That the astronomers who traced out the circle of the Zodiac on the heavens, and imagined its twelve strange figures, should also have devoted attention to, and marked out, its central point, is not improbable. The Pole of the Ecliptic, unlike the Pole of the Heavens, is immoveable amongst the fixed stars. At 6000 B.C., as at the present date, the stars of Draco surrounded this point—a point not itself marked by any conspicuous star. We have not, however, I think, at present sufficient grounds for deciding at what exact date the constellation Draco was imagined under the form it now holds. But that it is very ancient there is no doubt.
For the first depicting on the vault of heaven of the figure of Bootes, I claim with much stronger conviction the date of 6000 B.C., and the latitude of 45° north. For then and there Bootes might be seen at midnight of the summer solstice, standing upright on the northern horizon, his head reaching nearly to the Pole of the Heavens. Never since that date has he held so commanding a position in the sky, nor at any more southern latitude could his whole figure have been represented as standing on the horizon.
One further suggestion as to this constellation I am tempted to make. Not, it is true, on the same firm astronomical grounds as those put forward for the date of the first imagining of the figure, but a suggestion based on the Greek name of the constellation.
The name Bootes has been translated as ox-driver, and of him Aratos says:—
“The Bear-ward, whom mankind the Ploughman call,
Because he seems to touch the wain-like Bear.”[113]
[113] The Phainomena or “Heavenly Display” of Aratos, done into English verse by Robert Brown, Jun., F.S.A., line 92.
The seven bright stars which mark the tail and part of the body of the Great Bear are often spoken of as “the Plough,” and in the large remaining space allotted on the sphere to the constellation Ursa Major, it would not be difficult to include oxen harnessed to the brightly marked celestial plough.
I have said that at midnight of the summer solstice the constellation Bootes—if we suppose it to have been imagined at 6000 B.C.—presided visibly over the northern sky. But we have learnt from the month names in the Accadian calendar that the astronomers who instituted it always directed attention to the constellations which invisibly accompanied the sun in his daily journeyings from east to west, rather than to those which (in opposition) were visible through the hours of the night. For example—all through the mid-winter month of the sacrifice of righteousness, the stars of the Ram—the celestial symbol of that sacrifice—were invisible, hidden in the overpowering light of the sun. In like manner, I think, we may assume that at the close of the Accadian year—in the “month of the sowing of seed” or in “the dark month of sowing,” when mortal husbandmen were following on earth their ox-drawn ploughs, Bootes, the ox-driver, though invisible to the bodily eye, appeared to the mental vision of the astronomer, following unweariedly the ox-drawn plough in the sky.
The various suppositions here put forward will lead those who accept them as probably correct, to picture to themselves the existence, at the early date of 6000 B.C., in latitude 45° N., of a race of men—not savages, and not merely pastoral nomads—but a race of agriculturists who tilled the ground and reaped its fruits—a race possessed of high intellectual power—who respected law and justice, and whose religion taught them to offer to their god “sacrifices of righteousness.”