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Left: Stonehenge, 3200-1600 B.C, showing its alignment to sunrise at the summer solstice and (right) its sunset alignment at the winter solstice.
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In the earliest civilizations of the Ancient World, sun worship developed in parallel with an understanding of the movement of the stars. That was the origin of an architecture that expressed a number of religious and cosmological beliefs. Studies of ancient archaeological remains have revealed that astronomical orientations strongly influenced the...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... and astronomical investigations indicate that the circle formed by the enormous grey stones, which were transported from a quarry more than 80 kilometres away, is aligned with both the position of the sun at sunrise corresponding to the summer solstice and a sunset corresponding to the winter solstice. Interestingly, the alignment of the southern circle of Durrington Wall, which is another henge located three kilometres to the northwest, corresponds to dawn at the winter solstice 1 (Figure 1). Stonehenge was used as an astronomical calendar to predict eclipses of the Sun and the moon and was a place at which to worship the twelve Zodiac Gods. ...
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