الأرض في التاريخ .. عند البابليين و قدماء المصريين و اليونان .. في سبيل موسوعة علمية

Land in history... among the Babylonians, the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks...

After this introduction, let us delve into the topic we intended, which is how man imagined the image of this land on which he lived for long centuries.

- Land among the Babylonians:

The Babylonians thought of the earth as a broad, flat disk floating on water, and the water surrounded the earth's disk. Thus, from beyond the seas rose mountains, bearing this dome of the seas and sky at its edges.

And the stars of the sky, how do they appear and disappear? Intervention from
Holes in the celestial dome, and out of them.

Outside the heavenly dome was water, and its evidence was the rain falling from the sky. With this view the Hebrews took.

The Babylonians observed the sun, planets, and stars in their movements satisfactorily, but they did not mention why the stars moved the way they did.

They saw something like fog around the moon, so they called it a halo. They had a halo around the moon itself, so it is a sky phenomenon, and today we know that it is an air phenomenon.

The comet, its head and tail, they thought was an air phenomenon. Thus, there were no meteors, and we know today that they all come from the sky.

- Land among the ancient Egyptians:

The land of the ancient Egyptians was not much different from what it was among the Babylonians, and there was trade and communication between them. This is despite the Egyptians being ahead of themselves in industry, art, engineering, and arithmetic.

They made the earth an expanded oval disk, and above it was a dome that bore the sun, the moon, and the stars, and they embellished this imagination by introducing into the picture something of their religious beliefs, and images of their gods, heavenly and earthly. Perhaps they introduced the gods because they needed the power to hold the sky and the power to hold the earth.

This is despite the fact that they knew what a year was, and that it was 365 days, and they divided it into twelve months, each month having 30 days, and adding five days to complete the year. They also realized that the year is not complete with the setting of the star Sothis (the star Serius according to the Greeks, or Sirius, which is the brightest star in the sky, and the planet Venus is the brightest among it).

(This is the image of the universe that the ancient Egyptians imagined: the sky is a dome raised by the gods, who bounces with their bodies and extends their arms and legs. The gods baptize the god of air, Shu, in this position. Thus, the Egyptians mixed the sober of their knowledge with the unsober of the teachings of their religion.)

The setting of this star will not be complete unless they add a quarter of a day to the 365 days, so it becomes 365 1/4 (the meaning of today’s leap year). Moreover, they realized that the cycle of the sky does not return to its original course, with the stars rising at an hour if they were rising, and setting at an hour if they were setting, except after a complete cycle that takes 1500 years (365 x 4). They called it the Sothis cycle, meaning at the end of it the star Sothis (or Sirius) sets at the same time it was setting at the beginning of the cycle.

Progress in astronomical calculation contrasts with empty images of earth and sky, in which the gods entered, carrying and lifting, and filling the gaps.

Did the Egyptians have two sciences, the science of priesthood and the science of astronomy? The two sciences separated, and yet they coexisted, like this peaceful coexistence that is intended to be established today between the Russians and the Americans.

- Land in Greece:

During the Homeric era (around the ninth century B.C.), the Greeks began to imagine the earth and the universe as the Egyptians and Babylonians imagined them: a earth resting on top of water, and above it was the dome of the sky. However, since the Greeks believed that one of the pillars of beauty was the similarity of forms, the universe must It must be beautiful and symmetrical. It seemed to them that, since there is a dome above the disk of the Earth, there must be a dome exactly like it beneath it, and to it people’s souls go at death.

In this way, the idea of ​​the earth, which is in the middle of a rounded universe, began to be the center of the sphere in it.

Their first philosopher, Thales, came, followed by the philosopher Anaximander, and they did not change this image much: a flat earth like a disc, with a dome above it, and a dome beneath it.

Thales, the father of Greek philosophy, was in the Nile Delta. He visited Egypt in his youth, and returned to his country Miletus (full of splendor at what he saw there. He returned from ancient Egypt with that knowledge on which the Greeks built the science of geometry.) And the people of the West today deny this and others like him, because they believe that The science of the Greeks grew satanically and with the power of an Almighty in the land of the Greeks. How could it be established in the land of the East? The science on which the people of Europe, the people of the West, built their present civilization!! Thales was born in about 625 BC.)