divided the twelve zodiacal signs by the twenty-eight mansions of the moon.[1]
The Arabians are said to have received their astronomical knowledge from India, and in China, Arabia, and India we find an almost identical system, i.e., that of the Lunar Stations, or Lunar Mansions, employed to indicate the daily progress of the moon amid the stars.
India has been claimed as the birthplace of the constellation figures, but modern research, says Allen, finds little in Sanscrit literature to confirm this belief.
There is a controversy as to whether Indian astronomy was derived from Greece or independent of it. In support of the latter theory, it is said that the Brahmins were too proud to borrow their science from the Greeks or Arabs, and also that it was improbable that two rival Hindu sects, the Brahmins and Buddhists, should have adopted the same innovations in their calendars and religious symbolism. Again, the Greeks held Indian astronomy in high esteem, while the Hindus only bestowed a moderate praise on the Grecian science.
The Egyptians, on whose early monuments the twelve zodiacal signs are found, acknowledged that they derived their knowledge of the stars from the Chaldeans, and they were in turn the teachers of the Greeks as early as the time of Thales and Pythagoras.
Herodotus states that the Egyptians were the first of all mankind who invented the year and divided it into twelve parts, a statement much at variance to the accepted testimony of the Babylonian Tablets.
Of the constellations outside the zodiac, we find a few groups and stars mentioned at an early date, notably in the Old Testament, where, in the Book of Job, there are references to the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, names that have come down to us. Homer and Hesiod both mentioned
- ↑ It is of interest to note that the Chinese were called "Celestials" because their empire was divided after the Celestial spaces.
