It might be a stupid question but ...

If ancient civilisations can accurately predict moving of the stars (seasons) and all that malarky and also understand that there are other planets other than Earth out there ... what I ask is how?

I mean how could they see them or know of their existence?

Apologies for the dumb question ... look forward to your responses.

Cheers!

i think its a good question... i also want to know the answer... i was wondering the same thing

same here on the wondering part. good question and so i star and flag to see other responses.

when it comes down to it though, anything said would be speculation, right? i mean, since none of us were actually there, how would we know for sure? sometimes makes me wonder who we are trusting when it comes to the documentations of the ancient civilizations.

People look at stars for centuries, notice that some are stationary and some move, notice patterns and such. I do not think that those moving stars (planets) were considered to be those, but there is a lot of info suggesting that those were considered to be Gods ate first. Then once those lights as Gods idea was slowly eroding the information gathered allowed construction of different cosmological models - like spheres model.
en.wikipedia.org...
You can see that it was based on ancient Greek theories and it was pretty far from the truth but nevertheless explained a lot of what happened in the sky and so was accepted.
Then telescope eventually made the real breakthroughs.
I think that it is the same with Sumerians and Maya civilizations. They had gathered a lot of data to use in religious ceremonies and architecture but hardly thought that this light (say Mars) is similar to Earth.

A likely answer here: www.abovetopsecret.com...

And at the link in my sig.

It all started with calculations and star movement along with building contraptions that could predict the star movements.Just my take as a guess.

Hmmm.... Somehow I don't think this explains the Mayan's grasp of the 26,000 year cycles of our solar system. It all started with the aliens... My (rather educated) guess.

reply to post by Amaterasu

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Howdy

If you look into this you'll find that the Mayan's had no such knowledge, this modern myth is a creation of the new age movement. The Mayans had no such knowledge - they did have knowledge of the following.

The Maya were quite accomplished astronomers. Their primary interest, in contrast to "western" astronomers, were Zenial Passages when the Sun crossed over the Maya latitudes. On an annual basis the sun travels to its summer solstice point, or the latitude of 23-1/3 degrees north.
Most of the Maya cities were located south of this latitude, meaning that they could observe the sun directly overhead during the time that the sun was passing over their latitude. This happened twice a year, evenly spaced around the day of solstice.

Venus was the astronomical object of greatest interest. I think it possible that the Maya knew it better than any civilization outside Mesoamerica. They thought it was more important than the Sun. They watched it carefully as it moved through its stations--it takes 584 days for Venus and the Earth to line up in their previous position as compared to the Sun. It takes about 2922 days for the Earth, Venus, the Sun, and the stars to agree. Venus had a psychological effect upon the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures, it has been shown that the Maya were timing some of their wars based on the stationary points of Venus and Jupiter.

They also had an interest in the Milky Way,

The ecliptic is the path of the sun in the sky which is marked by the constellations of fixed stars. Here the moon and the planets can be found because they are bound, like the Earth, to the sun.

The Maya had a lunar component to their calendric inscriptions. After giving the pertinent information on the date according to the Maya calendar the typical Maya inscriptions contain a lunar reckoning. The lunar count was counted as 29 or 30 days, alternating. The lunar synodic period is close to 29.5 days, so by alternating their count between these two numbers the moon was carefully meshed into the calendric sequence as well. Their lunar knowledge was impressive for they also made eclipse predictions, an almanac for predicting them is contained in the Dresden Codex.

A short summary of Mayan Astronomy

reply to post by Hanslune

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So, if I understand your point, it sounds like the Mayans had a lot of time on their hands, and not much to do or more engaging than study the movement of the stars and planets for long periods of time.

Given the absense of television and the internet, I guess it must have been quite entertaining for them to speculate on this, and study the night sky, and the way that shadows were cast by the sun during the day at different angles based upon the time of year.

It shows what the human mind is capable of revealing, given enough study. Pretty remarkable.

They had priests or specialists who specialized in it. Man is a hunting animal - we sense movement. The night skies have moving objects in them.

Mankind is very good at seeing patterns, he is also good at making (imagination) of reasons for these movements.

I imagine at some point there was a creative Mayan Kepper, Galileo, Newton or Einstein who drove forward their knowledge.

reply to post by Hanslune

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I like that idea -- a Mayan Galileo -- lost in antiquity.

Perhaps this guy was just as smart as Galileo and imagined that the world might actually revolve around the sun, made sense of it all -- only to be rejected by the Mayan rulers and sacrificed. Not unlike Galileo himself.

Given the preoccupation that the Mayans had with astronomy, it doesn't seen like too big a stretch to imagine that, over the ages, someone figured things out perfectly. We can never know for sure.

One can speculate, we do have one solid piece of astronomical data, the Dresden codex




The codex

More

That's unlikely, because their religion didn't have such a dogmatic view of the structure of the universe. But in order to discover that there's a solar system, you have to understand that the planet is round... and there's no evidence they knew that the planet was round. Nor did they measure any distances to the planets or the sun.


We can be pretty certain because some discoveries are needed before you can reach these conclusions. And the math required to do some of the computations involves a lot of heavy calculus -- and there's no evidence that they had such a mathematical invention.

The priestly class was obsessed with Venus and with signs and symbols in the sky, so they devoted time and energy to studying them. They timed wars and other activities with these cycles -- but this didn't give them enough knowledge to save them from drought (which ended several civilizations when the cities couldn't sustain populations) or to save them from the Europeans.

As Hans points out, we have a number of their books (codices) as well as lots and lots of writing carved on monuments.

I was thinking about this in my sleep/waking dreams this morning, actually.

It's odd, to think that to understand how this would work it would've taken one person with the patience to sit still for 24 hours and measure each minute from when the moon reaches it's epitaph to go around the earth.

Whoever that fella was, i think he understood the truth of the world's shape...

[edit on 1-7-2008 by Anti-Tyrant]

Hey,

Thanks for the info people, got a few links to take a closer look at there :-) so I can start with these.

I should have been a little clearer originally too ... where I said "how could they see them" I was referring to the planets there because I have never (to my knowledge) seen another planet, day or night without aid so I was just baffled as to how ancient civilisations had such "advanced" knowledge of this stuff.

Cheers

[edit on 1-7-2008 by george_gaz]

well ancient civilisations invented science like math or astronomy so following and charting stars isn't so weird to believe. they had to sail using only stars .
look at architecture. lots of ancient buildings ( for example city of Petra) would be very hard to build today. ancient people were more commited to developing science. today is too much computer help. my processor this, my gps that, my software blah, blah..
more commitement more results.

I want to ask this..... I read a lot but I took some meds and my head isnt right so I may have read it and missed it, but! Ok How if we need a telescope to see Pluto are the Mayans sitting there watching Pluto? I dunno, but I dont see them having a telescope that can see that far. Pluto looks like a Nat on our modern day telescopes. Anyone know this? PM me please I see it better then trying to keep up(if its more then 3pages by 2days PM me please.)

You stay home when night falls or you go out into your light-noised world. You know nothing of a society where the nights were spent watching the skys for generations. Counting the dots of light and measuring how they moved. Go camping out in the dark wilderness for two weeks without returning and then you'll understand.

Well I could only assume with basic mathamatics....

Hi All

I was just browsing the topics and this one caught my interest and I thought I might offer a bit of a response to the original question.

I have just finished reading a book in my local library called "Thoth - Architect of the Universe" by Ralph Ellis, which is quite an interesting book on the ancient atlanteans/egyptians/mayans/britton's. Ellis has spent a lifetime researching ancient civilisations and how the aforementioned civilisations seem to have been influenced by the same character - being Thoth, an ancient Priest/King who originated from Atlantis, took his people to Egypt after the deluge and spread his knowledge of construction (pyramids), mathematics, writings and astronomy to the world.

Anyone worth their salt in the archaeology trade will tell you that the egyption pyramids are NOT tombs, but built for a much greater purpose (which I will not go into - I'll let you do your own research on that topic) and Thoth is attributed as being the true architect of the 3 pyramids of the Giza plateau. Just because someone graffiti'd a Kings name on the great pyramid (Cheops) doesn't make it his tomb!! We also now know that the 3 great pyramids represent the three stars of the "belt of Orion". Which is where our planets ancient "visitors" are alleged to have come from.

To cut a really long story short the author in summary, says that perhaps our ancient ancestors or specifically - Thoth - had direct contact with extra terrestrials who gave humanity a gigantic leg up in knowledge, civilisation and technology.

We all know of the ancient art around the world from Egyptian carvings to Australian Aboriginal rock drawings of alien looking humanoids, so it is pretty much assumed that our planet has been "visited" many thousands of years ago (right up to today some say). On that note, it is not too hard to assume that our intergalactic visitors shared their knowledge of our solar system and the universe with our fledgling society.

Anyway, I hope that has offered some of you a reasonable theory!

Kind regards,

Dobbie.

P.S. I apologise in advance if there are questions arising from this post that I will not get around to answering as I don't get a lot of time to spend on the internet.