How Stargazing Connects Every Culture in History

Author: Erin - Little Star Shop

Stargazing is one of the few experiences that every single culture throughout history has shared. However, the stories we tell about these same stars differs significantly throughout history. 

Stargazing might be the most universal thing we humans do. Every single culture has done it, in every era of the past. The stories we’ve told about the stars are wildly different, but that feeling of looking up? That’s the same everywhere. 

Carl Sagan's famous pale blue dot quoted:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there in a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam". We all look to the stars for meaning, and have done so for all civilisation trying to make sense of our own existence. 

The Sky Was the First Calendar

Before the invention of clocks and maps, the sky told people where they were in time. A certain star rising meant it was time to plant. The Moon’s phases helped people to count out the months. And when the Sun’s path started sliding lower, you knew winter was on its way.

In ancient Egypt, the star Sirius reappearing in the dawn sky meant the Nile was about to flood, which is what made life in the desert possible at all. In Mesopotamia, Babylonian astronomers documented their records of planets and eclipses into clay tablets, some of the earliest observations of their kind. Understanding the sky to them was crucial to survival. 

Stone Circles and Solstice Sunrises

Long before anyone wrote about astronomy, people were building it out of stone.

Newgrange: Ireland (Source: Amazing Ireland)

In Ireland, the passage tomb at Newgrange is more than 5,000 years old, which makes it older than both Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. Once a year, around the winter solstice, the rising Sun shines through a narrow opening above the entrance and lights up the inner chamber. Whoever built it knew exactly where the Sun would be on the shortest day of the year.

Stonehenge in England followed, with construction beginning around 5,000 years ago. Its famous stones frame the solstice sunrise and sunset, and thousands of people still gather there at the solstice to watch. Further east, the Goseck Circle in Germany is often described as one of the oldest known solar observatories, built roughly 7,000 years ago. And across the Atlantic, the Maya pyramid El Castillo at Chichén Itzá is said to have been designed so that, at the spring and autumn equinoxes, shadows ripple down its staircase like a descending snake. Even older is Göbekli Tepe in Southeastern Turkey, where huge carved stone pillars were raised around 11,000 years ago, thousands of years before Stonehenge. Nobody knows for certain what it was used for, but some researchers believe they represent some of the earliest sky-watching we know of. 

Gosek Circle: Germany

The Emu in the Sky

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the sky has been a living library for the past 65,000 years. Many First Nations peoples of Australia read stories in the dark patches of the Milky Way as well as in the bright stars. The best known is the Emu in the Sky, a giant emu stretched across the galaxy, drawn from dust lanes rather than starlight, with the Coalsack Nebula as its head.

As the emu shifts through the year, it tells people what’s happening on the ground, like when emus are laying and when it’s time to collect eggs. The Emu is just one story among many. Hundreds of distinct Aboriginal nations, often cited as more than 500 individual tribes, each have their own star stories, and those stories usually reflect the land people live on. Communities near the coast tell of sea creatures and scenes written across the sky, while those in the desert tell of land animals and the country around them. These traditions are some of the oldest continuous knowledge systems on Earth, carried forward in song, ceremony and story. 

Constellations

Most of the constellations we learn at school come from ancient Greece and Rome, where the night sky turned into a gallery of myths. There are 88 official constellations recognised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), 48 of which trace back to ancient Greek traditions catalogued by the astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd Century. Another 40 modern additions reflect the changing world. Instead of gods and monsters, they are often depicted after scientific instruments, exotic animals, or new discoveries.

Over in China, two bright stars, Vega and Altair, became the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, lovers kept apart by the river of the Milky Way and allowed to meet just once a year. People still celebrate the story at the Qixi Festival, sometimes called Chinese Valentine’s Day.

In the Andes, the Inca paid as much attention to the darkness between the stars as to the stars themselves, spotting a llama and a fox in the Milky Way’s dark clouds. The Maya built observatories and tracked Venus with astonishing accuracy. And in the medieval Islamic world, scholars refined the astrolabe, built on Greek astronomy and gave us star names we still use today, like Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Altair.

Astronomy In The Ancient World

In the 2nd century BCE, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus is credited with compiling one of the first star catalogues and with ranking stars by brightness, an idea that evolved into the magnitude scale astronomers still use. Around 150 CE, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, which gathered 48 constellations still used today.

Then there’s the Antikythera mechanism, a corroded bronze device pulled from a shipwreck in 1901. It dates to roughly the 2nd or 1st century BCE, and researchers have found that it modelled the movements of the Sun and Moon, and could aslo predict eclipses. It’s often called the world’s first analogue computer.

Chinese court astronomers, meanwhile, kept some of the longest unbroken sky records anywhere. Early sightings of what we now call Halley’s Comet go back to 240 BCE. In 1054 CE, they noted a brilliant “guest star” that appeared in the constellation we call Taurus. We now know it was a supernova, and its remains are the Crab Nebula, which you can still see through a telescope today.

Stories from Africa and the Americas

Some of the oldest sky-watching sites on Earth come from Nabta Playa, in the Egyptian Sahara, where cattle herders set up a circle of standing stones around 7,000 years ago. Some researchers believe it lined up with the summer solstice and certain stars. 

In many southern African traditions, the Milky Way is called the backbone of the night, a great spine holding the darkness together. Across the region, people have also used the stars to mark the seasons.

In North America, the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon built structures that followed the Sun and Moon. Meanwhile, in the Arctic, Inuit communities have long navigated across ice and tundra by the stars, through the polar night.

Observatories That Changed How We See

Cheomseongdae- South Korea

As societies grew, so did the buildings they made for watching the sky.

Gyeongju, Korea: Cheomseongdae, built in the 7th century, is often called one of the oldest surviving observatories in East Asia. In 1395, Korean astronomers carved a detailed star map into stone.

Samarkand, Uzbekistan: In the 1420s, the ruler and astronomer Ulugh Beg built an enormous observatory. His star catalogue was trusted for generations.

Jaipur, India: In the 1720s and 30s, Maharaja Jai Singh II built Jantar Mantar, a collection of giant stone instruments for tracking time, stars and planets. The great sundial still works.

The Sky Gets Rewritten

Tycho Brahe

For over a thousand years, most of Europe believed the Sun, Moon and planets circled a stationary Earth. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his case for the opposite: the Earth moves around the Sun, with his heliocentric model. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe then spent decades measuring the positions of stars and planets with unmatched precision, all by eye, before the telescope. His assistant Johannes Kepler used that data to show that planets travel in ellipses rather than perfect circles, a discovery he published in 1609. In 1687, Isaac Newton explained why with his law of gravity, tying the heavens and the Earth together in one set of rules, outlined in his publication Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

In 1781, the musician-turned-astronomer William Herschel spotted a new planet, Uranus, using a homemade telescope. It was the first planet found in modern times, and the discovery made him famous overnight.

Into the Space Age

Sputnik 1: NASA

In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the fuzzy patch we call Andromeda is actually another galaxy, far beyond our own. Overnight, the universe got unimaginably bigger.

Then we left the ground. The Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 launched in 1957, and in July 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the Moon while an estimated half a billion people watched on television. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope began sending back images from above the atmosphere, and in 2021 the James Webb Space Telescope launched to look even deeper into space and time.

It’s astonishing how far we’ve come. 

The Seven Sisters

Pleaides Star Cluster

The Pleaides star cluster is proof that stargazing is something we all share. Look at the Pleiades. This star cluster is visible to the naked eye almost everywhere on Earth, and just about every culture has noticed it.

The Greeks saw seven sisters. In Japan it’s known as Subaru (yes, the car company took its name from it, and its logo shows the stars). For the Māori it’s Matariki, whose rising marks the New Year, a time to remember those who’ve passed, celebrate the present and plan ahead. Seven-sister stories turn up in many cultures, including some Aboriginal Australian traditions with their own versions of the tale, shared across huge distances.

Look Up Tonight

Every culture on Earth has looked up and asked the same things. Where did we come from? What does it all mean? Is anyone else out there looking?

The questions never change, and we all share them, no matter what time we live in. So tonight, step outside, look up and join the longest conversation in human history.