What does the Polynesian star compass and the Horoscope have in common.

I was having a moment wondering how on earth the Polynesians could travel across the mighty Pacific and end up on any atoll they were heading too. Since their has been a bit of a revival in the ancient Polynesian art of navigation . It seems they used among other things a "Star Compass" Which was orientated east west on the beach before the trip, the Compass was divided into thirty two divisions the divisions pointed to bright stars and constellations. I noticed that one of the divisions said "Twins" that is two stars that rose together. Since the northern hemisphere horoscope, also has this marker as the "heavenly twins" I checked it out, if the Libra position meant Equinox , then the old original Horoscope would serve exactly the same purpose, and become a star chart. Which might have become degraded to the point where it was used not for navigating a trip, but navigating a persons life.
Noting how the Polynesian navigator used the Star compass from the point of departure, by noting the local sunrise and sunset, from then on it was a totally mental thing, making adjustments in the boats course as other stars came up. When you consider how great Egypt became, Trade was essential in this rise. When a country found areas of rich trade to exploit, they would not be about sharing that knowledge. Because it would injure them economically, so it would have been the same as keeping a state secret today. However since the power of Egypt declined around 1177 BC and a dark age ensued, where the Greeks lost the ability to write, could we assume along with the Piri Reis Map and a few others. That not only was world wide trade practised, that the art of navigating the Oceans lingered on with the Polynesians?
The interesting thing about the timing is that Hawaii was raided by the Tahitians, around the 1177 BC date which they claim to this day, they were left a Star chart which showed the Pacific Islands. It's all very well being able to hold a course at sea, but you would have to know where you were heading , the verbal discipline is to this day strictly enforced in Polynesia. Long after the Library of Alexandria was used for heating the baths.archive.hokulea.com...

a reply to: anonentity

if the Libra position meant Equinox , then the old original Horoscope would serve exactly the same purpose, and become a star chart. Which might have become degraded to the point where it was used not for navigating a trip, but navigating a persons life.

An interesting hypothesis on the face of it. I wonder if anyone has corroborating evidence.

One problem is that precession would have rendered the compass inaccurate over the years.

a reply to: Astyanax


If it was set at the GP at a certain time of the year. It might lock the date. But as far as being inaccurate if one of the star signs was north and the opposite south. Then it would be the same as the Polynesian star compass. One of the signs would point to Polaris, then it would be interesting to see if if the rising and setting of the constellations coincide, with the twelve signs as we know it. The Polynesian south was called Tan the only correlation with that name is in India and China, where Astrology has been practiced for thousands of years. It could mean Tangent for that matter.

a reply to: anonentity
I see no problem with the idea that old Babylonian/Greek zodiac originated as a navigating device. Night hunters would always have used the stars. The deserts and the Mediterranean had their travellers. The Twins, Castor and Pollux, were indeed a very important navigational aid for Greek and Roman sailors.

However, there is no reason to jump to the idea that they and the Polynesians were using the same system. The idea of navigating by the stars is obvious enough to be discovered independently. Even some of the star patterns, like the pair of Twins, are conspicuous enough to be noticed independently.

a reply to: DISRAELI


I quite agree but being able to Navigate a course, doesn't mean you know where you are going , you first need a Chart. When someone gives you one all well and good, but the Pacific is a massive Ocean and without that knowledge your navigating a course to no where.

a reply to: anonentity
I've read about the historic skills of Pacific navigators, how they built up their common knowledge of clues like ocean currents, movements of birds, shapes of clouds.
Charts are created by people going to places and bringing back reports of where they have been.
I think the Pacific navigators would have been doing that amongst themselves, gradually exploring, gradually accumulating a community fund of knowledge about their oceans, and so creating their own charts or the mental equivalent of charts.

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: anonentity
I've read about the historic skills of Pacific navigators, how they built up their common knowledge of clues like ocean currents, movements of birds, shapes of clouds.
Charts are created by people going to places and bringing back reports of where they have been.
I think the Pacific navigators would have been doing that amongst themselves, gradually exploring, gradually accumulating a community fund of knowledge about their oceans, and so creating their own charts or the mental equivalent of charts.

There is that legend where one of the European explorers was given a gift of a beach shell necklace by some islanders. He thought it was just trinkets. The shells actually represented the reflected waves off the islands and the string holding everything together represented the best directions to sail.

I think a bit more research is needed, here...

originally posted by: anonentity
I was having a moment wondering how on earth the Polynesians could travel across the mighty Pacific and end up on any atoll they were heading too. Since their has been a bit of a revival in the ancient Polynesian art of navigation . It seems they used among other things a "Star Compass" Which was orientated east west on the beach before the trip, the Compass was divided into thirty two divisions the divisions pointed to bright stars and constellations.

They also had a chart of the currents. They did not rely on star navigation alone.

Stellar navigation is going to put them WAY off course because the pattern of the sun's motion in the sky forms an analemma


Secondly, this "star compass"is new (past 300 years or so.) Polynesians didn't have paper. The very fascinating (and correct!) site you linke goes into explaining how they navigated and that their navigation wasn't extremely accurate.

I noticed that one of the divisions said "Twins" that is two stars that rose together. Since the northern hemisphere horoscope, also has this marker as the "heavenly twins" I checked it out, if the Libra position meant Equinox , then the old original Horoscope would serve exactly the same purpose, and become a star chart.

First, "Gemini" is "the Twins"... not Libra. Libra is "the scales."

Second, they had different constellations since they were SOUTH of the equator.

When you consider how great Egypt became, Trade was essential in this rise.

...and here you lose the thread, I'm afraid.

When a country found areas of rich trade to exploit, they would not be about sharing that knowledge. Because it would injure them economically, so it would have been the same as keeping a state secret today.

No, they acted as the middleman/broker for the resource area. They wanted others to know they had these things so they could sell the products at a hefty price after they'd taken what they wanted.

However since the power of Egypt declined around 1177 BC and a dark age ensued, where the Greeks lost the ability to write,

You need to be more familiar with the timeline of history. 1177 BC was the 20th dynasty (New Kingdom) - Ramesses III, in specific, and was a time of growth and building. The Greek Dark Ages do start about then, but the rest of the world seems to be pretty much okay.

could we assume along with the Piri Reis Map and a few others.

Piri Reis map was made by an admiral of the Ottoman empire in 1500 AD

That not only was world wide trade practised, that the art of navigating the Oceans lingered on with the Polynesians?
The interesting thing about the timing is that Hawaii was raided by the Tahitians, around the 1177 BC date which they claim to this day, they were left a Star chart which showed the Pacific Islands.

Hawai'i was settled sometime after 300 AD (and possibly closer to 800 AD.) The Polynesians hadn't gotten far into the Pacific in 1177 BC.

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: anonentity

if the Libra position meant Equinox , then the old original Horoscope would serve exactly the same purpose, and become a star chart. Which might have become degraded to the point where it was used not for navigating a trip, but navigating a persons life.

An interesting hypothesis on the face of it. I wonder if anyone has corroborating evidence.

One problem is that precession would have rendered the compass inaccurate over the years.

A greater problem is that Libra does not have two bright stars that rise together

originally posted by: anonentity
a reply to: Astyanax


If it was set at the GP at a certain time of the year. .

The Great Pyramid is in the middle of the desert. They couldn't possibly use its orientation for anything.

a reply to: Byrd


Polynesians had Tapa cloth, the Tahitians raided Hawaii, around the time the main stream say Polynesia was settled. It was already settled from Alaska where the oral traditions of Hawaii and Alaskan Indians coincide back to the same bloodlines.
Im suggesting they met some seafarers who had Maps. Then settled the rest of the Pacific, even they say their were people there when, in the likes of New Zealand when they arrived.
The Star map was put together on the beach using pebbles and shells , using sunrise and sunset to orientate it to East and West. Depending on the time of the year they would know which star to follow to get to a certain destination.
I just used Libra as an example, as it seemed the most logical sign to denote an equinox. But my suspicion is that at a certain time of the year, the traditional horoscope would also show the rising and setting of stars that could also be used for navigating. Since the Piri Reis map shows a longitude line based at Alexandria it seems a logical point to start from.But since the GP seems to be a mathematical representation of the Northern hemisphere, and the Nile ran by it,it seems that any serious navigation would use it as a geographical marker. The Maoris say their original home is the Pleiades, so its not much of a stretch of the imagination with the GP representing that star system as "Heaven on Earth" to suggest they had more than a passing contact with some ancient seafarers.

a reply to: anonentity

Hi anonentity,

Polynesian navagation was more complex and yet more subtle than just following a star map, which was commited to memory.
The stars were only for a general heading, they used other clues, like the change in water color and the interference patterns of waves were two currents meet. What kind of fish they are catching and what kind of sea birds they are seeing, ans which way the winds are blowing.

In the late 80's there was a fantastic documentary film by a french tahitian film maker, that detail a race between a traditional tahitian canoe and a modern yacht, remeber this is pre gps.
The race started a bar bet between a young tahitian, trying to get people intwrwsted in the old ways, and a reasonably famous yatchsmen, on who could get from tahiti to another island, like 1400 miles away , roughly two weeks.
It was the tahitians first long distance navigation, and had a young crew. They stocked up their canoe with manioc and dried sweet potatoes, chickens, a couple of small pigs and several large gourds of water. The pigs and chikens were for the destination and only ro be eaten in an extreme circumstamce, as was the water
They fished and collected rainwater, mostly, but one day they came upon, what was clearly a separate current. You could see the change in water color and texture, and there was a flock of seabirds hanging out in it. It was a freshwater current, that had come to the suface.
They agreed to leave on a certain day, and the first boat to the marquesas wins.
The modern boat dutifully left at sun up on the apppinted day, while the tahitians sailed around the island to a beach on the north side and waited a couple of days for a squall to kick up and give them a boost to the north.
After about two weeks, the tahitian navigators uncle(mentor).proclaimed they would make landfall the next morning. At the same time the yacth skipper was laying out his finally course, had agreed to only using traditional nav tools, compass, watch and astrolabe, but he did have the advantage of modern charts. He figured he would make landfall sometime the next day.
The next morning at sunrise, sure enough there is the first island in the chain, for the tahitians, while tje yatch had missed the by 40 miles and spent two more days looping back around.

Nothing in common with "the Horoscope" at all.
Did you mean the Zodiac?

I'm doubtful that the zodiac would be very useful to navigation since the zodiacal constellations follow a line running East-West across the sky as the Earth turns. Perhaps to help maintain an East or West direction.

Harte

a reply to: anonentity

Ok,
You really opened a bottle gourd full polynesian rats.

The maori know their home before new zeland was tahiti. The one the the polynesians have on nearly every other neolithic culture, is a fantastic, and still existing oral history tradition.
Sure, many cultures have good oral traditions, but the polynesian traditons have been scientifically shown to be extremely accurate. Key events in Hawaiian histories, that were thought to be mythical, are in fact real, and their dates pinned down by volcanic eruptions.
A UCLA mythologist B. Masse, wrote a watershed paper on Hawaiian royal geneologies and their temporal accuracy. Since the tradition is still alive and is date referenced in the historic period, we can set dates to reigns of kings.
For Hawaii, it was thought that history and mythology coalesce and yet diverge with the arrival of the Marquesans, then Tahitians who are thought,by the mainstream, to have first settled Hawaii.
But the histories tell of a series of kings before the invaders(marquesans and tahitians) arrived.
Several of these kings reigns were marked by eruptions at specific vents. Those eruptions can be absolutely dated, and those dates put a well known legendary king@~600ce, and another dated event,a group of canoes sailing off at ~400ce never to be heard from again, and the hawaiian arrival on the north western shore of hawaii @~200bce.
Now we start to complicate an already complex situation of the peopleing of the pacific. When trying to make connections to the past you can quickly overwhelm yourself, in time and space.
My personal example, on my fathers side, I am phillipino and native californian. On the phillipino side, the family comes from one of the first islands settled by the spaniard plantations, which heavily relied on slave labor, the family name, translates to "the men from quito".So deep on my phillipino side are native south americans slavea, who would be descended from some of the ancestors of my native californian ancestors, who were likely very originally from:

WAIT FOR IT


The area around south china sea or THE NORTHERN PHLLIPINES.
So across the pacific,my ancestors ancestors were my ancestors ancestors.


I told that story because the ancestral homeland for "polynesians" is the northern philipines. I put polynesians in "s because there are subtle differences between native hawaiians(before the marquesan invasion) and the rest of what we call polynesia.
My internet service is crap in my neighborhood , so i cant stream anything, I assume the vid you posted is of the canoe built by the Haidi, on Haidi G'waii island B.C., for the Tahitians.
One scenario, i used to favor not so sure no
Hawaii was originally settled from Haida G'waii around 200bce. Around around 400 ce, due to clan drama a group sails off for parts unknown. They make landfall on easter island, where they run into people from mainland south america, and pick up a definative gene set, and the sweet potato, to be possibly be driven off the island by political drama following from the mainland. They sail into north eastern polynesia, where they run into the austronesians sailing from the northern philipines with their chickens and pigs and rats. From there they sail into western polynesia, oceana and melanesia. Here they mix with australasian oceanans and the melanesians, who had been previously ruled by the Lapita culture, their long distance austronesian cousins.

originally posted by: anonentity
a reply to: Byrd


Polynesians had Tapa cloth, the Tahitians raided Hawaii, around the time the main stream say Polynesia was settled.

Cloth and paper aren't the same. Try drawing that compass on cloth.

It was already settled from Alaska where the oral traditions of Hawaii and Alaskan Indians coincide back to the same bloodlines.

As Punkinworks explained, your source is wrong.

Im suggesting they met some seafarers who had Maps. Then settled the rest of the Pacific, even they say their were people there when, in the likes of New Zealand when they arrived.

Their history is pretty well understood... and does not go back to 1200 BC or longer.

I just used Libra as an example, as it seemed the most logical sign to denote an equinox. But my suspicion is that at a certain time of the year, the traditional horoscope would also show the rising and setting of stars that could also be used for navigating.

I don't think you know the difference between a horoscope (a group of 12 constellations) and a sky map. Polynesia is a large space and not all areas can see the same 12 constellations that the Greeks called "The Zodiac." Nor do all cultures see the same constellation groups.

Since the Piri Reis map shows a longitude line based at Alexandria it seems a logical point to start from.

Are we looking at the same map? Alexandria isn't on there; hence there's no longitude line there. Check for yourself

But since the GP seems to be a mathematical representation of the Northern hemisphere, and the Nile ran by it,it seems that any serious navigation would use it as a geographical marker.

It's a hundred miles inland, in the middle of a lot of desert. It's not useful as an ocean navigation item. It doesn't represent the Northern Hemisphere.

The Maoris say their original home is the Pleiades,

The video is wrong. The Maoris have no such belief. In fact, if you look at a map of the stars that the Maori CAN see... you will see that they can NOT see the Pleaides.

A bit of research on Wikipedia would help you craft better hypotheses.

a reply to: Byrd


Ulysses couldn't see the Bear constellation from the Med. but its still in the Iliad.

a reply to: Byrd

The pleides do figure into the mythos of tribes from the west coast of NA.

A paper was published in the last couple of weeks that shows aboriginal australians and ancient greeks did share imagery im some constelations.
I'm thinkin it was on sciencedaily, ill look for it.

originally posted by: anonentity
a reply to: Byrd


Ulysses couldn't see the Bear constellation from the Med. but its still in the Iliad.

Greek art and astronomy disagrees with you. They're the ones who named the constellations. Heck, the Egyptians could see them.... called them the "undying stars." However, as you'll note, those folks are north of the equator.

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: Byrd

The pleides do figure into the mythos of tribes from the west coast of NA.

A paper was published in the last couple of weeks that shows aboriginal australians and ancient greeks did share imagery im some constelations.
I'm thinkin it was on sciencedaily, ill look for it.

North America, yes. Not South Polynesia.

originally posted by: Byrd

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: Byrd

The pleides do figure into the mythos of tribes from the west coast of NA.

A paper was published in the last couple of weeks that shows aboriginal australians and ancient greeks did share imagery im some constelations.
I'm thinkin it was on sciencedaily, ill look for it.

North America, yes. Not South Polynesia.

Yes it can be seen

The Pleiades star cluster – also known as the Seven Sisters or M45 – is visible from virtually every place that humanity inhabits Earth’s globe. It can be seen from as far north as the north pole, and farther south than the southernmost tip of South America

pleides


Besides polynesians have cultural roots in the northern hemisphere, no matter how you look at it.