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| ISBN-13: | 9781490765082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trafford Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 126 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Nature's Twelve
Corners of the Earth
By Louis Komzsik
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Louis KomzsikAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-6506-8
CHAPTER 1
Twelves of time
Human preference for and preoccupation with the number twelve dates back millennia. While there are many competing hypotheses about the origin of this, the most plausible of them is clearly in astronomy. Ancient human societies observed the cycles of the Moon that were very visible on the short term, and also the cycles of the Sun on the longer term. They soon arrived at the conclusion that roughly twelve of the short term cycles constitute one of the longer term. Since those cycles were very important in the lives of humans, the particular number associated with them also became very important.
Many millennia ago Chinese astronomers (well, people looking at the skies whatever their official name was at that time) already created a yearly calendar in twelve parts. They also realized that it did not exactly match the yearly cycle and occasionally an additional short period (let's use our modern term, month) was added to catch up with the annual cycle. They were also aware of an even bigger cycle related to the precession that led them to another use of twelve as we will see shortly.
About the same time, the ancient Babylonians also recognized that the year consists of twelve lunar months. Their long term observation led to the recognition of a more accurate duration of the lunar month being about 29.5 days. They noticed that 19 solar years is exactly 235 lunar months, that is 19 lunar years plus 7 lunar months (19 x 12 + 7 = 235). Hence they could live with a lunar calendar with twelve months for 19 years and then add 7 lunar months to get back in synchrony with the Sun.
That would have made for a prolonged discrepancy with the solar activities. Therefore, in a solution similar to our current leap years, they added an extra month at the end of the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 16th and 19th year of the 19 year cycle. This smart solution resulted in a calendar that was never more than 20 days out of synchrony with the solar cycle. In any case, the fact that their fundamental number was also twelve is relevant to our story.
Some other cultures, notably the Romans, were not as quick to establish their twelve-based calendar. The ancient Roman calendar, per anecdotal evidence established by Romulus, the founder of Rome, had only ten months originally. The names of the ten months were: Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December.
It is noticeable that some months follow the Latin name of their numeral order, while some do not. Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December verbatim mean the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and the 10th months. The other months were named after gods and goddesses. Martius was named for the god of war, Mars, Maius and Iunius were for Roman goddesses. Aprilis was designated to honor Aphrodite, the Greek version of Venus, the goddess of beauty.
The ten month long calendar with 29 or 30 day long months was extremely short, less than 300 days. One of the Roman rulers in the 7th or 8th century BC attempted to adhere to the lunar cycles by adding two additional months, Ianuarius and Februarius, to the end of the year and the calendar became 355 days long. It was still short, hence Julius Caesar in 46 BC added several days, as well as moved Ianuarius and Februarius to the beginning of the year, where we have them now. Ultimately in all classic cultures, twelve became the basis of human timekeeping.
There was, however, another celestial occurrence of twelve, related to the aforementioned precession. The precession phenomenon is due to the fact that the axis of Earth is not perpendicular to the plane in which Earth is rotating around the Sun. This misalignment of the axis means that the Earth in its yearly cycle does not return to the same position with respect to the sky. In fact it takes twelve times 2,160, or 25,920 years to complete this humongous cycle, also known as celestial great year. We are part of an even larger cycle, the 230 million year cycle of our solar system around the whole Milky Way which we will omit here.
Looking into the Milky Way ancient human observers recognized that the Sun is traveling around the distant objects in the sky in a repeatable manner. Hence they designated twelve equal sections of the sky with a notable star or constellation in each sector, the famed Zodiac. Those stars were so far that their movement was barely detectable, hence were considered fixed. The name's origin is based on the Greek words for animal circle because many of the dominant constellations in each sector were associated with an animal. The twelve names were the Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Maiden, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water-bearer and the Fish. There are depictions of them by the Egyptians as early as 3000 BC. Due to the precession, the signs of Zodiac have been shifted since that time and people born in the Aries sign are actually born in the Taurus section.
Ancient Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all had their own names and philosophies related to the Zodiac. Incidentally, most of them associated the same animal with the same constellation. For example, the Bull (constellation Taurus) appears in the ancient mythologies ranging from India though Babylonia and even Europe. The philosophical underpinning everywhere was the Bull being the symbol of strength. We will not explore further the tremendous amount of beliefs, influence and conceptual interpretation of the Zodiac. Suffice to state that twelve is its fundamental number.
After the universal twelve of the Zodiac and the global twelve of the year, it is reasonable to seek it on a smaller scale. That is, of course, the day. The Babylonians may have developed their twelve hour days because they had a base 60 system of arithmetic and that is well divisible by 12. They certainly recognized the fact that the length of the day varied in the big yearly cycle, so their measurements may have been rather loosely interpreted.
The Egyptians also used a twelve hour day according to archaeological records and the prevailing theory about their arrival at it is based on finger counting. Since each finger (not counting the thumb) has 3 phalanges, it was natural to count the hours by those. So goes the theory. However, they were also acute observers of the night sky and another historical explanation is that Egyptians first divided the night into twelve periods. That was based on the observation that during the summer nights, between sunset and sunrise, ten so-called decan stars rose in approximately hourly intervals over Egypt. This, with one extra hour for the two twilight periods resulted in twelve. There are also archaeological records of sundials (for day-time) and water clocks (for night time) with twelve notches.
Then there is the story about a pharaoic advisor named Thedontus who supposedly had a birth defect of having extra fingers on his hands, called polydactyly. He proposed to divide the day and night accordingly into twelve segments. Whether this has any historical foundation is unclear, but in any case, from the phalanges of a finger to extra fingers, we now have several possibilities to explain the smallest twelve based scale of humankind: hours.
The Romans also divided the day into 12 hours although their counting was sort of backwards. They counted the morning hours with respect to the high noon (meridian). For them 5 ante meridiem meant 7 in the morning in our current usage. We did inherit, however, their reference notation with AM (ante meridiem) and PM (post meridiem), albeit 5 AM is now two hours earlier than in Roman times.
In any case, most clocks nowadays have an analog face divided into 12 hours with one arm rotating around twice a day, another arm two time twelve times a day and a third arm two time twelve time 60 times a day. This brings the related question: why did we not end up with subdividing a circle into 12 segments in the geometrical sense?
This is likely due to the Babylonians' sexasegimal (base 60) system. While the Zodiac was adequately subdivided into 12 segments, for precise geometric activity in the circle, a famous pastime of Greek geometers, one needed a more detailed discretization. Eratosthenes, the Greek astronomer living in Alexandria, a Greek territory at the time, in the 3rd century BC, divided the circle into 60 partitions. He did so in order to aid his calculations to determine the radius of Earth, and he created the first systematic method of presenting the Earth by geometrical means: he invented the latitude and longitudinal lines of the Earth.
Eratosthenes' latitude lines were not equally spaced though. They ran through some known places at the time, such as Alexandria, the place that helped him make an astonishingly accurate measurement of the radius of the Earth, but that is another story. His center of the Earth fittingly was in Alexandria and he placed both a longitude (meridian) and a latitude (parallel) line through it. The next meridians to the west were one at Carthage and another one at the Pillars of Hercules, a hero in our next chapter, which was the ancient name of the Straits of Gibraltar. The second and third meridians to the east of Alexandria were placed at the Indus and the Ganges, whose presence he was well aware of.
Eratosthenes' map, shown above, is worthy of deeper investigation as it reflects the known Earth around 200 BC. Notice his knowledge about the main waterways, Nile, Danube, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Ganges, that are all shown with their modern names recognizable. The Mediterranean coast was rather accurate and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Red Sea and Persian Gulf were also correctly placed. The British Isles were also well defined, but otherwise the continental boundaries were rather approximate.
A half a century or so later, his countryman, Hipparchus, upped him by subdividing each segment of Eratosthenes into six sub segments and generalized the longitude lines to be equidistant rather than connected with specifically chosen and known places. Our most commonly recognized image of the net over the Earth had been finalized more than two millennia ago. In the last chapter we will revisit this topic by applying some twist to it and contorting our Earth into the shape of having corners.
The location of the prime meridian has a history of its own. Ptolemy also produced a world map in his 1st century AD work where he assigned the prime meridian to the area of today's Canary Islands. While he used 180 degrees in both directions in longitude as we do it today, he measured the latitudes in hours upwards from the Equator.
Even Mercator, the 16th century Flemish cartographer, whose projection is still used in today's maps of the globe, used a different prime meridian through the Cape Verde Islands also off the African coast. Ultimately, the zero meridian became the meridian going through Greenwich in the United Kingdom and the location of zero Universal Time.
The different hour long time zones around the world are designated in reference to this as either negative offsets, meaning behind the universal time, or positive offsets for time zones ahead of it. There are some minor deviations from this system to accommodate political entities wider than a zone by locally modifying the straight zone boundaries, but by and large our time measurement around the globe is based on twelve, justifying the title of this chapter.
Before we conclude this chapter we also have to acknowledge that twelve's astronomical emergence and consequent use in our time measurements is somewhat serendipitous. The Moon becomes more distant from Earth by about 4 centimeters, or about an inch and a half, every year. That is only about 8 ten thousandth of a billionth of the considerable 240,000 miles between us, but precipitates a dire future of losing our Moon in a few billion years.
At the same time the rotation of Earth slows by one and a half millionth of a second each year, even today. Had we started to do such observations 600 million years earlier we would have found that Earth's day was about 21 hours. The perilous rotational dance between our Moon and Earth was different and the number of times the lunar cycle repeated itself in the solar cycle would have been closer to 13.
Hence it appears that twelve might be an accidental number, but even if that is so, it does not eliminate the fact that it is now a part of life, ours and the gods as well.
CHAPTER 2Gods of twelve
Having established the likely reasons for distinguishing twelve, let us see how we folded it into our belief system. We must start with the most well known, the ancient Greek mythology. The story starts with the Titans, who were notably twelve. The Titans were the children of the Earth and the Sky, named Gaia (the female) and Uranus (the male).
They were six males, Kronos, Krios, Koios, Hyperion, Oceanus and Iapetos. They were the fathers of the time, the heavens, the intelligence, the light (of the Sun and Moon), the water (of the oceans), respectively. Iapetos was, simply but most importantly, the father of Atlas, who held Earth on his shoulders, and Prometheus, who brought fire to humans and was punished by a vulture gnawing at his liver for eternity.
The six female Titans where Rhea (wife of Kronos), Thea (the wife of Hyperion and hence the mother of the Sun and Moon), Thetys (wife of Oceanus and the mother of the oceans), Phoebe the Titan of the Moon, Mnemosyne, the Titan of memory, and Themys, the Titan of justice.
These twelve have a certain extraterrestrial connection, being the fathers and mothers of components of our solar system. There is also a strong philosophical underpinning of human evolution in heralding intelligence, memory and justice.
But their story turned sour soon. The oldest of them was Kronos who ultimately took power by killing his father, Uranus, a scenario often repeated in mythology. He fathered the gods of Olympus with Rhea. However, he proceeded to eat them after they were born because he was afraid of history repeating itself and his children overtaking him. After Zeus was born, Rhea tricked Kronos into swallowing a rock wrapped in baby blankets instead of Zeus.
When Zeus grew up he did turn against his father. Using a magic potion created by his grandmother Gaia, he forced Kronos to vomit up his brothers and sisters. After that he started the War of the Titans, and gaining victory, he banished the Titans to the underworld. Since Atlas was fighting alongside his father, the Titan Iapetos, he was punished by Zeus to hold Earth on his shoulder, for eternity.
Zeus married his sister Hera and they sit atop Mount Olympus along with the other ten of the twelve gods: Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hermes, Hephaestus and Dionysus. Poseidon ruled the seas, Athena was the goddess of wisdom and Apollo the god of arts. Ares was the god of war and Artemis the goddess of hunting. The goddess of beauty was Aphrodite, Demeter the goddess of fertility, Hermes was the messenger and Hephaestus the blacksmith of the gods. Finally, Dionysus was the god of wine and good times.
There were some additional deities, called demigods, such as Heracles and Hades, but not included in the twelve. These two share a notable twelve related relationship worthy of mention: Heracles' so-called twelve labours. According to the myth, Heracles in his madness killed his wife and his six sons (another common occurrence in Greek mythology). His penance for this, ordered by the Oracle of Delphi, was to serve King Eurystheus for twelve years who assigned twelve difficult tasks to him. These are known as Hercules' twelve labors after the Roman name of Heracles.
His tasks were related to a collection of mythical beasts or valuable rare animals, either to kill them or to capture them and bring them back to King Eurystheus. Heracles had to kill the man-eating Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, a water serpent with nine heads and the Erymanthean Boar, an aggressive wild pig. He also had to capture the Hind of Ceryneia, a deer with golden horns and bronze hoofs, the Cretan Bull, given by Poseidon to King Minos to sacrifice but who let it free, and capture the man-eating Horses of the King Diomedes.
Heracles also had some mundane tasks, such as of cleaning up King Augeas' Stables occupied by thousands of cows, goats and sheep, and driving away the Stymphalian Birds, mythical species that supposedly ate humans. Then he had to bring back the Belt of Hippolyte, the Queen of the Amazon women, who got it from Ares, the god of war, the red colored Cattle of the monster Geryon with three heads and pairs of legs, and the golden Apples of the nymphs, named Hesperides. These were the daughters of Atlas who apparently still had time to sire them while holding Earth on his shoulders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nature's Twelve by Louis Komzsik. Copyright © 2015 Louis Komzsik. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue, 3,1 Twelves of time, 5,
2 Gods of twelve, 15,
3 Ubiquitous twelve, 25,
4 Dozenal society, 33,
5 From twelve sides, 41,
6 To twelve corners, 51,
7 Symmetry of twelve, 61,
8 From a sublime number, 71,
9 To a sum of infinity, 81,
10 Dozenal chemistry, 87,
11 Nature's twelve, 95,
12 Corners of the Earth, 103,
Epilogue, 113,
References, 115,