Category Archives: Historical Essays

Historical essays covering pre-civilization, pre-religion, reformations of society and sociology, prophets, stories of creation, great floods and astronomy.

08/1/19

Mesopotamia – Sunshine Supermen

Chapter III – Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia has been home to some of the oldest major civilizations, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians. Grouped together they are known as the Chaldean. It began with the rise of the first cities in southern Mesopotamia around 7,300 years ago and ended with the Persian conquest around 2,500 years ago. The achievements of these early astronomers, especially the Persians, and later Islamic, which I will include in this chapter, though not being significant until the seventh century A.D., were extremely significant to astronomy.

Tablet Of Shamash / historyly.com

By about 2,500 years ago, the Sumerian civilization was firmly established in Mesopotamia, during the archaeological period of Uruk. These early Sumerians saw the night sky as a blackboard on which the gods left cryptic messages. Their priests began to seriously and systematically observe the stars and planet’s movements, with a form of writing, known as cuneiform, also emerging around this time. The Sumerians would only practise a basic form of astronomy, but they had an important influence on the sophisticated astronomy of the later Babylonians, when astral theologies would give planetary gods an important role in mythology and religion.

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06/30/19

Megaliths and Mounds – Sunshine Supermen

Adams Calendar, South Africa Realhistoryww
Adams Calendar, South Africa

Chapter II – Megaliths and Mounds

Megaliths are structures made of large stones by ancient cultures, without the use of any mortar or cement. As to not knowing what exactly their roles were, we can only surmise that they fulfilled both astronomical and religious functions, due to the astronomical significance of their alignments. In general, megaliths do not include structures built by developed and well expressed cultures like the Romans or Maya, and their pyramids, but rather the more ancient cultures.

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05/25/19

Sunshine Supermen

By Joseph Peters

Started in 2010 ended in 2019

Contents

  1. Prologue
  2. Megaliths & Mounds
  3. Mesopotamia
  4. Egyptians
  5. Chinese
  6. India
  7. Greeks
  8. Maya
  9. Inca
  10. Aztec
  11. Nicolaus Copernicus
  12. Johnnes Kepler
  13. Galileo Galilei
  14. Isaac Newton
  15. Albert Einstein
  16. Astrology
  17. Modern Astronomy
  18. Spacemen
  19. Sun / Summary

Chapter I – Prologue

Today, astronomy is known as the study of objects and matter outside the Earth’s atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties. It is one of the oldest sciences, if not the first. From the beginning of time, all living things have been affected by what goes on in the sky, and since humans have been on the planet, the sky, especially the night sky, has been the most awesome and most mysterious aspect of our lives, as well as the most overwhelming. The earliest human, would perhaps stand up on a rock, in the quiet of a clear night and stare up at the panorama of the sky and probably feel so very small, swimming amongst the stars. Dwarfed by the seemingly, endless and uncountable twinkles of light, whilst standing agape with eyes open wide and bottom lip hanging open, drooling upon oneself. Or we’d sit around our campfire and tell stories about the night skies and attempt to decipher them. Shooting stars would be talked about for days, while we may have danced with the Aureole-Aurora Borealis.

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02/7/13

The Age of Myth – Chapter Four

Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern man, began to move into Europe about 40,000 years ago, with the skeletal remains of one of its population, found in the cave Pestera Cu Oase, in Romania, and radiocarbon dated to 37,800 years ago. They had broken away from the main group of Homo sapien survivors of the eruption of Mt Toba, 30,000 years previous, who had come out of the Ethiopian highlands and had replaced survivors of the earlier species, Homo erectus, throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And though they had also made their way to Australia and the Far East, the majority of the Cro-Magnon population lived around the lakes of the Mediterranean basin, which was not a sea yet, North Africa, the Canary Islands, and the Eastern Mediterranean. They had become highly specialized hunters and gatherers and had developed speech, and soon, their own languages, while the environment of wherever they had ended up on the planet would dictate the race of human they would become, with random mutations in our DNA providing the basis of variation. Continue reading →

12/26/12

The Borborygmus that is Palestine – An Essay on Apartheid

Chapter 1

The first time, the area between what was Phoenicia (today – northern Lebanon and Syria), and Egypt to the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, was clearly called Palestine was by the Greeks in the

5th century BC. Though Palestine had always been there and has been called many other names. The region was among the earliest to see human habitation, animal domestication, agricultural communities and civilization.

The descendants of earlier peoples, such as the Kebarian culture, who lived in the area from about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, were the hunters and gatherers, the Natufian, who created an Eastern Mediterranean culture which would be the first to implement the concepts of agriculture; originally developed to feed their livestock, and the first cultivation of cereals, specifically rye. The Natufian dominance lasted from 14,500 to 11,500 years ago. One of its settlements, now called Jericho, is the oldest inhabited city in the world. It lies near the Jordan River in the West Bank.

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12/2/12

The Age of Myth – Chapter Three

In review, since discussing the development of language, speech and social progress waylaid the timeline of the evolution of humans somewhat, hundreds of thousands of years before such things as Homo sapiens, Homo erectus had gradually made their way up the Great Rift Valley and out of Africa. Around 400,000 years ago they would be joined by another group of humanoids slowly making their way out of Africa, Homo neanderthalensis, who instead of spreading out through the Middle East and Southeast Asia as Erectus had done, the Neanderthal would make their way their more northwards, in the direction of North Africa, Europe and central Asia. Continue reading →