Astronomy in Africa- News and Updates

Lightning over West Africa; Credit: ESA/NASA

• NASA has just released an image (above) of a lightning flash over West Africa, as seen from the International Space Station.
• The chairman of Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics has just announced that the Islamic holy month of Ramadan will begin on July 20 this year. The starting point of the holy month is determined according to astronomical calculations.

Guest Voices: Archeoastronomical Sites in Africa

Our guest post this week is by J. Craig Wheeler, Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin and former president of the American Astronomical Society.

Like ancient people everywhere, Africans looked in wonder at the sky and struggled to make sense of it. Evidence that they did so with creativity and insight has been slow to permeate academic studies of archeoastronomy and wider public understanding. There is evidence in myths and calendars, but more concretely in ancient megalith observatories.

6500 year old Megalith at Nabta in Southern Egypt. Photo courtesy of F. Wendorf.

Nabta Playa in southern Egypt is the oldest known astronomical site in the world. It was created some 6500 years ago, 5000 years before Stonehenge. The circle of standing stones allowed the Neolithic people to determine when the solstices and rainy seasons occurred. Monstrous stones, some more than 9 feet tall, were dragged for more than a mile to construct Nabta. For three weeks before and after a solstice, the standing stones would have cast no shadow in the noonday sun, due to their proximity to the equator. There is an east-west sighting among the megaliths, as well as a north-south lineup. There have been several other alignments found, but their significance is yet to be determined.

The megaliths of Ng’amoritung’a stand on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya. There are 20 peculiar polygonal basalt columns that are of order 2000 years old. While there is some controversy, there are suggestions of possible alignments of nineteen of the twenty stones with seven stars and constellations popularly used for astronomical purposes; Triangulum, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Central Orion, Saiph, and Sirius.

Jens Finke at the 2000 year old site of Ng'amoritung'a on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. Photo by Maria Helena Barreira.

Many current treatises on archeoastronomy discuss the wonderful Mayan cosmology and evidence for paleoastronomy in Europe and elsewhere, but make little or no mention of ancient astronomy in Africa. Given the evidence of Nabta Playa and Ng’amoritung’a, it seems very likely that other evidence for the ancient astronomy of Africa awaits in other places, to be discovered with proper care and attention by the people of Africa.