So which constellation was it?

I’m having to write this up early, so a late flurry of votes on Slooh might change the final tally, but at the moment the results are:

Constellation	Votes Here	Votes @ Slooh	Total
Orion	4	5	9
Hercules	1	4	5
Bootes	2	0	2
Andromeda	0	1	1

This is interesting for me because I think it’s Hercules and the published identification is Bootes. I added the option of Orion as an afterthought because I thought it would be useful to see if people are bringing their own familiarity with constellations to interpretations.

To see why G.L. Huxley thinks it’s Bootes you need to turn the sherd upside down. If you do this then the scrawl in the middle becomes Arcturus. The pentagram on the right is eta Bootis and the pentagram on the left is zeta Bootis. Another reason the Huxley gives for this being Arcturus is that it’s the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and that there’s a Beta for Bootes on the sherd.

The Beta is backwards, which might be a problem, but probably not. This is a sherd from around 500 BC, which is at the early stages of literacy in the Greek world. At this stage there was no consensus about which way round the letters should go and Pithekoussai, the site where this sherd was found, did have a retrograde alphabet, so this matches nicely what we know about the culture. From an astronomical perspective it’s more difficult. Arcturus is the brightest star in the Northern celestial hemisphere. Unless you’re standing at the North Pole, you can see stars in the Southern celestial hemisphere too. Sirius is a brighter star and is visible from a long way north, and was certainly visible from Pithekoussai in this period, so why can’t the star be Sirius. In fact there’s no reason to assume that the stars on the sherd have to be in the northern celestial hemisphere. Merely that they should be visible from Pithekoussai. There’s also no reason to assume these have to be bright stars. Indeed if they were that would be very strange.

The reason it’s strange is because of the way amateur astronomers find their way around the sky. They star-hop. This is a way of going from the brightest stars and finding your way to fainter objects. No one would say: “You see that really faint star there, and that other one you can hardly see? Well if you see that really bright one half way between them, that’s Arcturus.”

I showed this to an astronomer in the i-Science department and the striking feature she saw the keystone shape. This is distinctive of Hercules. How would this relate to star-hopping?

The keystone of Hercules can be found by star-hopping. It’s between Vega and Arcturus, which are both very bright stars. In fact if you look closely you’ll see it’s closer to Vega than Arcturus, and this is reflected on the sherd with the Beta being roughly where Corona Borealis is.

If you can’t see the keystone shape, the Flickr photo page also has note highlighting it when you put your mouse over it.

There are reasons to get excited about this. This is because the Greeks didn’t have a constellation of Hercules. What they had was a constellation of the Kneeler or the Toiler, but they didn’t know who he was or what he was doing. If this was a Greek constellation then this would be a bizarre constellation to have. Other Greek constellations have a purpose, so why have a symbol of the unknown bloke?

The clue might be in these pentagrams. These are a Semitic symbol that gets adopted by the Greeks around this period and later. At this period not only were the Greeks in the western Mediterranean, so were the Carthaginians, who originally came from the Levant, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. They did have a myth for the constellation that was later known as Hercules. They named it after Melkart who may, people argue about this, have been a sea-god. The connection with the sea suggests a possible practical use and this would explain why the Greeks decided to keep this unknown constellation.

But it’s a leap. If you look at the sherd there’s the problem that this keystone is pointing in the wrong direction. Does that matter? If I say it doesn’t then am I ignoring evidence to fit my own pet theory. So this is why asking people for their opinion is a good idea.

What about Orion then?

I added Orion as an option as an afterthought. I’ve said elsewhere that I suspect people love to see Orion everywhere. I suppose you could say the two stars and the keystone are arranged in a bent line like Orion’s belt. This isn’t how the Greeks saw Orion though. They didn’t just see a belt, they saw a whole figure. I think the votes for Orion are reflections of the constellation’s recognisability. Lots of people know what Orion looks like. Fewer people know what Hercules looks like. But I could be wrong. I can’t say for certain that it isn’t Orion, but if we’re going to take Orion seriously then we have to take lots of other constellations seriously as options too.

As far as the experiment goes it hasn’t proved my pet theory but it has done the job I wanted. It shows that you can’t merely say “I think this looks like constellation X” and assume that’s an objective judgement. There clearly a lot more work that needs to be done on recognition of patterns. —–