The Song of Urania

We turn to the astronomy of Mesoamerica, with a particular focus on the Maya and Aztec. The central feature of their astronomy was a pair of interlocking calendars which regulated all aspects of life…

The most important application of astronomy in Polynesian societies was oceanic navigation. Polynesian navigators regularly traversed from one small island to another across hundreds of miles of open…

Aboriginal Australian societies are believed to be among the oldest continuous cultures on the planet. Some of their oral traditions appear to preserve a cultural memory of celestial events from mult…

In his second attempt, Matteo Ricci was able to gain access to the Forbidden City. Over the next century, the Jesuits came to surprising influence in China through their knowledge of European astrono…

After the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty drove the few small Nestorian Christian communities in China underground and largely closed China off to foreigners. Only in the 16th cent…

After Wang Mang had usurped the Imperial throne, a disastrous series of reforms led to the collapse of his dynasty. The reestablishment of the Han Dynasty called for yet another calendar reform. Abou…

After Wang Mang deposed the Han Dynasty and instituted his new Xin Dynasty, he needed to promulgate a new calendar to mark the occasion. One of his court astronomers, Liu Xin, developed a new calenda…

We learn about the political events and omens that led to the calendar reform of 104 BC.

We turn to the ways that the Chinese Emperor's astronomers predicted and interpreted eclipses, as well as the so-called "guest stars" that they occasionally reported observing in the skies. Then we d…

This month we turn to the astronomy of China in the early Imperial Era. We look at the way that the Emperor's astronomers were organized within the imperial bureaucracy and then walk through the thre…

We start to explore the relationship between the heavens and the Earth in Ancient China, along with the role of astronomers. One of the most important concepts in Chinese political thought to emerge …

In our final episode on ancient Indian astronomy, we tour the five astronomical Siddhantas, and then meet some of the astronomers whose names and works survive to us, most importantly, the great Arya…

We delve into the contents of the Vedanga Jyotisha, the earliest Indian text to deal explicitly with astronomy. Then we turn to early Hindu cosmology and their explanations for various celestial phen…

India developed one of the most advanced astronomies of any of the ancient cultures, even rivaling European astronomy in its accuracy by the 18th century. We look at how the geography of India influe…

We take a break from the main narrative in honor of this month's blue moon and turn to a somewhat more frivolous topic — how the term "blue moon" came to mean the second full moon in a calendar month…

This month we tour the astronomers of ancient Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the last native Pharaoh of Egypt just prior to Alexander's conquest. We look at how astronomers fulfilled their primary res…

Before getting back into Egyptian astronomy proper, we start by looking at Nabta Playa, a site of megalithic activity in the Nubian desert during the late neolithic. Then we turn to the megaliths the…

We turn to ancient Egypt, one of the oldest and most beguiling of the ancient civilizations. Egypt is particularly notable for the sheer conservatism of its civilization and changed little in more th…

The oldest plausible astronomical artifacts known are African, as are many of the oldest megaliths, around 10,000 of which dot the Sahara and whose orientations are astronomical in character. We then…

We turn the clock back to the astronomy of the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Clues about humanity's interest in the heavens during the Paleolithic can be seen in linguistic, mythological, and archaeolo…