Alice C. Linsley
with self-proclaimed atheists, I was told that theology and religion emerged because people who lived before the time of science needed to explain natural phenomena; the implication being that we no longer need religion now that we have science. I attempted to explain that the earliest developments in science and technology were motivated by religious concerns, but they were not interested. Their minds were closed and reasoning with them proved a waste of time.
As the Romanian sociologist Mircea
Eliade has shown, people of antiquity believed that things on earth are
patterned after things in the heavens. Eliade called these “celestial
archetypes.” The notion “as in the heavens, so on earth” is common among tribal
peoples. Their rituals and ceremonies mirror the celestial patterns which they
observe in the clock-like motion of the fixed stars and constellations. Among
archaic peoples, these observations were done by a caste of ruler-priests who
served at advisers to the early kingdom builders.
It was a risky business because there were serious
consequences if their calculations were wrong. If the ceremony was not
performed on exactly the right day, the advisers could be blamed for violating
a celestial pattern. If war broke out, or the crops failed, or there was a
flood, the ruler’s advisers were blamed. This happened to Chinese astronomers
who failed to predict the solar eclipse of 2134 BC. The emperor ordered that
they all be executed.
The threat of punishment, even death, motivated the king’s
advisers to be as accurate as possible in their calculations. This led to the
development of sidereal astronomy. The sidereal
day (four minutes longer than the solar day) is the time required for the earth’s
rotation to be synchronized with fixed stars. Solar time is the measurement of
time according to the earth’s rotation around the sun, but sidereal time is the
measurement relative to a distant star. It is used in astronomy to predict when
a star will be overhead.
When making ethical decisions, especially decisions that pertained to the
timing of important events such as royal weddings and the signing of treaties,
ancient peoples relied on observations of the stars and constellations which
move in a fixed pattern. Sidereal
astronomy is based on the actual location of stars and constellations, unlike
popular astrology which is based on culturally relative symbolism associated
with stars and constellations. Sidereal astronomy developed out of an ethical
concern to uphold the celestial pattern believed to have been established by
the Creator in the beginning.
This worldview is alien to modern Americans and regarded as superstition by atheists. Yet the acute observation of ancient peoples gave birth to technologies such as metal and stonework and to the development of sciences such as horticulture, animal husbandry, s
idereal astronomy, and medicine.
Let us consider but a few examples.
Horticulture
The ancestors of the Nes craftsmen of Anatolian sites like Gobleki Tepe cultivated both einkorn and emmer wheats about 12,000 years ago, according to genetics and archaeological studies. African rice was domesticated from the wild ancestor Oryza barthii (
Oryza brevilugata) by peoples living in the Benue-Niger floodplain about 3,000 years ago. Rice grain formed the basis of weight measurement from East Africa to Sulawesi. In Madagascar, the weight of one grain of rice is called
vary which corresponds to the Swahili
wari and to the Dravidian
verasu. The common stem of these words indicates that these people kept written records of commercial weights.
The ancients observed that the seeds of plants that fall to the ground produce plants of the same kind. It was logical to assume that the seed that should fall to the earth is the seed of plants, which spring forth from the earth. Likewise, the seed of man should fall on his own type (the womb), from which man comes forth. This was regarded as the divine order in creation. Therefore, the ancients regarded both onanism (spilling of human semen) and homosex to be in violation of the established order. This is the ancient wisdom that based moral law on observed patterns in nature.
Animal Husbandry
Cattle were domesticated in what is today Kenya 15,000 years ago. The common term for cattle or cow in the many African languages is nag (Wolog, Fulani), nagge (Hausa), ning (Angas, Ankwe) and ninge (Susu). This corresponds to the Egyptian word ng or nag.
Cattle bones were found in graves of the elite classes at
Hierakonpolis (Nekhen in Sudan) and cow skulls were used to mark the pan graves of the ancient Saharans. The oldest evidence of domestication of wild pigs is found at Nekhen, Maadi,
Abydos, and Armant, near graves belonging to the poorer classes, indicating that the diet of the lower classes included pork. Cows were also domesticated by the Nilo-Saharans, who even took them on their boats (see second image below).
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| Boats and cows of the ancient Nilo-Saharans |
Sidereal Astronomy
Medicine
The
Edwin Smith papyrus is the world's oldest known surgical document (c. 1600 BC). It is written in the hieratic script of ancient Egypt and Kush and reveals a high level of sophistication in medical care. It gives detailed descriptions of anatomy, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of forty-eight types of medical problems. It describes closing wounds with sutures, preventing and curing infection with honey and moldy bread (both known to contain antibiotics), application of raw meat to stop bleeding, and treatment of head and spinal cord injuries. The
Nubians also used antibiotics. Between 350 and 550 AD Nubians laced their beer with tetracycline.
The great prehistoric monoliths and circles of standing stones attest to the skill of the early architects and stone masons.
