For thousands of years, different civilizations have attached stories and symbolism to the same starry configurations in the night sky. Click the link to read more.
Civilizations come and go, some lasting mere decades while others endure for a few millennia. What rarely changes, at least on the human timescale, are the stars above us. Yet the cultures of our past have interpreted different shapes in the stars they saw at night — representing everything from myths of creation to legendary figures and godlike animals, depending on the viewer.
Some of these cultural references go back thousands of years, and possibly even older. They represent early examples of humanity’s preoccupation with symbolism in the world around us, as well as how vastly different cultures have interpreted similar things in the sky. “Cultures around the world organize stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture specific,” wrote the authors of a recent. “Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such as Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades and the Southern Cross are widely recognized across many different cultures.”
Unfortunately, many constellations that some ancient cultures recognized still are not well understood by modern scholars — though we have identified some of their or the role these stars played in calendar systems. Below are a few examples of ancient constellations that we
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