In my recent attempt at a paper posted to academia.edu, I audaciously suggest that ancient Americans were aware of Saturn’s rings and capitalized on this knowledge in making symbolic representations of what the stars, planets, moon and sun were up to at a given point in time.
I deliberately tried to avoid getting into the subject of ancient optics in the course of the paper, but I may address it in some upcoming addendum to it.
Naturally, no one seems to be able to produce a Mayan telescope even if the Maya built at least two astronomical observatories including El Caracol at Chichen Itza that look like they could be near cousins to modern ones.
A little bit of unorthodox history of optics for readers who might be unaware of some of it:
“The Nimrud lens, also called Layard lens, is a 3000-year-old piece of rock crystal, which was unearthed in 1850 by Austen Henry Layard at the Assyrian palace of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. It may have been used as a magnifying glass, or as a burning-glass to start fires by concentrating sunlight, or it may have been a piece of decorative inlay.” Wikipedia: Nimrud Lens
The article continues, “Assyrian craftsmen made intricate engravings and could have used a magnifying lens in their work. The discoverer of the lens noted that he had found very small inscriptions on Assyrian artefacts which he suspected had been achieved with the aid of a lens.
Italian scientist Giovanni Pettinato of the University of Rome has proposed that the lens was used by the ancient Assyrians as part of a telescope and that this explains their knowledge of astronomy (see Babylonian astronomy). Experts on Assyrian archaeology are unconvinced, doubting that the optical quality of the lens is sufficient to be of much use. The ancient Assyrians saw the planet Saturn as a god surrounded by a ring of serpents, which Pettinato suggests was their interpretation of Saturn’s rings as seen through a telescope. Other experts say that serpents occur frequently in Assyrian mythology and note that there is no mention of a telescope in any of the many surviving Assyrian astronomical writings.
According to his book, Layard found the lens buried beneath other pieces of glass which looked like the enamel of an object, perhaps made of wood or ivory, which had disintegrated. The British Museum curator’s notes propose that the lens could have been used “as a piece of inlay, perhaps for furniture” and that there is no evidence that the Assyrians used lenses for their optical qualities, e.g. for magnification, telescopy or for starting fire.
A similar object was mentioned in The Epic of Ishtar and Izdubar, Column IV, Coronation of Izdubar, written about 2,000 BC. 10th stanza. It reads:
The King then rises, takes the sacred glass,
And holds it in the sun before the mass
Of waiting fuel on the altar piled.
The centring rays—the fuel glowing gild
With a round spot of fire and quickly. spring
Above the altar curling, while they sing!”
Already we seem to encounter scholarly reticence to give ancients the benefit of a doubt, resulting in what is probably a rather questionable declaration that ancient people discovered this fantastic item with magical properties and then restricted its use to decorate furniture inlays.
Of course ancient people were bright, learned, inquisitive, experimentative, imitative – everything they’d need to be for there to not only be more of these where this one came from, but also for their creators to know how to use them for their optical properties such as starting fires without rubbing sticks together, and gazing at the stars.
Realistically, within minutes of the first discovery of the optical properties of a lense, the idea for combining the optical properties of two lenses probably came along, much like we can imagine the discovery of the effects of one beer led to questions about what the effects of two beers were like.
Of course, another way to have a telescope might be to have a good reflector, and ancient Americans don’t seem to have been empty handed there. They made convex and concave mirrors from polished obsidian and pyrite.
John Dee is said to have owned an ancient American mirror (now said to be in the British Museum) which he allegedly used for “divinatory” purposes, but we can imagine he was probably quite intrigued with its optical properties.
It is variously stated by different sources that Dee created parabolic formulas for “burning mirrors” – concave mirrors capable of lighting fires – and even that such a “burning mirror” was tested on the seas for prospects of setting fire to enemy ships at a distance.
Wikipedia’s article on Mirrors in Mesoamerican Culture (a photo of John Dee’s Aztec mirror appears at upper right in the article)
“Early mirrors were fashioned from single pieces of iron ore, polished to produce a highly reflective surface. By the Classic period, mosaic mirrors were being produced from a variety of ores, allowing for the construction of larger mirrors. Mosaic pyrite mirrors were crafted across large parts of Mesoamerica in the Classic period, particularly at Teotihuacan and throughout the Maya region. Pyrite degrades with time to leave little more than a stain on the mirror back by the time it is excavated. This has led to the frequent misidentification of pyrite mirror backs as paint palettes, painted discs or pot lids. By the Postclassic period obsidian mirrors became increasingly common.”
Amid all the mystical mumbo-jumbo of most contemporary interpreters,
Mirrors were associated with fire in Mesoamerica, and representations of mirrors could take the form of flowers and be combined with representations of butterflies. Both butterflies and flowers were associated with fire in central Mexico from the Classic to Postclassic periods, with butterflies representing flames. The Olmecs of the Preclassic period fashioned concave mirrors that were capable of lighting fires…
Although hundreds of mirrors have been excavated in the Maya area, comparatively few mosaic mirrors have been recovered from lowland Maya sites. Large quantities of mirrors have been recovered from some highland sites, such as Kaminaljuyu and Nebaj in the Guatemalan Highlands. The high concentration of mirrors in a few highland sites probably indicates centres of production and distribution into the trade network. It is likely that they were manufactured in the highlands and then were traded as finished objects to the Maya lowlands…
In the Valley of Oaxaca, only San José Mogote has produced evidence of mirror production dating as far back as the Preclassic. Mirrors produced at San José Mogote were distributed to relatively distant places such as Etlatongo and the Olmec city of San Lorenzo. The mirrors from San José Mogote that were excavated at San Lorenzo have been dated to between 1000 and 750 BC. Towards the end of this period, mirror production at San José declined and halted altogether.
The incomplete slate back of the earliest known Maya mirror was excavated from Cahal Pech in Belize; it was dated to around 600 BC, in the Middle Preclassic.”
Here is an interesting curio:
Moctecuzoma (Montezuma or however scholars are spelling it this week) from the Florentine Codex (upper) and redrawn from probably Victor Von Hagen’s popular paperback on the Aztecs (lower). The captions tell us that Moctecuzoma was scrying in the mirror and had a vision that constituted the seventh prophetic sign of the end of the Aztec empire, but even the redrawn version shows us that what Moctecuzoma actually seems to be looking at in the mirror are stars.
Says HistoryCrunch,
“The seventh omen is related to a bird that was caught by a hunter on Lake Texcoco. The bird was gray in color and apparently had a black mirror-like object on its forehead. The hunters reported seeing the stars and the night sky in the mirror. They took it to the Aztec leader, Moctezuma II, and when he looked into the mirror he reportedly saw a large number of warriors riding on animals that appeared to be large deer. Moctezuma II then gave the bird to his high priests who were told to view the mirror and interpret its meaning. However, when the priests looked into the mirror they saw nothing and were unable to offered their advice to the Aztec leader.”
I don’t know what complicit role deer might play in the end of the Aztecs, but Mars is said to be sometimes symbolized by a deer in ancient American iconography, and I am beginning to sense a dreadful misinterpretation save for the part where the hunters saw the stars and the night sky in the mirror too.
I really haven’t made much effort to write a piece on the subject, but there is already more that might be included, including contentions that the great geoglyph spider design at Nazca, Peru shows not only a species-correct rendition of an often tiny genus of spider (Ricinulei, or tick spiders) found in the rain forests to the north of Peru, but that it shows anatomically correct detail about the usual features and traits of the species that cannot be seen with the unaided eye, i.e., without magnifying lenses.
I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that matter yet as my spider-measuring time is often limited, but readers may wish to be aware of this fascinating contention.
Of course, we probably shouldn’t leave out the ancient Greeks. While mighty Tikal’s stargazing days apparently had yet to even begin, the ancient Greeks demonstrated knowledge of advanced optics
Astronomy Trek informs us of the
According to Roman historian Pliny, glass-making was discovered accidentally by the Phoenicians around 5000 BC, while cooking on the desert sand. However, the earliest man-made glass objects were found later around 3500 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia, with lenses no doubt being made soon after the discovery.
The earliest known lens currently unearthed is the Nimrud lens (750 BC) found at the Assyrian palace of Nimrud in modern-day northern Iraq. It is believed to have been used as a magnifying glass, or as a burning-glass to start fires. Lenses were certainly well known by the time of the Greeks, with even the dramatist, Aristophanes, referring to them in his Comedy of the Clouds in 424 BC:
Strepsiades: “Have you ever seen a beautiful, transparent stone at the druggists’, with which you may kindle fire?”
Socrates: “You mean a crystal lens.”
Uses of these early lenses included starting fires and cauterizing wounds, although their magnifying properties would obviously have been known. However, in the 1st century AD we find the first written record of magnification with the Roman Seneca the Younger explaining:
‘Letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe or glass filled with water.’
Ancient Telescopes
The most powerful ancient lens yet discovered was found in Crete dating back to the 5th century BC and had the ability to magnify clearly up to seven times and even as much as twenty times, albeit with considerable distortion.
It has even been suggested that a piece of Greek pottery discovered dating back to 4th century BC depicts a man using an early telescope and that ancient people were able to connect two lenses inside a simple tube to make an early, crude telescope. However, making lenses and a telescope useful for astronomy purposes requires a level of expertise and precision probably undiscovered by the ancients, although it is good to keep an open mind on the subject.”
Once again, there are probably plenty more where these came from, and sooner or later the earliest dates will get pushed further and further back.
We expect no less from bright industrious ancestors who so demonstrably obsessed with astronomy and astronomical objects because “they thought the planets were gods” – well, they certainly the thought the planets were worth a good look at least, and just look at some of the tools they had at their disposal to carry out that all important edict.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 