Week 2 of Yesod (July)...constellations, a good starting point.
Lascaux Caves, Southern France
It has been suggested that the 17,000-year-old
in
Southern France depict star constellations such as Taurus, Orion's Belt, and the Pleiades. However, this view is not generally accepted among scientists.
Mesopotamia
Inscribed stones and clay writing tablets from
(in modern Iraq) dating to 3000 BC provide the earliest generally accepted evidence for humankind's identification of constellations.
It seems that the bulk of the Mesopotamian constellations were created within a relatively short interval from around 1300 to 1000 BC. Mesopotamian constellations appeared later in many of the classical Greek constellations.
Ancient Near East
See also:
Babylonian tablet recording
in 164 BC.
The oldest
of stars and constellations date back to the beginning of the
, most notably the
Three Stars Each texts and the
, an expanded and revised version based on more accurate observation from around 1000 BC. However, the numerous
in these catalogues suggest that they built on older, but otherwise unattested,
traditions of the
.
The classical Zodiac is a revision of
constellations from the 6th century BC. The Greeks adopted the Babylonian constellations in the 4th century BC. Twenty Ptolemaic constellations are from the Ancient Near East. Another ten have the same stars but different names.
Biblical scholar
interpreted some of the creatures mentioned in the books of
and
as the middle signs of the four-quarters of the Zodiac,
with the Lion as
, the Bull as
, the Man representing
, and the Eagle standing in for
.
The biblical
also makes reference to a number of constellations, including עיש
‘Ayish "bier", כסיל
chesil "fool" and כימה
chimah "heap" (Job 9:9, 38:31–32), rendered as "Arcturus, Orion and Pleiades" by the
, but
‘Ayish "the bier" actually corresponding to Ursa Major.
The term
מַזָּרוֹת, translated as
a garland of crowns, is a
in Job 38:32, and it might refer to the zodiacal constellations.
