How ancient is the constellation Delphinus?

It’s all very well saying that the cult of Apollo Delphinios is used the constellation Delphinus, but they could only do that if the constellation had been invented. How old is Delphinus.

The earliest description of Delphinus is in the Phaenomena, a poem describing the skies by Aratus of Soli. It dates from the third century BC, but other texts tell us it is a re-write of Phaenomena by Eudoxus. Unfortunately this is only a hundred years older. This still leaves a four hundred year year gap. Going back another hundred years, we know Delphinus is mentioned in the parapegma of Euctemon, of which more later. However this leaves us in the fifth-century BC and still three hundred years too short.

There have been a few attempts to place a date on the origin of the constellations. A recent innovative attempt was by Goran Henriksson and Mary Blomberg at Uppsala. They examined the Phaenomena and found it wasn’t very accurate. In fact it would be more accurate for the stars in the Bronze Age rather than the Classical period of Greece. If Aratus re-wrote the Phaenomena, then perhaps other Greeks did too. They used their archaeological work in Crete to argue for a Minoan origin for the Phaenomena, which would make the constellations at least four thousand years old.

This would be excellent news for me. Unfortunately I’m not convinced. There are statistical problems with their analysis*. There’s also the question that if this is an updated text, then how come Aratus’s version was still more accurate for the Bronze Age than the Classical period. It would seem generations of Greeks had done an awful job in updating the text. My own hunch is that in converting the Phaenomena into a poem some errors were introduced and, as the palaver over the Greek calendar shows, the Greeks were non to fussed about accuracy anyway. I would love Henriksson and Blomberg to be correct, but there’s still problems to solved.

Alexander Gurshtein has a different approach. He reasonably argued that big constellations came first as people carved out large areas of sky. Later constellations were smaller as they filled in the gaps. This would be a serious problem for me. Delphinus is one of the smallest constellations, which would make it very young. Fortunately Gurshtein’s idea also has problems. One is that he assumes that stars only belonged to one constellation. In fact constellations could often overlaps with some stars being in two or more constellations. This probably reflected different uses for different reason in antiquity. The killer is that using his method Argo Navis, the ship dated to 30,000 BC, or well before the invention of the ocean-going ship. It’s an excellent idea, but again as it stands it doesn’t work.

So can you date the origins of constellations. I think not, but that hasn’t stopped me trying. An idea I’d like to float is that as constellations grow older myths accrete around them. There are no myths for the modern southern hemisphere constellations because they were only invented a couple of hundred years ago. There’s no fixed rate for gathering myths, but generally older constellation should have more myths. This is interesting because according to Richard Hinckley Allen, Delphinus has a surprisingly large number of myths attached to it. This doesn’t firmly date Delphinus back to the eighth century, but I would argue it makes it more likely that not. It’s for to decide if this is reasonable, or how much more likely than not.

* You can say this about any theory that uses statistics that you don’t agree with, so it’s not necessarily a major problem. —–