Lascaux Caves, southern France It has been suggested that the 17,000-year-old
cave paintings in
Lascaux, southern France, depict star constellations such as Taurus,
Orion's Belt, and the
Pleiades. However, this view is not generally accepted among scientists.
Mesopotamia Inscribed stones and
clay writing tablets from
Mesopotamia (in modern
Iraq) dating to 3000 BC provide the earliest generally accepted evidence for humankind's identification of constellations. It seems that the bulk of the Mesopotamian constellations were created within a relatively short interval from around 1300 to 1000 BC. Mesopotamian constellations appeared later in many of the classical Greek constellations.
Ancient Near East in 164 BC The oldest
Babylonian catalogues of stars and constellations date back to the beginning of the
Middle Bronze Age, most notably the
Three Stars Each texts and the
MUL.APIN, an expanded and revised version based on more accurate observation from around 1000 BC. However, the numerous
Sumerian names in these catalogues suggest that they built on older, but otherwise unattested,
Sumerian traditions of the
Early Bronze Age. The classical Zodiac is a revision of
Neo-Babylonian constellations from the 6th century BC. The Greeks adopted the Babylonian constellations in the 4th century BC. Twenty Ptolemaic constellations are from the Ancient Near East. Another ten have the same stars but different names. with the Lion as
Leo, the Bull as
Taurus, the Man representing
Aquarius, and the Eagle standing in for
Scorpio. The biblical
Book of Job also makes reference to a number of constellations, including "bier", "fool" and "heap" (Job 9:9, 38:31–32), rendered as "Arcturus, Orion and Pleiades" by the
KJV, but '
Ayish "the bier" actually corresponding to Ursa Major. The term
Mazzaroth , translated as
a garland of crowns, is a
hapax legomenon in Job 38:32, and it might refer to the zodiacal constellations.
Classical antiquity , There is only limited information on ancient Greek constellations, with some fragmentary evidence being found in the
Works and Days of the Greek poet
Hesiod, who mentioned the "heavenly bodies". Greek astronomy essentially adopted the older Babylonian system in the
Hellenistic era, first introduced to Greece by
Eudoxus of Cnidus in the 4th century BC. The original work of Eudoxus is lost, but it survives as a versification by
Aratus, dating to the 3rd century BC. The most complete existing works dealing with the mythical origins of the constellations are by the Hellenistic writer termed
pseudo-Eratosthenes and an early Roman writer styled pseudo-
Hyginus. The basis of Western astronomy as taught during
Late Antiquity and until the
Early Modern period is the
Almagest by
Ptolemy, written in the 2nd century. In the
Ptolemaic Kingdom,
native Egyptian tradition of anthropomorphic figures represented the planets, stars, and various constellations. Some of these were combined with Greek and Babylonian astronomical systems culminating in the
Zodiac of Dendera, the oldest known depiction of the zodiac showing all the now familiar constellations, along with some original Egyptian constellations,
decans, and
planets. It remains unclear when this occurred, but most were placed during the Roman period between 2nd to 4th centuries AD. Ptolemy's
Almagest remained the standard definition of constellations in the medieval period both in Europe and in
Islamic astronomy.
Ancient China with a cylindrical projection (
Su Song)
Ancient China had a long tradition of observing celestial phenomena. Nonspecific
Chinese star names, later categorized in the
Twenty-Eight Mansions, have been found on
oracle bones from
Anyang, dating back to the middle
Shang dynasty.
Chinese constellations are among the most significant observations of the Chinese sky, dating back to the
5th century BCE. The Chinese system developed independently from the Greco-Roman system, although there may have been earlier mutual influence, suggested by parallels to ancient
Babylonian astronomy. Three schools of classical
Chinese astronomy in the
Han period are attributed to astronomers of the earlier
Warring States period. The constellations of the three schools were conflated into a single system by
Chen Zhuo, an astronomer of the 3rd century, the
Three Kingdoms period. Chen Zhuo's work has been lost, but information on his system of constellations survives in
Tang dynasty records, notably by
Gautama Siddha in his
Nine Seizers Canon (), an
Indo-Chinese resident of
Chang'an. The oldest extant Chinese star chart dates to that period and was preserved as part of the
Dunhuang manuscripts. Native Chinese astronomy flourished during the
Song dynasty, and during the
Yuan dynasty and the subsequent Ming dynasty became increasingly influenced by other eastern and western astronomers of the medieval era: see
Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era. A well-known map from the Song period is the
Suzhou Astronomical Chart, which was prepared with carvings of stars on the
planisphere of the Chinese sky on a stone plate; it is done accurately based on observations, and it shows the
1054 supernova in Taurus. ==Early modern astronomy==