The ancient world, from the earliest times to 800 AD . lains and clear skies invitedto an early study of the heavenly bodies. The Chaldeans fore-told eclipses, made star maps, and marked out on the heavensthe apparent yearly path of the sun. The ^ signs of the zodiac in our almanacs come from these early astronomers. Everygreat city had its lofty observatory and its royal astronomer,and in Babylon, in 331 , Alexander the Great found an un-broken series of observations running back nineteen hundredyears. As we get from the Egyptians our year and months, sofrom the Chaldeans we get the week (
The ancient world, from the earliest times to 800 AD . lains and clear skies invitedto an early study of the heavenly bodies. The Chaldeans fore-told eclipses, made star maps, and marked out on the heavensthe apparent yearly path of the sun. The ^ signs of the zodiac in our almanacs come from these early astronomers. Everygreat city had its lofty observatory and its royal astronomer,and in Babylon, in 331 , Alexander the Great found an un-broken series of observations running back nineteen hundredyears. As we get from the Egyptians our year and months, sofrom the Chaldeans we get the week (with its seventh day of iFor hundreds of years the stars were believed to have influence uponhuman life, and a class of fortune tellers claimed to be able to discover thisinfluence, and to foretell the future, by studying the heavens. This pretendedscience is called astrology, to distinguish it from real astronomy. It lasted inEngland as late as the days of Queen Elizabeth; and all through the middleages in Europe an astrologer was called a §50] SOCIETY AND CULTURE 65 rest for the soul) and the division of the day into hours, withthe subdivision into minutes. Their notation, by 12 and 60, westill keep on the face of every clock. The sundial and the waterdock were Assyrian inventions to measure time.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjecthistoryancient, booky
