What do solar eclipses mean to you? Photo credit: Jiaqi Ding via The Oxford Scientist
Solar eclipses are a lot like kisses—everyone remembers their first. For me, it was on the second-floor corridor of my primary school that, through the glass ceiling, I saw this astronomical phenomenon for the first, and so far only, time in my life. March 20th 2015 was a normal spring day in every other way, but on that morning you could’ve sworn it was Christmas. Palpable excitement, incessant chatter… it was clear that a once-in-a-lifetime event was imminent.
…it was clear that a once-in-a-lifetime event was imminent.
At a time of great polarisation across many parts of the world, the resonance of solar eclipses feels like a rare unifier in an otherwise divided world. Though they occur roughly once every eighteen months, solar eclipses are only visible from a small area of the world at any particular occurrence. As such, providing that an individual was to stay in the same place for their entire life, there is only a 19.5% chance that they would live to see a total solar eclipse. Never mind once in a lifetime, the statistics indicate that solar eclipses are once-in-a-half-millennium events.
This number may be surprising, especially given the frequent talk of upcoming solar eclipses in the media. Yet it is important to note that the role of mass media has exacerbated the extent to which we have awareness of astronomical phenomena and their visibility across the world. Additionally, the scientific understanding of the earth’s orbit, rotation, and proximity to both the sun and the moon has meant not only that future eclipses can be predicted with astonishing accuracy, but also that the dates of past eclipses can be extrapolated using knowledge of solar cycles.
The earliest reference made to a solar eclipse may be found on an ancient rock carving in Ireland. Archaeo-astronomer Paul Griffin has argued that carvings into 5,000-year-old stone cairns at Loughcrew in County Meath seem to depict an ancient partial solar eclipse. Using software which predicts the dates of former eclipses, Griffin has suggested that the carvings depict an eclipse which would have been witnessed on November 30th 3340 BC. This has been widely reported by several media organisations, including the press wing of NASA, as the first speculated reference to a solar eclipse.
Archaeologist Susan Johnson who specialises in the Irish Neolithic, from which this rock carving dates—has questioned the claim that the concentric circles represent an eclipse, since circles of this sort are a relatively common style seen on Neolithic tombs. For an event as unique as an eclipse, Johnson believes a more distinctive style of art should be visible. Furthermore, history of astronomy professor John Steele has questioned how precisely software can even calculate the dates of former eclipses, casting further doubts over the relationship between the Loughcrew cairns and solar eclipses. The earth’s rotation rates fluctuate enough to call into question the totality of past eclipses. Even if there was a solar eclipse around 3340 BC, it is impossible to tell whether this would have been visible to the Irish Neolithic population, nevermind whether they then decided to depict this within their iconography.
The question of how ancient peoples interpreted solar eclipses has been a source of fascination in recent years. A quick internet search displays several articles which simply list both purported and confirmed references to ancient solar eclipses and how these have been used in ancient mythologies. These should be read with a critical eye though, as understandings of the past are rooted within the present. Paul Griffin only interpreted the Loughcrew circles as a solar eclipse because he interpreted them as a work of art representing a phenomenon which he found interesting. Since solar eclipses interested him, Griffin assumed they must have held importance in the past, particularly given the lack of ‘scientific knowledge’ that could explain eclipses in the same way that the public understands them now.
…it isn’t clear whether these circles can even be understood as ‘art’.
The worldviews of past cultures are far harder to access than this. Not only is the interpretation of the artwork up for debate but it isn’t clear whether these circles can even be understood as ‘art’. We don’t know who the intended recipients of this artwork would have been—but it certainly wasn’t us. Western understandings of ‘art’ are so tied-up within the mimetic tradition of representational art dating to ancient Greece, yet this is not a way of understanding art that has some universal basis. Not every iconographic image is indicative of some event, person, or object.
The best understanding we can have of ancient understandings of solar eclipses is therefore either from written sources, or from cultures whose artistic traditions are better understood. In The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria, Zainab Bahrani demonstrates how art was understood to be ‘alive’ in the Assyro-Babylonian traditions of the first to third centuries BC. Statues of deities were not merely representations of mythical figures, but rather were mythical figures in and of themselves. As such, a common feature in Assyro-Babylonian iconography is the mutilation of statues by invading forces. This mutilation would particularly target the sensory facilities of the ruler, such as the mouth, ears, and nose of the statue. By removing sensory perception, invading forces would destroy what it is that made the statue human. As such, statues could be killed as well as being given life to.
…eclipses were seen as dangerous omens which would predict a dangerous fate for the king.
This insight into Assyro-Babylonian tradition is known from textual accounts which have survived for around three thousand years. From Akkadian scholarly texts, we know that eclipses were seen as dangerous omens which would predict a dangerous fate for the king. We also know that when such fates were predicted, the king would be replaced by a layman who, following a ritual ceremony, would temporarily take the king’s place to suffer his fate for him. Interestingly, this echoes the behaviour of Ancient Greeks. Having learnt how to predict eclipses through looking at the patterns of certain solar cycles (including the Saros Cycles, which are based on lunar months), Ancient Greek officials would choose a peasant or prisoner to stand in for the king so that the misfortune associated with eclipses would befall them rather than the king. This stand-in would then be summarily executed following the eclipse.
The interpretation of them as a bad omen does seem quite common—but this is not universal.
These ontologies can be accessed thanks to the preservation of textual documents. Using these, we know how some ancient societies interpreted and predicted past eclipses. Nevertheless, for many ancient communities, we simply have no idea what they thought of solar eclipses. The interpretation of them as a bad omen does seem quite common—but this is not universal. Aboriginal Australians interpret solar eclipses as a mating ceremony, whereby the male-regarded moon is drawn to the female-regarded sun. This we know from contemporary ethnographic accounts—but how far this mythology dates back into prehistory is unknown.
Solar eclipses have thus been interpreted both positively and negatively. Indeed, even today, some people refuse to leave their houses on the same day as a solar eclipse for fear of bad luck. If there is such variability to eclipse interpretations in the globalised, contemporary world, then the multiplicity of past approaches towards solar eclipses must have been endless. For most ancient peoples, we simply do not know what they thought when they looked at the sky and saw the moon blocking the light of the sun. Yet the very fact that they saw the same phenomenon that we do serves as a reminder that the past, no matter how distant and inaccessible on the ground, can sometimes unite us in the sky.
