Did You Know? The Influence of Astrology on the Science of Astronomy along the Silk Roads

Did You Know? The Influence of Astrology on the Science of Astronomy along the Silk Roads
© UNESCO Youth Eyes on the Silk Roads/ Javad Hassanpour
The Silk Roads were a driving force behind significant cultural exchange across many different parts of the world. Throughout the long history of these routes, a blending of civilizations and people resulted in the sharing of various knowledge bases and the creation of pluralistic disciplines of scientific study still recognised today including medicine, mathematics, geography, cartography, and astronomy. There were also a number of areas of academic enquiry enriched by these exchanges that are generally no longer considered sciences, such as alchemy, but which nether the less form an important part of the shared heritage and legacy of these routes and which played important roles in the development of the sciences. A key example of such a discipline is astrology, a broad field concerned with the search for meaning and predictive information in the sky.  Through closely observing and monitoring the location of the stars and planets, astrology sought to understand human behaviour and predict events based on the influence of these celestial bodies. The practice probably began as soon as humans first started to observe astronomical cycles, with some of the earliest evidence dating from the 3rd millennium BCE. Throughout much of history, and up until the 17th century, astrology was considered an academic discipline across much of Eurasia. In fact, astrology was commonly accepted in political and cultural circles with astrological concepts applied in other fields including alchemy, meteorology, and traditional medicine.

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