians, were lunisolar with months based on lunar phases plus leap months as required to keep reasonable synchrony with the solar year. That is fine provided that one knows how the scheme on which the leap months are added, but therein lies the difficulty in that they tend to be adjusted on a more ad-hoc basis or systematically over the medium term but with unknown larger jumps in the long term (think about the break that occurred in England in 1752 with the switch from the Julian to Gregorian calendars). In fact even today this problem exists in the form of 'leap seconds' added by the international body which supervises global time standards, as they are irregular and unpredictable.
Sorry I can't really give you a simple answer, but I hope this goes some way to at least explaining why it isn't a simple question!
