ASTRONOMY.
Not being greedy of delusion ourselves, neither would we lead others into error; but, on the contrary, are desirous to avoid all deception, as we may be considered over studious to give the most rational origin, and where we cannot get at the history of those objects which engage our attention—whenever this is uncertain we resort to nature, experience, and reason, and furnish the most correct explanation our contracted circle of information will permit. Whenever we discover the clue of history, we collect the most satisfactory detail our limits will afford us to insert. Guided by the preceding notions, and directed by those principles, we have endeavoured correctly to conceive, and faithfully to portray our own conceptions in the best manner our experience might enable us, to make a just distinction between metaphorical allusion and literal application; ever endeavouring to discriminate between serious assertion and studied fable.
We fully coincide with the just remark of the learned author of “Indian Antiquities,” who says “that in respect to the early ages of the world, all the remains of genuine history, except that contained in the sacred annals, is only to be obtained through the mazes of Mythology.”
It must be confessed, that to sift this grain of corn from the bushel of chaff with which it is surrounded, where every effort which the ingenuity of Greece could devise to render fable as current as truth, was resorted to, is no small task; that it requires the operation of the best exercised reason, and the assistance of extraordinary judgment, which is only to be attained through the medium of extensive experience and the exercise of clear and discriminative powers: then we pretend not to possess the best of possible acquisitions of this kind, but the best in our power, we have endeavoured to collect, and summoned to our assistance; and the value of our labours we will leave the public to judge.
If the application of observations like the preceding ever come apropos, surely they apply to the present article; since from the sideral science, all the errors of an idolatrous race proceeded in the major part of the population of the ancient world: from thence also proceeded the most sublime imagery which embellishes the syren voice of poetic song, the grandest metaphors, and the sweetest allegories, which ornament the transendent eloquence of the most able rhetoricians of Greece and Rome; the fire of exquisitely natural and most noble allusions which enliven and embellish their historic pages. The sweetest philosophical explications also flowed from thence, which ornament the various immortal works of their most excellent poets, orators, historians, natural and moral philosophers; and, in brief, of every description of the sublimest genius of ancient Greece and Rome, in their most divine effusions.
It will appear, we believe, that the first astronomers of Chaldea, Phœnicia, and Egypt, are not now known as astronomers, by name, if we except the person of the royal Nimrod, the founder of the Chaldean empire, which name is often confounded with Belus; sometimes one is put for the other, and often Belus is called the son of Nimrod. How the truth of this was, we shall not at present determine: be it as it may, it is allowed on all hands that the sideral science claims for its inventor no less a person than the founder of the first monarchy in the world. That this science was first introduced by the founder of the Tower of Babel is not questioned, because it is more evident, that in that country there must have existed from necessity, the expediency of the most approved observation, which could be made upon this eminently useful science; where, on account of the excessive solar heat, people generally travel by night: where, for hundreds of miles, are nothing but pathless deserts, with a horizon as boundless and little impeded as that of the ocean; assuredly under such circumstances, the local situation of the site of the immense Observatory of Babel must point out the expediency of procuring some intelligence from the position which the inhabitants discovered the host of heaven to appear in at the rising, setting, &c.; for from what will appear in the course of this article, it will be very evident that the Tower of Babel was constructed for the purpose of an astronomical observatory; farther, that the climate of Chaldea was most favourable to the exercise of that sublime art, will not admit of a question, when we consider the atmosphere is so pure, so clear, so free from exhalation, that at night the sky is said to resemble an immense canopy of black velvet studded with embossed gold, from the appearance of the stars; and that it was not only the appearance of the stars, their rising, setting, and motion, by which they knew time was to be measured; but also the distinction between one star and another could be correctly ascertained from the usual colour—here it was the various planets, zodiacal constellations, and the other asterisms in both hemispheres, received their primary names.
The preceding circumstance, it is conceived, fixes the local place where the science had its origin.
The Tower of Babel was a parallelogram, with sides of unequal length. Herodotus thus describes it.—“The Temple of Jupiter Belus occupies the other [square of the city], whose huge gates of brass may be seen. It is a square building; in the midst rises a tower of the height of one furlong, upon which resting as a base, seven other turrets are built in regular succession. The ascent is on the outside, which, winding from the ground, is continued to the highest tower: in the middle of the whole structure there is a convenient resting place.”