HOW DID ANCIENTS KNOW & CALCULATE THE EQUINOX
 

Hi,

There were two factors actually. They were closer to nature which allowed greater intuitive thinking. This lead them to recognize the value of base 12 math which many see as ancient math today.

Using base 12 math instead of base 10 math allows for more percise calculations. Some thing not considered important I guess. I have no idea why we insist on counting things with the fingers on our hands.

John

Even more interesting than the Equinox,

How did the ancient who drew the 12 astrological signs in the sky, know where the center of our galaxy was?

It was only discovered by our advanced science between 1950 and 1960.

Yet the tail of Scorpio and the arrow of Sagittarius point to this center…

As this one minute video gives a visual for those who don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8eIVv3_ZbU

Interesting indeed.

Fuller believes this stems from Babaloyians knowledge of the icosa{20}hedron. One of the ancient stones is of an icosahedron and the icosahedron has chirality as 60 left-handed right triangles and 60 right-handed triangles.


Also the icosahedron has 30 edges/chords and when the icosaehedron is derived from the cubo-octahedron its has those 30 edges i.e. 30 left and 30 right-hand versions.


On an aside, there exist 20 kinds of amino-acids for most part they also have chirality handeness. Well the icosahedron 20 left or right handed triangles, in relation to teh cubo-octahedron it is derived from, depending on which direction the spin of contraction happens with the cubo-octahedron. LINK

For the equinox calculation.

"Systematically observing the sunrise, people discovered that it occurs between two extreme locations at the horizon and eventually noted the midpoint between the two. Later it was realized that this happens on a day when the durations of the day and the night are practically equal and the word "equinox" comes from Latin Aequus, meaning "equal", and Nox, meaning "night". " Wikipedia

No more power at my home. So I’m writing from cell.

No need of time to find it. Simply observe from the same point of observation in a year where the sun sets. On a circle where you are the center, put a rock where it sets the most far away on one side at the beginning of winter and put another rock on that circle where it sets down the most far away on the other side, which marks the beginning of summer. When the sun sets in the middle of those two rocks you have the solstice.

Picture of that below but it includes a pencil and pie plate.

Is this what led to the sundial?

Typo in my last post. The last word should be equinox not solstice. Sorry typing from a cell...

CLEVER.......

Hello Big John,

One thing if for sure, when the Egyptians build their first Pyramids, around 3500 BC, they already new the exact position of the equinox in a way that even today we would have difficulty to build a so huge construction that is perfectly aligned with the True East and West line as the pyramids are.

On the equinox day the sun sets on the true West and the sun rises on the True East. Drawing a line from those two points at that time of the year gives a good idea of the direction for the true East/West line. Finding the place where the sun sets on the Equinox in those times is the only way I know of to find that line. Yet the finding with such precision the angle of that line in the way the pyramids where build would be a challenge for any surveyor and builders of today with all the tools we have.

As for realising that the time of day = the times of the night on the equinox day. Don't know how they did it, and when we realized it was such a thing on the equinox day.

The oldest sun clock dates from around 1500 BC. But then it only gives the time during the daylight. How did they calculate the time during the night time to compare with day time? Most probably from observation of the movement of the stars. But this is only speculation from my part.

Even more fascinating than the equinox, is the knowledge they had in those times, as shows for example the Mayan calender, of the north/sud pole axis of rotation of the earth doing a precessional circle in the sky that takes 25 920 years. It's from this movement of the axe of rotation of the planet that we say that we are entering the age of Aquarius that will last for about 2160 years.

Have a great day!

Hi,

It is amazing to me that they did these things. May be were were smarter back then than we are now.

John

..Space ( Time ) | ( Time ) Space....
 

Perhaps it has to do with mathematical extrapolation based on what is known from years of observation of precession and observation is key.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-ancien...-the-equinoxes

.."Axial precession shows up as both procession of the equinoxes and the changes in the star closest to True North. People must have found such stars useful for navigating. But it would be noted that there were slow shifts:"...

..."Ptolemy compared his own observations with those made
by Hipparchus, Menelaus of Alexandria, Timocharis, and Agrippa. He found thabetween Hipparchus's time and his own (about 265 years), the stars had moved 2°40', or 1° in 100 years (36" per year; the rate accepted today is about 50" per year or 1° in 72 years). He also confirmed that precession affected all fixed stars, not just those near the ecliptic, and his cycle had the same period of 36,000 years as found by Hipparchus."....

POSSIBLY!

Hello r6r6,

I tried to understand the meaning of 36 000 years and I could not. Could you explain more on that number? what it means to you?

72 years to make 1 degree x 360 degree in a circle = 25 920 years.

Regards,

...@{ * i *}@....Mama mia Mama mia
 

36000 as number has not specific meaning to me. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was only copying info from net that helped to valid a mycomments as stater regarding mathematical extrapolation via years of observation by Maya and whomever else.


You may need to read more info from that specific Quora page I linked to or find other sources of a similar nature. It seems apparent to me that there is no deep unaccounted for mystery regarding how maya new this or that regarding equnoz solitce etc.


Nor that they could do mathmatical caclulations out to some date in the future. Wasnt 2012 alledged to be the Mayas end-of-time scenario? I didnt buy into then and constantly correcting those who predicted doom related to it. Or a least most assessed it that way.


Then after 2012 came and gone they changed there tune or it just meant a monumental change was coming. Charlatan conartist luke around ever corner.



Yet here we are. End of human time on Earth is most likely related to Erratic Climate Change and any resultant pressures that may develop in world of crisis that also has,


plenty of hydrogen bombs to wipe out humanity,


plenty of nuke plants and nuclear waste just sitting around,


plenty of toxic polluants sittiing around,


etc.........Do you follow my drift here above?

Find the longest day.
Find the shortest day.
Count the days in between.
Divide by 2.

Various devices were used.

Hello :)

Here up North, as I watch the birds already leaving for the South, I wonder how they know its time for them to migrate on this beautiful hot and sunny day.

Sundials? Ergo shadow movement

SOUNDS REASONABLE!
But how would one realize this data is important?
For example, at the Equinox, the amount of daylight and darkness at these 2 days per year are the same.

Just like for the birds who need to migrate when the seasons change to find food or not die from the cold of winter, even as nomads in the last ice age the change of seasons must of been remarked in order to survive. And latter to need to know when to plant the seeds in spring. To know and find out pointers to indicate when the seasons change was thus a matter of survival for us then.

My two cents...

Position of sun, moon stars etc relates to seasonal changes.

Good afternoon BigJohn :smile:

Do you think this is the first time around :wink:

...@{ * 3 * }@....
 

Not with Boolean math-magics :icon_eek: is my best guess.

..Space ( Time *) i (* Time ) Space....
 

Sundial if not others for reliability.

Modern Scientist know that the height of the largest tetrahedron we know to exist in Universe that is on Mars. The know because of the shadow length and other data.

Sundials use shadows.

..Space ( Time *) i (* Time ) Space....
 

Dont know that you need a night time piece.


Moon dial and hour glass are other possible ways to reference time to celestial events.

..Space ( Time *) i (* Time ) Space....
 

Observation, sundials, hourglass time pieces :clock: and whatever other time clocks that could have been used.


Ditto my above and all of my previous posts adn here is link to others that we know of.

The simplest way would be to note where the sun sets and rises everyday, and realise there is a pattern of the sun swinging from right to left, and it draws high and low arcs on the sky. It's relatively easy to establish the equinoxes in this way, within a few days at least, without having a counting system to measure number of days or hours therein. People would notice the days became longer and shorter without time pieces, and it's likely the chronology by which time was perceived would have been different to our modern method of counted time intervals. No doubt the old peoples' representations of time was less accurate than our modern use of atomic clocks etc, but they did not need accurate measures back then.

I live in north east Scotland in a small town that's traditionally fishing and farming, so most folks around here take notice of things like daylight hours and weather patterns, the changing of the seasons.... At the summer Solstice we have a handful of hours of darkness and winter Solstice gives a handful of hours of daylight. There's a noticeable difference even just after the Solstice when the days become either shorter or longer and no timepiece is needed. Perhaps megalithic man noticed the changes in daylight hours and devised a way to measure them more accurately, in the same way as he noticed the sun creeping across the sky over the course of the year.

Hi,

I have done my fair share of assembler programming. Binary concepts are important to appreciate when dealing with electronics.

The place for base 12 math is in physics. I was not aware there was a base 60 system. In physics there is the need for matching the number of elements and concluding the relationship. Since nature works in base 12 math with a lot of 3's, 4's, and 6's it only seems reasonable to me we would want to think in those terms instead of base 10 like we do now. In my mind the ancients were closer to nature and understood things better than we do today.

As far as computers are concerned, our 64 bit processors of today are not effective. The registers these chips use are 1 byte, 2 byte, 4 byte, and 8 bytes mostly. There is no effective way to deal with storage sizes of 3, 5, 6, & 7 bytes. Not to mention the great liability that all boolian data must be stored 2 byte fields of information. A great deal of programming logic is yes/no boolian dependant. Yet we do not have really good ways to work with it.

I first worked with assembler in 1965-1966. It was called FAP. Fortran Assembly programming. Then again in 1975-1976 with BAL. Basic assembler language. My most recent experience has been with FASM. That runs on the current x86 chip sets. I mostly use the higher level languages because assembler does not have a user friendly interface. However the day it can work directly with a browser like front end I will be a big advocate for it.

John