The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251219-the-ancient-monuments-saluting-the-winter-solstice

by 1659447091 • 7 months ago

201 85 7 months ago

voidUpdate• 7 months ago

How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times

srean5• 7 months ago

To tell it accurately of course takes work.

However if you live in the open, or have daily access to the open sky, after a while you are bound to notice.

We are so used to having a ceiling above us, so used to constructions blocking our view of the sky that this seems a feat.

I was the same till I got access to the sky. Then ... oh wait ... the sunset is shifting towards those landmarks every day. Oh wait, now its turning around to go the other way.

The total span of movement is so large, that its hard to miss unless you are on a featureless landscape or in the open sea.

I am super impressed by humans noticing and separating the planet's from the stars. Look at those stars they don't twinkle and they move funny. I guess the planets drew attention because of their brightness and by their lack of twinkle.

arethuza3• 7 months ago

Probably easier to measure the location of sunsets and sunrises rather than the time?

Edit: Obviously somewhere like here in Scotland observing the sunrise is easier said than done - particularly at this time of year!

JKCalhoun4• 7 months ago

Just need to be lucky one year.

clickety_clack• 7 months ago

I’m sure you’d know that this was winter. If you line 2 sticks up with sunrise, and keep adjusting them every morning, eventually you’ll see that the sun stops rising further south and starts moving north again. You don’t need complex mathematics to work it out.

exitb• 7 months ago

It seems unintuitive today because people living in cities and towns don’t usually see sunrises and sunsets from where they live. If you had a way to easily reference the sunrise and sunset points against known horizon, it’d be very easy to tell.

bluGill2• 7 months ago

Also because today we have accurate clocks and most of us don't depend on seasons for anything. Farmers care about when to plant, and a few gardeners pay attention, but for most of us nothing changes in life. (I'm carefully not counting the traditional vacations that most of us have around this time - though that is important to us and historically related, we could move the date and it wouldn't affect anything else).

jcims• 7 months ago

Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature.

I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I remember wondering as a kid how people even thought about planets or came up with these wild stories with the constellations...to me it just kind of looked like a bright field of randomly twinkling lights.

Well, when you're out every night from 10pm to 2am looking up, it all just kind of comes alive. You see everything. The motion of the planets, the elliptic upon which they travel, the gradual shift of the entire field as the seasons change, the undulations of the moon and it's varied trajectory across the sky. The shifting of the sun's set and rise and the ebb and flow of day vs night. Everything. Your mind just starts to harmonize with the rhythm of it all. It's pretty wonderful.

noosphr2• 7 months ago

If you can I strongly suggest going to a Bortle 1 site and staying there for a month, preferably in winter.

The sheer amount of _stuff_ in the sky is mind boggling, the silence is deafening.

That we spend all of human existence until little over a century ago living like that is something I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

mmooss2• 7 months ago

That's amazing. Thank you.

mapcars2• 7 months ago

How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was

Solstice is a small thing they figured long ago, there are things they managed that are much more complex than that. In India there are whole temples dedicated to astronomy and built to align with different celestial geometries.

matusp• 7 months ago

1. Go out every morning to work in your field. 2. When the Sun rises, make a note on the same fixed piece of wood, e.g., a fence. 3. Observe the leftmost and rightmost positions, these are your solstices. 4 You can now use your fence to identify and predict solstices.

JKCalhoun4• 7 months ago

I have read that the auspicious date of December 25th may have been intended to be the Solstice but that the degree of error for "making a note on a fence" is why we have the 25th.

Merry Sun-Fence Day everyone. ;-)

eitau_12• 7 months ago

It can be tricky b/c Sun's azimuth at sunrise varies by a hundredth of a degree on days directly before and after the solstice.

Also fun fact: date of latest sunrise is slightly out of phase with seasons https://xkcd.com/2792/

beejiu• 7 months ago

They could reason about the Pythagorean theorem in 2000 BC. It's not a surprise they could figure out when the sun set in 2800 BC.

eitau_12• 7 months ago

Wikipedia says it's indeed not a trivial thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice#Solstice_determinatio...

BurningFrog• 7 months ago

Pre technology, the sky was very central to life. Sunlight, rain and snow dictated much of your life (and death), and you probably considered the sun, moon and five planets as gods.

You and I personally may not have kept track, but our local religious leader did, and maybe the even staged a ceremony at the winter solstice to ask the sun to make the days longer.

mapcars2• 7 months ago

and you probably considered the sun, moon and five planets as gods.

I find it strange that today knowing much more about sun and moon we don't consider them as gods. Today we know for sure they are the origin of all life on this planet and yet many cultures decided to go for an abstract intangeable entities instead of what is directly in front of us and can't be debated.

marcosdumay• 7 months ago

For very ancient people, it's the longest/shortest day.

After you notice that, if you want more precision, it's the day the Sun rises and sets most on the North/South. It's also the day things cast the largest shadow at noon. You will need some special device to get very precise on the sun raising position (like a pair of stones or something with a hole), and you won't be able to get precision on the shadow thing.

For more modern people, starting about only half a dozen millennia ago, it's the hour the Sun stops moving North/South within the stars and starts moving the other way around. You will need to look at it and take notes many times, and average things out to get any precision. Even more because you can't see the Sun and the stars at the same time, so you have to model them.

empath75• 7 months ago

They didn't.

They didn't like go out on Dec 21st, and look where the sun was and mark it. They didn't even have calendars like that. They watched the sun every day, and waited until it stopped being lower in the sky at it's highest point in the day (or whatever other sign of the solstice they wanted to use), and marked that angle and built whatever viewport they wanted (a door, tunnel, etc).

Then they could just go wherever they built the thing that pointed at that point in the sky, and go, oh, okay, the solstice is soon, or just happened, or whatever and plan accordingly.

It actually wasn't really accurate to the day, anyway. There are a few days on either side of the solstice where the effect is basically the same for the viewer.

Something to keep in mind is that this isn't only useful for determining the exact date of the winter solstice, which they may not have even cared that much about. You can see roughly where you are in the year on either side of the solstice by looking at how far out of alignment the sun is on a given day. So it could be useful throughout the fall and even well into the winter for gauging the passing of time. People didn't need to plan day by day or even week by week, but they did need to do things in roughly the right part of the year.

People act like this is some unexplainable advanced technology, and anybody can just do this with a stick and some rocks.

rags2riches• 7 months ago

Try making it through a few northern European winters as a pre-modern farmer. I'm sure you will develop a keener interest in measuring these things.

mr_toad2• 7 months ago

It’s probably not a coincidence that these monuments that seem to serve as calendars happened to spring up just as farming was becoming widespread .

timeon• 7 months ago

Cultures? You do not even need to be mammal to notice that. Try next years - stop scrolling and notice if you can spot it.

franze4• 7 months ago

my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night))

https://daylight.franzai.com/

franze4• 7 months ago

and yes, the maths fails when you are super super high north or south

srean5• 7 months ago

Hey! nice little useful web page. I like the minimalism of it.

Does the math fail because of not considering (i) equation of time and (ii) oblateness of the Earth ?

JKCalhoun4• 7 months ago

You should try to address the latitude issue. (Says the guy who has only to spend a few seconds typing that.)

noosphr2• 7 months ago

Ha, amazing, I build the same 24 hour clock with night time for daily planning.

You can use an js SVG animation to have it run in real time: https://tomchen.github.io/animated-svg-clock/clock.svg

I have no idea why we stuck with the 12 hour clocks once we stopped using sundials and variable hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours

pbalau• 7 months ago

Doesn't really work on my setup (0). I am curious if it does more than the PhotoPills app, quite a useful thing for city scapes photography.

0. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FB3Ofl4mUvOO4gGqARro9cO_kjJ...

/edit: Looks like noscript blocks the p5 thing.

busfahrer• 7 months ago

For a modern equivalent, the first thing that came to my mind was Manhattanhenge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge

psunavy032• 7 months ago

The street I live on also has a "henge," and it's annoying as all get-out because I have to drive up a big hill with the setting sun in my face to get home.

aworks• 7 months ago

With your app, it seems daylight today in Chicago is the same length as yesterday's solstice, although it starts and ends 30 seconds later.

today - 07:18:59 → 16:24:29 = 9:5:30. yesterday - 7:18:23 → 16:23:53 = 9:5:30

masfuerte• 7 months ago

Sunrise and sunset aren't in phase (or exactly out of phase). The latest sunrise and the earliest sunset don't happen on the same day and neither happens on the solstice. Not at this northern latitude anyway.

mos_basik• 7 months ago

Love it, bookmarked.

I first saw this idea at https://jmw.name/projects/linear-clock/ and then later I wrote a TUI version for myself

I had tickmarks for stuff (when to go to bed to sleep for 7.5h and wake up near sunrise, things like that). I was working on adding a config file format.

Then I lost the project due to a mishap with a pipx flag... https://github.com/pypa/pipx/issues/1324#issuecomment-211885... ;_; o7

One day maybe I'll come back and do it in Rust.

arionmiles• 7 months ago

This reminded me of The Anasazi Sun Temple that catches the first light of the Summer Solstice in a specific point in the temple. I first discovered this watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos early this year (which I'd highly recommend, BTW)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Rinconada

andrewinardeer• 7 months ago

Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.

jstanley• 7 months ago

Where I live, the difference is almost six months!

JKCalhoun4• 7 months ago

Compiler-brain.

arethuza3• 7 months ago

For Orkney the difference in day length between winter and summer solstices is about 12 hours?

December: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=12&year=20...

June: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=6&year=202...

srean5• 7 months ago

So roughly your latitude is 40 degrees ?

Now if you disclose your local time offset from GMT, say, Palantir can send a drone carrying roses.

Of course this is meant as a joke, but wanted to emphasize how easy it is for location information to leak. And if one really doesn't care about collateral deaths how easy it is to exploit location data.

designerarvid2• 7 months ago

We’re I live it is a little bit more than 21 hours. Quite noticeable.

Loughla• 7 months ago

I lived briefly where the sun doesn't really shift that much in the sky. I didn't think about it at the time, but that constant noon day sun really messed with my sense of time passing. Weird.

lb1lf4• 7 months ago

These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)

When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.

A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'

YJfcboaDaJRDw• 7 months ago

We also have these in Germany, in the region where I live it which is North Rhein Westfalis they are quite a common thing actually. Strongly recomment people check it out if they pass by here some time

phinnaeus• 7 months ago

The local archaeologist? Incredible

lb1lf4• 7 months ago

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.

There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.

Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.

To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...

arethuza3• 7 months ago

I suspect most local councils in the UK have an archaeology team and failing that there are a lot of professional consulting archaeologists - a lot (all?) large scale building works often include the need for archaeological surveys and/or remediation.

e.g. Work for what is now the Queensferry Crossing bridge uncovered a 10,000 year old home:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-2...

gwbas1c• 7 months ago

as are they everywhere else, presumably!

They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up.

FWIW: The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence. It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. Pretty much anything old is celebrated because there is so little of anything old.

robotbikes• 7 months ago

Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...

bluGill2• 7 months ago

As the other replies note, there are things. Many were destroyed though and so there is nothing to preserve. However much of North America lacks ready access to building materials that will last and so many of the natives built with organic goods that rotted away in a few decades and so there isn't much to find. You can find many flint arrowheads - but that only tells us when (about) it was made and since there are millions of them there isn't much to learn anymore.

Don't take the above as a sign that the natives were uninteresting or stupid. Just that they didn't leave much for us to learn from, both because they couldn't and because what they did was destroyed.

AlotOfReading• 7 months ago

Norway also wasn't populated until after the last ice age. As an American archaeologist, old stuff is also quite common here. The fun examples I like to use are the structures in Tucson older than Rome.

Your "local archeologist" is one of the staff at the state historic preservation society [0], though you'll likely have more luck contacting a local university archeologist if you find anything.

[0] https://www.ohiohistory.org/preserving-ohio/state-historic-p...

hammock• 7 months ago

They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up… The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence

Fun fact, New England has at least 71 different stonework “prayer sites” that are all astrologically aligned.

Two of the most notable are King Philip’s Cave (Sharon, MA) with a stone aperture through which a "dagger of light" appears specifically during the winter solstice, and Pole Hill (Gloucester, MA) which has fixed boulders that align with the summer solstice sunrise/sunset and the winter solstice sunrise.

Here is a research paper talking about all of them: https://neara.org/pdf/wantofanail.pdf

There are lots of historical preservationists in New England that you can call up. If you want my help finding one let me know where you are located.

mr_toad2• 7 months ago

It wasn't settled until after the last ice age.

The UK wasn’t permanently settled until the mesolithic either. There are older artifacts like axes, but no monuments.

debo_• 7 months ago

You're that guy who lives on the northeast island of the Chrono Trigger map, aren't you?

JoeAltmaier2• 7 months ago

When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out.

We jump so quickly to religious significance.

theoreticalmal• 7 months ago

Why not just point the door to the north if the goal was to keep the sun out?

inejge• 7 months ago

When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning?

In the northern latitudes, doubtful. It would be cool enough year round.

designerarvid2• 7 months ago

In Scandinavia we have no heat to anor condition out.

roarcher• 7 months ago

We jump so quickly to religious significance.

The article talks extensively about how these monuments were used for timekeeping. Marking the seasons allowed people to predict animal migrations and plan agricultural activities.

It seems that you are the one who has forgotten the practical uses of these artifacts.

JoeAltmaier2• 7 months ago

Yeah I had that backward.

INTPenis• 7 months ago

What I find cute is that every year on the 21st of december a small number of modern day pagans and nature lovers gather at Ales Stenar here in southern Sweden and watch the sun rise over the center stone of the "ship".

We bring thermos bottles, some bring kids, pets, and we just stand there in silence watching the sun.

Afaik it's not coordinated, it's just a bunch of people having the same idea every year.

onion2k• 7 months ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4g4exnj2p5t?page=2 8,500 turned up at Stonehenge in the UK.

kzrdude• 7 months ago

That's.. neat. I guess lots more people show up for summer solstice though? Or are they occupied with the mainstream-pagan Midsummer celebrations then?

maelito• 7 months ago

Vert interesting ! One of the cited monuments is 30 min by bike from my home, incredible !

praveen9920• 7 months ago

There is a temple in India called “Konark Sun Temple”, meant to be worship place of sun god.

It is built east-west to signify sun’s journey. The temple has a wheel sort of structure which kinda acts as sundial with minute level accuracy.

In India, difference in day time between winter and summer solstices is minimal ( 3.5 hours ), I guess it doesn’t signify anything major close to equator.

alephnerd• 7 months ago

Depends on where in India you are from. Winter solstice times with chillai kalan [0] which is treated as a headache. Everything basically shuts down in the Western Himalayan regions of India around this time - from Ladakh to Kashmir to Upper Himachal and Uttarakhand [1], though it has gotten much drier/warmer compared to the stories my parents or grandparents told.

[0] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/j-k/snow-rain-in-higher-re...

[1] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/snow-likely-on-de...

BobSonOfBob• 7 months ago

How to say I love Math and Astronomy without saying …

The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

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