A Reconsideration Maybe

  Two days to go eh? I'm wondering if I should get some beer in for over the holidays.

   
  Now just in case I am wrong about the Mayan calendar thing here is something I found online.

  Here is what  Sonchis an elderly Egyptian priest had to say to Solon the great Athenian lawgiver concerning the myth of Phaethon who stole his father's Sun Chariot ,lost control of it and set fire to the Earth
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   There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because  he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt - that story, as it is told, has a fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals." "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is no such thing as an old Greek ... You possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age.""You remember only one deluge, though there have been many ... You and your fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that remained, but you know nothing about it because so many succeeding generations left no record in writing."

    Something that I have been intrigued by is what caused ancient civilizations in Egypt,Sumeria,Meso-America and  Harappan in northern India to build tall stepped pyramids to facilitate the study of the heavens,not all the heavens just the planets nearby.Another question was why the unusual study of and preoccupation with the precession of the equinoxes by these ancient peoples.
     I wonder if the reason for this preoccupation is that in the ancient past the records spoke of a 360 day year  that suddenly changed to a 365 day year .Interestingly the Mayans kept two calendars,one of 360 days and one of 365 days.The Mayans considered the five extra days to be very unlucky ones.
   Beside the Mayans, Egypt,Assyria,Babylonia and Persia all had calendars at one time of a year having 360 days.Assyria for one in the 7th century BCE changed to a 365 day calendar when their astrologers suddenly found that the old calendar didn't match up with the seasons.

  So did the ancients watch the sky in a quest for knowledge or out of fear? Something else,other ancient civilizations beside Egypt believed as the Mayans did that mankind had been destroyed, except for a remanent, many times by a world wide cataclysm.












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