Exploring the buildings created by our ancestors thousands of years ago often comes with surprising surprises. With their help, we can learn a lot about the culture, religion and technology of the ancients. Recently, a group of English researchers proposed a new look at stone dolmens with long corridors. In their opinion, the design of the tombs could be the prototype of a telescope and was needed for observing the stars.
Dolmens are amazing monuments of the past that are found all over Europe - from Britain to the Caucasus. They come in many different shapes and types. Small "houses" made of huge stone slabs; huge chambers carved into solid rock through a small entrance; long corridors with walls and roofs built of megaliths.
It was the latter that attracted the attention of a group of scientists from several universities in England. The joint work ended with the conclusion that the corridors of the tombs are nothing more than a kind of telescopes through which people of the Bronze Age observed the movement of celestial bodies.
Seven stone dolmen in central Portugal
Window for Aldebaran
The main object for study was the so-called Seven-stone dolmen tomb in central Portugal. Its age is estimated at six thousand years. Then the territory of the Iberian Peninsula was inhabited by tribes whose names are unknown. Generally, they are called the "culture of megaliths", since it was they who created the monuments on the territory of modern Spain and Portugal.
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Dolmens, similar to the Iberian ones, are found in Britain, throughout southern Europe and as far as Italy. And also in the Caucasus and North Africa. True, scientists have not yet been able to establish whether the dolmen builders came from Africa or, on the contrary, crossed over to Africa from the Iberian Peninsula.
The researchers noticed that if you stay inside the tomb for a long time, in the dark, then when you look outside the eye begins to distinguish more details in the night sky. This occurs due to isolation from other celestial bodies - especially the reflections of the setting or rising sun and the reflected light of the moon.
One of the leaders of the project, Kiran Simcox, admits: "We did not even suspect that until now no one paid attention to how the color of the night sky affects what can be seen on it."
In addition, as it turned out, the entrance of the tomb is designed in such a way that it allows you to observe a strictly defined area of the sky - where the star Aldebaran (alpha of the constellation Taurus) is located. This is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, it is often used as a reference point for amateur astronomical observations. The ancients might need it for more important things.
According to one version, rituals of communication with ancestors could take place inside the tomb. While there, the participants in the ceremony could see the stars in the sky before those who were outside. This could be perceived as a kind of sign, a signal from the dead.
Another assumption is the initiation rites that people undergo when their status changes. This can be associated with reaching a certain age (as a rule, with the age of majority) or with the acquisition of some important status (for example, with initiation into the priesthood). In this case, the initiate could be left in the tomb overnight - for vigil. And the star that appeared in the doorway “invited” him to go outside, signaling that he had passed the test.
Signal for the shepherds
The conclusions of scientists are confirmed by other monuments of megalithic culture. Moreover, some of them even look better suited for astronomical observations than the Seven Stone Dolmen. For example, another Portuguese dolmen, Orca de Santo Tisco, has a long sloping corridor covered with stone slabs in front of the entrance.
Dolmen Orca de Santo Tisco
This corridor acts as a kind of lensless telescope, focusing a person's vision on a specific, very small area of the sky. In this case, it becomes possible to discern even rather faint stars with the naked eye, since no disturbances interfere with vision. It turns out that all corridor tombs (and among dolmens they are distinguished as a separate type) may turn out to be such "stone telescopes".
At the same time, the versions as to why the ancients spent so much work on the construction of their "observatories" are not limited to religious and sacred issues. Dr. Fabio Silva of the University of Wales believes the link is more likely to be linked to seasonal grazing cycles.
In Portugal, herds are driven to graze in high-altitude pastures for the summer. The Bronze Age herders probably did the same. They may have noticed that the time to drive the cattle to summer pastures comes just when Aldebaran is visible in the sky. After all, in winter this star is not visible in the sky from the territory of Portugal.
“Aldebaran's first sunrise of the year 6,000 years ago occurred in late April or early May,” explains Silva. "Accordingly, it could be a good, very accurate calendar marker for people to know when it is time to send herds to the upper pastures."
To confirm their findings, the research team plans to conduct several experiments in the laboratory in the near future. Experiments should demonstrate how much better celestial objects are visible from a dark room at dusk.
Dolmen Orca de Santo Tisco
The sky above us
Scientists made a joint report on their research at the National Astronomical Meeting held at the University of Nottingham in the summer of 2016. Despite the fact that astronomers have received it with great interest, archaeologists so far are rather skeptical.
They indicate that the orientation of the tombs to certain stars could have been accidental. It is not so easy to prove the fact that dolmens were built, initially guided by celestial bodies, because we know very little about how such ancient cultures lived, which did not leave behind a written language.
“Any archaeologist will tell you that trying to get into the minds of the people who built these prehistoric monuments is an extremely difficult task,” said Marek Kukula, astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich.
“But in any case, this impressive study shows us that humanity has always admired the stars. And sky observations have played an important role in human society for millennia."
Nevertheless, some publications have already declared the work of British scientists as proof that astronomy was the oldest science in human history. Various studies on the knowledge of the ancients about celestial bodies and the impact of this knowledge on life appear every year. There is even a special term - "cultural astronomy". After all, the fact that people were staring at the stars cannot be questioned. And this obviously could not pass without a trace.
Kirill IVANOV