Black History Month - African Astronomy
October is Black History Month. Being a history of science nerd I shall celebrate this by sharing a few selected snippets about African science and mathematics. This week, some notes about aspects of African astronomy you probably didn’t know.
The Dogons of Mali
The Dogon people of Mali live on the western edge of the Sahara desert, and their oral traditions state that for thousands of years they have known that the Earth revolves round the sun, Jupiter has moons, Saturn has a ring, and that Sirius has a companion star (a fact not known in the West until 1862). It is thought they brought this knowledge with them as they migrated west from Egypt, keeping it hidden from outsiders until the 1950s. So sure were they about Sirius that they based their calendar on the 50 year orbit of Sirius B and Sirius A.
The Stone Circle at Nabta Playa
Contrary to popular belief Europeans weren’t the first to make predictions from astronomical observations. Further east of Mali at Nabta Playa in the Sahara desert a stone circle was built 7,000 years ago to track the summer solstice and forecast the start of the annual monsoon season. This was 2,000 years before Stonehenge. Today it can be found, reconstructed, in the Aswan Nubia museum.
Timbuktu Manuscripts
In more recent times thousands of scholastic scrolls and manuscripts were, over hundreds of years, collected together in Timbuktu in Mali, covering thought from three major West African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai in the 11th to 15th centuries and including surprisingly detailed astronomical knowledge. Fortunately most of these documents have survived the 21st century unrest in the country and were taken to safety in Bamako in the south west. It has been argued that these show evidence that mathematical astronomy existed in Africa centuries before modern (western) scientific institutions were established.
Finally, the comic book series called Black Science, launched in 2013, is nothing to do with black science.
#BlackHistoryMonth #HistoryOfScience #Astronomy
References
Want to learn more about Astronomy in Africa? Try one of these sites:
https://africanews.space/astronomy-in-africa-the-past-the-present-and-the-future/
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/06/nabta-playa-the-worlds-first-astronomical-site-was-built-in-africa-and-is-older-than-stonehenge
https://astrobites.org/2020/08/28/african-cultural-astronomy/
https://www.labocine.com/spotlights/the-function-of-astronomy-in-pre-historic-africa
And if you are more serious:
http://www.as.utexas.edu/~wheel/africa/index.htm
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-4425-0_8461 (£)
© The Tree Sleuths October 2020
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