Ancient Greek astronomy

Ancient Greek astronomy is the astronomy written in the Greek language during classical antiquity. Quotes about It is worth quoting Anthony Grafton’s summation of Scaliger’s assault on the prisca theologia presumptions of his contemporaries here, as Scaliger’s position strongly foreshadows the nineteenth-century philhellenist view of cultural relations in the ancient world: “In astronomy and astrology, it had been the Greeks, not the Babylonians and the Egyptians, who performed most of the observations and, above all, tabulated and systematized the results. The ancient Near East had been not a world of gold, populated by calm sages, but a world of iron, haunted by superstitious fears and only fitfully illuminated by the work of certain science- minded priests — themselves prone to spin out unfounded speculations.”’ Anthony Grafton’s summation of Scaliger, quoted in Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009) The first Graeco-Egyptian astrologists did not invent the discipline they claimed to teach the Hellenic world. They used Egyptian sources going up to the Persian period which were themselves at least partially derived from ancient Chaldaean documents. Traces of this primitive substratum still survive in our much later texts, erratic blocks transported on to more recent soil. When we find mentions there of ‘the king of kings’ or ‘satraps’ we are no longer in Egypt but in the ancient Orient … We limit ourselves to noting that in all appearances, the priests who were the authors of Egyptian astrology stayed relatively faithful to the ancient Oriental tradition. Franz Cumont in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vol. I, published in 1987, by Martin Bernal External links Category:Astronomy Category:Ancient Greece