It’s nice but is it astronomical?

Joe at Oldschool recently pointed out a news report, also noted by Mary Harrsch on a claim about a building called Zoroaster’s Kaba in Iran. An Iranian archaeologist has rejected the theory describing the Achaemenid era monument Zoroaster’s Kaba as an ancient government archive, saying that the monument is the world’s most unique calendrical and astronomical building. Joe suggested that I could look at it in his post and having looked at what data there is I can conclusively with 100% authority say that without a doubt I haven’t the faintest idea if the claims are correct or not. I simply don’t know enough about the site, or the Achaemenid period of Persia in general to come to any conclusions.

What I can do is ask a few questions. First of all what is Zoroaster’s Kaba? Kaba is a term for cube and if you search for Cube Zoroaster on Google Images, you get just a couple of pictures. If you follow the link then, as you can see, it is a small square building in its own pit. It doesn’t look immediately astronomical to me, but it has windows, so who knows of they align on something important or not?

The next thing is to look at the claim. It’s said that: “At the end of Shahrivar (the sixth month of the Iranian calendar, August 23-September 22) we can determine exactly the day of the month by the light shed by the sun on Zoroaster’s Kaba.” So now I need to learn about the Zoroastrian calendar. Straight away I’m sceptical because a lot of early calendars are lunar. If the Zoroastrian calendar was lunar then there’s no way the alignment could fit exactly onto one specific day. Looking on the Wikipedia it gets interesting. “Persians have always been keen on the idea and importance of calendar system throughout their recorded history. They were among the first cultures to employ a solar calendar, and have long favored a solar approach rather than lunar models. In general, the sun has always, even to this day, had a special meaning and great symbolic significance in the Iranian culture.” not only that but the entry adds, “The Iranian calendar is a more accurate approximation than the Gregorian calendar, but has a more complicated leap year rule.”. This confirms that the ancient Persians did have a desire for high accuracy. It also answers my next question.

Why?

It’s easy to come up with astronomical alignments, it’s harder to say why anyone should care. My front door faces sunrise on the equinoxes. Is that the result of a secret cabal of ancient Egyptian builders making my house a clandestine temple to Horus? Or is it just co-incidence that the road I live on runs north-south? I’d need to read more, but it does seem reasonable that the Sun would have had a strong symbolic influence in ancient Persia.

I’d still like to know why the end of Shahrivar was so important though? Was this where an extra day might be put in in a leap year? It it the trigger for an important solar festival? I don’t know. If I were reading a paper on it then I’d like to be told.

If there was an obvious reason to align on the Sun, then it would also solve the next problem. The date September 22 is an odd one. It’s pretty much what you’d expect for an equinoctial alignment, because the Spring equinox sun would also rise over more or less the same area of the horizon. The direction would be near east, though this might vary if the horizon to the east is hilly.

Looking back at the picture, the building is a square box. If two sides are aligned east-west, then the other two have to be aligned north-south. Could this be a cardinal orientation using the north celestial pole to define the four major directions? Again I don’t know enough to tell. If there is a strong interest in the Sun, then the solar alignment is more likely to be intentional than a stellar alignment, but it would be nice to have a few similar buildings in different types of landscape. If they all face the cardinal points, you’d suspect a cardinal orientation. If the east-west alignment to the September 22 sunrise is the important feature, then the orientation will twist when the building doesn’t face a flat horizon.

If it is aligned to the sunrise on this specific day, it would still be likely to be used on the other 364 days of the year, so one use shouldn’t automatically rule out others. So all in all I couldn’t say that it’s one thing or another. —–