Jul
21
A Fair Look at Ancient Near Eastern Science
This is the fourth entry in my series citing Rescuing Inerrancy: A Scientific Defense (2023) by Dr. Hugh Ross.
A few weeks ago, I watched a streaming TV series — the title of which I can’t remember, sorry — that looked at controversial archaeological finds and how they indicated scientific inquiry among ancient civilizations. Granted, there was a lot of questionable speculation by the show host/writers, but I thought that a few fair questions were asked. Coincidentally, I was also reading (or had recently finished) Rescuing Inerrancy at the time, and there was an interesting bit of crossover between the two. The common message, I suppose, can be summed up as: “The ancients did a lot more science-ing than we usually give them credit for.”
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For well over a decade, some Christian theologians have made bold claims not only about ancient peoples’ lack of concern to understand and describe the cosmos but also about their inability to study the natural realm. In other words, these theologians believe that ancient peoples were unable to do science. Peter Enns makes the claim that “scientific investigation was not at the disposal of ancient Near Eastern peoples.” He also writes, “The biblical writers assumed that the earth is flat, was made by God in relatively recent history (about 4,000 years before Jesus) just as it looks now, and that it is a fixed point in the cosmos over which the sun actually rises and sets.” John Walton and Brent Sandy agree that nature was of no interest to ancient Near Eastern (ANE) peoples, except for purposes of survival. They attribute a lengthy list of supposed false beliefs to the ancients’ ignorance of or disinterest in “the material cosmos.” …
Today, much of the world’s population has lost touch with the night sky. Urbanization, with its bright lights and nighttime entertainment options, powerfully prevents and distracts people from noticing the night sky. Both light and air pollution in many parts of the world block people from seeing more than a few planets and a dozen or so stars. In some cities, the only visible heavenly body after dark is the Moon, and only once it has risen well above the horizon.
The ANE peoples had a radically different experience. No matter where they lived, they saw, night after night, hour by hour, the Milky Way and roughly fifteen thousand shining stars. I have witnessed what happens when twenty-first-century people visit a planetarium. They are awestruck by the simulated view of a night sky, which today shows us only about five thousand visible stars (due to current atmospheric conditions). The ANE peoples had an even more awe-inspiring view than we do on the clearest of nights. They could hardly help but become familiar with the Milky Way, the stars, and the orbital movements of the planets and the Moon, even if they called these objects and actions by different names.
Nearly all ancient cultures — Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Briton, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more — dating back to the time of Moses or earlier invested heavily in the pursuit of astronomical knowledge. They spent a greater fraction of their gross national product in employing and equipping astronomers than any nation does today. Some 1,800-4,900 years before Christ, people living in Great Britain, Ireland, Normandy, and Germany constructed thousands of stone circle observatories (e.g., Stonehenge, as seen above), ranging in size from several meters to 330 meters in diameter. The primary purpose of these sites was to allow accurate naked-eye observations of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. Egyptians, dating back to at least the fifth millennium BC, constructed similar observatories for the same purpose. Archaeologists have recently identified what are likely astronomical observatories made of stone dating from 3600-2500 BC in the Maltese archipelago.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, Europe, and China employed astronomers to predict the timing of future solar and lunar eclipses and planetary conjunctions (two or more planets coming within a few Moon diameters of each other in the celestial sky) and the locations from which these events would be visible. They did so because the visual proximity of planets to one another and the duration of eclipses differ depending on the observer’s location on Earth.
Nearly all ancient governments paid astronomers to detect the timing and relative positions of the Sun, Moon, five (naked-eye-visible) planets, comets, novae, and supernovae. These astronomers were employed for both astronomical and astrological purposes, just as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD….
Ancient astronomers realized through their observations of solar and lunar eclipses that both Earth and the Moon must be spherical bodies. They noted that the shadow of Earth on the Moon during partial lunar eclipses always has a curved edge, a portion of a circle. They knew enough about geometry to recognize that only a spherical body would present a consistent curved boundary to its eclipse shadows. Thus, Earth must be a spherical body.
People throughout the ancient world, as today, could observe partial solar eclipses using tiny gaps between tree leaves. These gaps act as “pinhole lenses.”… Such observations made by ancient peoples would have revealed that the Moon’s shadow on the Sun during a solar eclipse always has an edge that is a portion of a circle. Thus, ancient astronomers would have concluded that the Moon, too, must be a spherical body.
Ancient mariners and military leaders were also well aware of earth’s curvature due to the crow’s-nest effect. They noted that only the tops of mountains could be seen from a distance and that the more distant the mountain, the less of the top was visible. This crow’s-nest effect is illustrated in Genesis 8. From the top of the ark, Noah could see distant hills (verse 5), whereas the dove he released, flying low over the floodwaters (verse 9), was unable to see any land.
Many other evidences affirmed that Earth was spherical…. ANE astronomers possessed two additional methods to measure Earth’s diameter: (1) variation in obelisk shadow length, depending on location, and (2) variation in shadow angles in deep wells, depending on location. [The Greek-Egyptian astronomer Eratosthenes used the obelisk shadow method to measure Earth’s diameter in the third century BC.] His measurement of Earth’s polar diameter was 7,850 miles. The current measurement is 7,899.8 miles. Eratosthenes’s measurement came within 0.99% of the true value.
Eratosthenes’s measurement is the earliest surviving precise determination of Earth’s shape and diameter. Aristotle, writing a century earlier, referred to the curved shape of shadows of lunar eclipses and the visibility of stellar constellations at different geographical locations as proof that the world must be a spherical body. Given ancient peoples’ ubiquitous curiosity and preoccupation with astronomy, Aristotle could not have been the first to correctly discern Earth’s shape. No doubt, this knowledge predated the earliest surviving published sources.
Given how labor intensive and costly written publications were in ancient times and how challenging it was to preserve such publications, we should not be surprised that earlier written descriptions of Earth’s shape and size have not yet been found. By analogy, there is no written record of ancient peoples manufacturing flour and baking bread until about 3,500 years ago. Yet, the discovery of grinding stones, hearths, and charcoal residues of roasted grains establishes beyond reasonable doubt that humans living 32,600 years ago indeed were engaged in such activities. Likewise, the thousands of astronomical observatories constructed by ancient peoples and the ease by which ancient peoples through multiple methods would have discerned Earth’s sphericity leave little doubt that the astronomers they employed knew Earth could not be a flat disk.
Ancient records show that astronomers’ eclipse studies also enabled them to determine the approximate size of the Sun and Moon and the distances of each from Earth. For example, they could see that when the Moon is partially eclipsed by Earth’s shadow, the curved shape of its shadow yields the Earth’s diameter relative to the Moon’s. They could obtain a measure of the angular diameter of Earth’s shadow on the Moon by measuring how long it takes for Earth’s shadow to fully encompass the Moon and how long the Moon remains completely within Earth’s shadow during a total lunar eclipse. Thus, a measurement of Earth’s diameter provided a value for the Moon’s diameter. The observed angular size of the Moon in the sky then allowed them to measure the distance to the Moon. By similar means, ancient astronomers were able to make rough measurements of the Sun’s diameter and distance.
These measurements were supplemented by observations of the Moon’s phases. At exactly the first and third quarters of the Moon’s phases, when the Sun’s light is reflected by half of the Moon’s face (from the vantage point of Earth), the line between the light half and the dark half of the Moon is perfectly straight. If the Sun were infinitely distant from Earth, the triangle from the Sun to the Earth to the Moon would be exactly 90 degrees. However, because the Sun is not infinitely distant from Earth, the observed triangle from Earth’s surface is less than 90 degrees. The true value is 89 degrees 50 minutes. Ancient astronomers, using naked-eye observations, determined that the value must be greater than 87 degrees. On this basis, they determined that the Sun must be at least 19 times more distant from Earth than the Moon is. Further, given that the Sun and the Moon have nearly equal apparent diameters as seen from Earth, the Sun’s diameter must be at least 19 times greater than the Moon’s and at least 6 times greater than Earth’s.
Realization that the Sun must be much larger than Earth persuaded ancient astronomers that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. Although Copernicus (1473-1543) often receives credit for discovering the heliocentricity of the solar system, his “discovery” came from a visit to Italian libraries, where the manuscripts of ancient Egyptian and Greek astronomers were archived. These manuscripts from about two millennia earlier explained why Earth and the planets must revolve around the Sun.
Because ancient astronomers lacked algebra, however, they were unable to calculate the future positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets from a heliocentric perspective. Nevertheless, their mathematics did permit such predictions from a geocentric perspective. The Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (AD 100-170) demonstrated how accurately future positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets could be calculated by assuming, arbitrarily, a geocentric perspective. Even today, his mathematical approach still delivers remarkably accurate predictions.
Ancient astronomers attempted to determine distances to the stars by measuring stars’ movements relative to other stars in the celestial sky as Earth orbited around the Sun. However, the movements of the stars relative to one another remained undiscernible to them. From this inability to detect any relative movements they came to understand that the stars must be far more distant from Earth than the Sun.
The oldest surviving written records by ancient astronomers citing their measurements of the sizes and distances of the Sun, Moon, and stars are those by Egyptian and Greek astronomers of the seventh to the third centuries BC. However, given how intensely the ancients studied astronomy and how straightforwardly the relevant observations could be made and simple geometry applied, one may reasonably assume that ancient astronomers around the world, not just in the Near East, had determined at least rough estimates of the shapes, sizes, and distances of the Sun, Moon, and Earth by the time — or perhaps long before — the Bible was written….
Countless books and articles published in the twenty-first century convey the notion that we humans are becoming more intellectually advanced through an ongoing naturalistic evolutionary process. If that were the case, it would make sense to conclude that ancient peoples were either intellectually inferior to us or lacking in intellectual motivation. To me, this idea is an example of twenty-first century hubris.
Even the brief content presented in this chapter and the previous one would seem adequate to counter the claim that we moderns are intellectually superior to ancient peoples. Readers wanting a more thorough treatment of the topic will want to consider books by Karl Butzer, Marshall Clagett, J.L.E. Dreyer, Christine Garwood, Helge Kragh, and Jeffrey Russell. Even these scholars, however, may have overlooked a significant factor in their assessment of early humans’ intelligence.
During the last ice age, the global mean temperature varied by +/- 8ºC on timescales of a few centuries. Such extreme climate instability explains why people living during that period struggled to devote significant resources toward the advancement and scaling up of their technology: they were struggling to survive. This struggle for survival was exacerbated by the much lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the last ice age. With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of 180-190 parts per million, photosynthesis and, hence, crop productivity would have been seriously hindered.
From 9,500 to about 75 years ago, the global mean temperature varied by no more than +/- 0.65ºC. Such climate stability made possible the Neolithic Revolution — the scaling up of agriculture, manufacturing, city building, and transportation systems. Then, from AD 1000 to 1950, the global mean temperature stabilized to within +/- 0.06ºC. This astounding climate stability contributed significantly to the development of universities during the Middle Ages, then to the Renaissance, and more recently to the industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions.
While the ANE peoples, including ancient Hebrews, lacked the wealth, technology, climate stability, and leisure time that later eras made possible, we must also acknowledge that most of their scientific achievements have been lost. The fire that destroyed the great library in Alexandria, for example, eradicated much of the record of ANE science. However, even the ancient literature we do possess, once we separate out the religious, astrological, and sociopolitical stories, leaves little doubt that these peoples were just as intelligent, just as curious about the workings of the natural realm, and just as committed to scholarly research as people today.
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Once again, Ross has gathered plenty of evidence (with extensive bibliographic endnotes in his book) that pretty much destroys the claims of some Christian theologians (e.g. Enns, Walton) that ancient Near Eastern peoples had neither the interest nor capability to study the heavens. Even a cursory reading of the Bible indicates that the Hebrew people were not ignorant of scientific discoveries and achievements made by their neighbors. (Figures like Moses, Solomon, and Daniel were influential leaders who had access to, studied, and likely shared this knowledge.)
I have one more post planned that will include citation from Rescuing Inerrancy. Assuming you aren’t a fan of John Walton, I think you’ll like it.
