Divination by Astrological and Meteorological Phenomena
The Divination by Astrological and Meteorological Phenomena (Chinese: 天文氣象雜占; pinyin: Tiān Wén Qì Xiàng Zá Zhàn), also known as Book of Silk is an ancient astronomy silk manuscript compiled by Chinese astronomers of the Western Han dynasty (202 BC – 9 AD) and found in the Mawangdui of Changsha, Hunan, China in 1973. It lists 29 comets (referred to as 彗星, huì xīng, literally broom stars) that appeared over a period of about 300 years.
It is now exhibited in the Hunan Provincial Museum.[2]
Contents
[edit]The Divination by Astrological and Meteorological Phenomena contains what archaeologists claim is the first definitive atlas of comets. There are roughly two dozen renderings of comets, some in fold out/pop-up format. In some cases, the pages of the document roll out to be five feet long. Each comet's picture has a caption which describes an event its appearance corresponded to, such as "the death of the prince", "the coming of the plague", or "the three-year drought."
One of the comets in the manuscript has four tails and resembles a swastika. In their 1985 book Comet, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan argue that the appearance of a rotating comet with a four-pronged tail as early as 2,000 years BCE could explain why the swastika is found in the cultures of both the Old World and the pre-Columbian Americas.
Bob Kobres, in a 1992 paper, contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han-dynasty manuscript was labelled a "long tailed pheasant star" (dixing) because of its resemblance to a bird's foot or footprint
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Shu, Ensei; Zhu, Yuanqing (2006). Chūgoku shutsudo bunken no sekai : shinhakken to gakujutsu no rekishi 中国出土文献の世界 : 新発見と学術の歴史 [zh:中国出土文献与伝統学術] [The World of Literature Excavated in China: New Discovery and Academic History] (in Japanese). Translated by Takagi, Satomi. Tōkyō, Japan: Sōbunsha. p. 204. ISBN 978-4-4234-5006-2. OCLC 76918358.
- ^ Hunan Provincial Museum Archived 2016-07-04 at the Wayback Machine
External links
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