Archeoatronomia

Prehistoric temple builders 

‘an advanced civilisation’ 

ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Europe, Malta, Recommended Reading, Southern Europe  

Malta’s prehistoric temple builders were an advanced civilisation, paying careful attention to align the Mnajdra complex with celestial activity right from its very inception, according to Norwegian academic Tore Lomsdalen. 

Niche at the Mnajdra South Temple [Credit: Sudika/WikiCommons] 

In a book titled Sky and Purpose in Prehistoric Malta: Sun, Moon and Stars at the Temples of Mnajdra, Mr Lomsdalen introduces new evidence and insights into the temple architecture and its relationships with the sky. 
The notion that megalithic monuments were deliberately constructed to align with the sun, moon and stars has been well documented. 
Mr Lomsdalen presents evidence based on archaeoastronomical observations, a field of study which bridges archaeology with astronomy. 
At the equinoxes (March 20/21 and September 22/23) the rising sun perfectly illuminates the central corridor of the south temple. 
During the solstices (June 21 and December 21/22) the sun rises in line with corners of the 
door jambs. 
The light never extends beyond the altar-like arrangements towards the back of the temples. 

Plan of the Mnajdra temple [Credit: Hamelin de Guettelet/WikiCommons] 

“The temple builders knew exactly which parts of the temples they wanted to light up and which parts they wanted to remain in the dark. 
The very specific orientation seems to be connected to ritual ceremonies during the solstices and equinoxes. 
“It has been suggested that Malta had a chiefdom society, that it might have been a priestly class. They might have held ritual feasts, with animal sacrifices around those particular times of the year. 
“The arrangement is just too precise to be arbitrary.” 
The Mnajdra complex was built in different stages, spanning from the early Ġgantija phase (c.3,600-3,000 BC) to the later Tarxien phase (c.3,000-2,500 BC). Mr Lomsdalen suggests that the lower left chamber is the oldest part of the south temple.
 The chamber is a temple in itself, with a proper entrance and three altars. This was followed by Rooms 2 and 4 in the middle Ġgantija phase. 
The eastern buildings of Mnajdra were also constructed in the early Ġgantija phase (c.3,600-3,000 BC), while the northern buildings were built in the later Tarxien phase Each extension to the temple meant that the light’s penetration was closed off, causing the temple builders to build new altars or introduce orthostats (large stones set upright) to ensure that the specific features of the temple were illuminated. The very specific alignment of the stones increased in complexity and sophistication through time. “They had a very keen knowledge – as they extended the temples, they constantly made modifications to ensure that the light always struck at a particular point.” 
The sun’s movement throughout the year casts vertical slits of light on the orthostats. 
Mr Lomsdalen suggests the temple builders used it as a sort of calendar device, to keep track of the seasons.

 To find the exact orientation of Mnajdra, the temple builders might have used the open star cluster known as the Pleiades.

 This could possibly mean that some of the building was done at night. 


Author: Kim Dalli | Source: Times of Malta [June 28, 2015]

PERSONA o TRADIZIONE?

Homer is a tradition, 

not a person, 

British historian says 


 The ancient Greek poet Homer was not a single person but actually an entire culture of storytelling, a historian has claimed. 

Portrait of Homer, known as Homer Caetani.
Pentelic marble, Roman copy  of the 2nd century CE after a Greek original of the 2nd century BC. From the Palazzo Caetani in Rome 

[Credit: WikiCommons] 

Adam Nicolson, 
an author and historian who has studied Homer, believes the epic poems of The Iliad and The Odyssey have their origins around 2,000 BC - 1,000 years earlier than the man who wrote them is said to have lived. 
Instead, he claims the stories evolved as a tradition that were shared and refined as spoken poems for hundreds of years. Speaking in an interview with National Geographic, Mr Nicolson, who is the Fifth Baron Carnock, said that the idea of Homer as a single author has emerged due to an 'author obsession'.

He said: 'I think it's a mistake to think of Homer as a person. 
Homer is an "it" - a tradition. 
'An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it.' 

There is very little known about exactly who or what Homer was, but is believed by the ancient Greeks to have been the first great epic poet. 
Some accounts claim he was a blind poet who lived between 1,102BC to 850BC. 
A guild of singing story tellers, or rhapsodes, later emerged known as the Homeridae and has led some to argue that Homer was actually a mythical figure whose name was derived from the guild.

 Some of the earliest written works attributed to Homer were found with the mummified remains of Green Egyptians from around 150-200 BC.

The oldest complete Iliad manuscript is found in the doge's library in Venice and is thought to date from 900AD.
Mr Nicolson, who lives in Kent, said that notes in the margins of this manuscript, which was created in the Constantinople-Byzantium, provide some clues to what the origin of the Iliad may have been.
 He said: 'One of the exciting things that emerge from that is that in the early days it seems there was no such thing as a single Iliad, no one fixed text, but this wild and variable tradition of the stories, with many different versions in different parts of the Mediterranean, endlessly interacting with itself, like a braided stream in the mountains.'

Mr Nicolson said he first became interested in Homer around ten years ago when he began reading The Odyssey while waiting for his yacht to be repaired after it was damaged in a storm while sailing up the west coast of Britain. 
He describes reading The Odyssey as being like somebody 'telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth'. 
Mr Nicolson, who has presented several TV programmes, including one about the history of whaling, has now written a book called The Mighty Dead, or Why Homer Matters in the US, to explore what influence Homer's stories have today. 

He said that he believes many of the poems attributed to Homer have their beginnings around 2,000 BC. He said that large elements of the stories from The Iliad, for example, are shared with stories found in India, Germany and Iceland. He also said that the Iliad also paints the Greeks as lawless violent warriors rather than the civilised society they later became. 
He said: 'That picture of the Greeks doesn't make sense any later than about 1,800 to 1,700 BC. After that, the Greeks had arrived in the Mediterranean and started to create a civil society. 'Before that, they were essentially tribes from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian - nomadic, male-dominated, violent.' 


Author: Richard Gray | Source: MailOnline [January 05, 2015]

Read more at: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.it/2015/01/homer-is-tradition-not-person-british.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+(The+Archaeology+News+Network)
Follow us: @ArchaeoNewsNet on Twitter | groups/thearchaeologynewsnetwork/ on Facebook