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Going Look At The Stars

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Go look at the stars. Now look at the paper. Now look at the stars. Now look at the paper. Now take one last look at the sky and count the number of visible stars. Not many, right? The problem of being a miniscule part of a vast Universe is our incapability to observe and understand the Universe, especially with the naked eye. Even in ancient Greece, people observed the skies, understanding it in order to locate their relative positions and noticing the movements of the sun and the moon. Many believe that a Greek cosmology does not form until the Pre-Socratic works of 600 B.C.E., but there are signs that point to the Greek tradition of epic poems as a means of communicating astronomical information, the first of which was written down by Homer, who is considered the first epic poet (Hetherington 54, Murnaghan l). Before delving into Homer’s poems, it is important to first understand the history of Greek civilization because his poems reflect several historic periods spanning hundreds of year. After 2000 B.C.E. Greek-speaking people arrived in what we call Greece, establishing the Mycenaean civilization, which thrived, becoming rich with powerful cities that were military strongholds and international trade centers (Murnaghan l). Through their trade with nearby islands, they adopted a “syllabary” system of writing from the Minoans, who flourished on the island Crete (Murnaghan l). However, the next evidence of Greek writing is not seen until the Phoenician alphabet is
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