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Star LoreUrsa MajorPart 1 - Ancient Beginnings |
Plow in ancient Egypt |
Ursa Major is the most prominent constellation in the in the northern
celestial hemisphere.
It is one of the 48 original Ptolemaic Constellations. In ancient Babylon and Egypt, it was pictured as a carriage or a plow. In Greek mythology, it became a female bear. |
Babylon
While almost all of the (Greek) Ptolemaic Constellations
have their roots in ancient Mesopotamia, there were no bears in Mesopotamian star charts.
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Enlil and Ninlil Source: Wikipedia |
Ancient Egypt
The ancient Egyptians had two words for the asterism we call the Big Dipper, both related to farm or draught animals:
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Oxen in ancient Egypt; Source: touregypt.net |
Ancient Greece
Ian Ridpath describes the different interpretations of the constellation in ancient Greece:
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The constellation shown as a wagon (above) and as a bear (below) by
Peter Apian Source: Cosmographicus liber Ursa Major in a modern day poster, © Lantern Press
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The Greek myth of Callisto
(As told by Ian Ridpath)
Callisto is usually said to have been the daughter of
Lycaon, king of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese. ...
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Jupiter (Zeus) in the Guise of Diana, and Callisto; François Boucher, 1759 Source: Wikipedia
Arcas Preparing to Kill his Mother, Changed into a Bear; François Boucher, 1590 Ursa Major in Atlas Coelestis, 1753 Ursa Major in Urania's Mirror, 1824
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The Greek myth of Adrasteia
(As told by Ian Ridpath)
Aratus makes a completely different identification of Ursa Major. He says that the bear represents
one of the nymphs who raised Zeus in the cave of Dicte on Crete. That cave, incidentally, is a real
place where local people still proudly point out the supposed place of Zeus’s birth.
Rhea, his mother, had smuggled Zeus to Crete to escape
Cronus, his father. Cronus had swallowed all his previous children at birth for fear that one day
they would overthrow him – as Zeus eventually did.
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Zeus raised by Adrasthea; Jacob Jordaens, ca. 1640 Source: Wikipedia
The goat Amalthea nurturing Zeus and Pan |
Ancient Rome
Ian Ridpath tells us that
Germanicus Caesar "... seems to have been the first to mention a third, now-common identity – he
said that the bears were also called ploughs because, as he wrote, ‘the shape of a plough is the closest to the real shape formed by their stars...
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