In the Shu-king, an ancient Chinese work, occurs the earliest record of a total eclipse of the sun, in the year B. C. 2158. The Nineveh eclipse of B. C. 763 is perhaps the first of the ancient eclipses of which we possess a really clear description on the Assyrian eponym tablets in the British Museum. It is the eclipse possibly referred to in the Book of Amos, viii.
But of all the ancient eclipses none perhaps exceeds in interest the famous eclipse of Thales, B. C. 585, May 28. It is the first eclipse to have been predicted, probably by means of the saros, or 18-year period of eclipses, which is useful as an approximate method even at the present day. But the accident of a war between the Lydians and the Medes has added greatly to the historic interest, because the combatants were so terrified by the sudden turning of day into night that they at once concluded a peace cemented by two marriages.
Very many of the ancient eclipses have been of great use to the historian in verifying dates, and mathematical astronomers have employed them in correcting the lunar tables, or intricate mathematical data by which the motion of the moon is predicted.
Coming down to the middle of the sixth century, we find the first eclipse recorded in England, in the "Saxon Chronicle," A. D. 538. During the epoch of the Arabian Nights several eclipses were witnessed at Bagdad, A. D. 829 to 928, and many a century later by Ibu-Jounis, court astronomer of Hakem, the Caliph of Egypt. Nothing is more interesting than to search the quaint records of these ancient eclipses. One occurring in 1560, when Tycho Brahe was but fourteen, had much to do with turning his permanent interest toward mathematics and astronomy. The eclipse of 1612 was the first "seen through a tube," the telescope having been invented only a few years before. "Paradise Lost" was completed about 1665, and the censorship was still in existence; and it is matter of record that the oft-quoted passage,
"As when the Sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the Moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."