![]() ![]() The summer palace was built during Tang Emperor Xuanzong‘s reign. This is the site plan of a Tang Dynasty royal summer palace engraved on a 64x38cm stele at a scale of 1:2800 a thousand years ago in 1080. It is a collection of the Beijing Library. This is a Tang Dynasty telestial/celestial map that indicates the spatial collaboration between big cities, mountains and rivers on earth and major planets, stars and constellations in the sky. This nearly 2,000-year-old map is no doubt the world’s earliest paper map, unearthed from an East Han tomb in Fangmatan, Gansu Province. The map was carved on a 39x47cm stone and is a collection of the Sichuan Museum. The map illustrates city walls, city gates, shopping streets and residential areas with courtyards. This is a map of an ancient Chinese city dated back between 1,800 and 2,000 years ago during the East Han Dynasty. This is an illustration in the ancient book Classics of Mountains and Oceans (山海经), a collection of Chinese mythological tales. A 3,000-year-old World Map from Chinese Mythology Jin Ke snatched the weapon and lurched at King of Qin but was eventually neutralised. When the map scroll was unrolled to the end, a short sword was exposed. Prince of Yan Kingdom thus sent Jin Ke to present a map of Yan to King of Qin. In 228 BC, the Qin Kingdom in today’s Shaanxi conquered the Zhao Kingdom in today’s Hebei, which caused an alarm in Zhao’s neighbour the Yan Kingdom in today’s Beijing. The earliest recorded events associated with a map are from Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (史记) about Jin Ke’s assassination of the last king of Qin who later became First Emperor Qin. Allegedly, his success in the flood control projects more than 4,000 years ago owned to a detailed map carved on a slab and presented to him by a higher being who administrates the Yellow River affairs (apparently the guy didn’t do a good job as the river either flooded or dried out). The earliest tale about the map is related to the legendary Great Yu, a hydraulic engineer and the found of Xia Dynasty. ![]() In concert with the publication of Symons’ and Tasker's in-depth narrative, and by special permission of the University of Tubingen Museum in Germany, the following slide show introduces you to one of the best preserved star tables of ancient Egypt-from the tomb of Idy of Asyut.The use of map features heavily in Chinese mythology and real historical events. The five odd days or "half week" at the end of the year were tacked on in their own special column at the end of the table.Įvery column of star names (written in hieroglyphs) consists of 12 rows, with each cell indicating the rising (or possibly setting) of a particular star over the horizon.īut the true magic of these tables really comes alive when you can examine in detail. Each month contained three 10-day weeks with 12 months of 30 days marking 360 days. ![]() Running along the top of the table is the ancient Egyptian civil calendar. The horizontal strip contains a line from a religious text making an offering to a number of Egyptian gods, and the vertical strip pictures four images of the gods themselves." The basic layout of the star charts has, of course, been known for decades, as Symons and Tasker write in "Stars of the Dead." A complete table "is divided into quarters by a horizontal and a vertical strip. Symons and co-author Elizabeth Tasker of Hokkaido University in Japan describe the work in the October issue of Scientific American. Her conclusions are based on years of research into ancient Egyptian beliefs, extensive surveys of the 27 known star tables or fragments of tables in the world and, using planetarium software, the ability to easily recreate the nighttime sky as it appeared more than 4000-odd years ago along the Nile. But Sarah Symons of McMaster University in Ontario thinks it more likely that the tables represent a kind of map for the dead to properly navigate the sky, where they would live forevermore as stars. Scholars have long believed that the star charts represented a very early type of clock, for telling time at night, which might be important for certain religious rituals. The depictions look like timetables or spreadsheets of when various stars first appear (or disappear) over the horizon at different times of the year-only a lot more beautiful. Some of the nobility around the upper Egyptian city of Asyut even had detailed tables of star movements drawn on the inside of their coffins. Thousands of years ago they painted big beautiful eyes on the outside of their coffins so that they could see what was going on in the world. Ancient Egyptians expected to be very busy in the afterlife. ![]()
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