Giulio Magli

• PhD
• Professor at Politecnico di Milano

Chinese urban planning has a millenary history. According to the ancient classic texts, it was based on principles related to the cosmic order as well as on traditional ideas related to the feng shui doctrines. The problem of understanding the extent to which such ideas were put into practice is still open, partially due to the overwhelming number...

The first Japanese written sources belong to the end of seventh century AD, when the long formative process that led to the unification of the country under imperial power came to an end. The last phase of this process, called Kofun (250–600 AD circa) bears its name from the scores of funerary monuments which are still today visible in the whole co...

The classical world, or classical antiquity, is a traditional definition describing the cultures of the Mediterranean area from the Ancient Greek civilisation to the end of the Roman Empire. It thus includes Classical Greece, Hellenism, and Rome. This chapter is devoted to this broad historical period, and presents the archaeoastronomy of the Greek...

The Mayas had a deep knowledge of astronomy, which was intimately connected with their religion. This is visible in all aspects of Maya culture, including architecture, inscriptions, and also the few texts which escaped destruction. An introduction to Maya astronomy and calendrics is given, together with insights on famous places such as Chichen It...

Many ancient cultures acquired a profound knowledge of the sky, but the celestial bodies available for their observations were only those visible with the naked human eye, and from the point of view of an observer on the Earth. In this first chapter, the basics of astronomy with the naked eye and the apparent motion of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars...

Archaeoastronomy is a intimately multi-disciplinary science, living in-between humanities and technical disciplines. The foundations of Archaeoastronomy are, consequently, related both to cognitive aspects of archaeological research and to technical treatment of objective data. The chapter’s aim is to discuss what the most desirable compromise betw...

The role of the observation of the sky in the course of human civilization is described starting from Palaeolithic art and the introduction of monumental architecture, some 12,000 years ago, in Gobekli Tepe.

Ancient human settlements in North America are characterized by the construction of mounds and other earthworks. Here attention is concentrated on a period during which the interest for celestial phenomena and for geometrical shapes is apparent: the Hopewell (100 BC-400 AD circa). In particular, the spectacular Hopewell earthworks of Newark and the...

The connection between astronomy and daily life in ancient times is described, showing the relationships between celestial cycles, religion, and the management of power.

Astronomy has a key role in understanding ancient Egyptian religion and architecture. Indeed a fundamental duty that the Pharaohs assigned to themselves was of keepers of the cosmic order, called Maat by the Egyptians. The ideology associated with kingship thus designated the king as intermediary between gods and humanity, and—as a consequence—the...

The Chinese emperor was considered the owner of a mandate from the heavens, and this characterizes all the history of Chinese imperial architecture, together with another traditional doctrine connected to nature, the Feng Shui. These concepts are explored with the help of key examples, which include the tomb of the first emperor with his famous ter...

The Inca Empire, stretched from Colombia to Argentina, was based on a rigid hierarchy, with the noble families residing in the capital, Cusco, which was the cosmic heart of the Inca worldview. The symbolic, religious world of the Incas was very complex and included veneration of a series of sacred sites, called huacas. Many such huacas were related...

The role of astronomy in megalithic sites of Europe, including a detailed description of Stonehenge, Newgrange, and of the taulas of Menorca, is discussed with special attention to the relationships between astronomy and landscape.

The main tools used to acquire data in Archaeoastronomy fieldwork are described: magnetic compass, clinometer, and Theodolite. How to use software which allow digital fieldwork, such as virtual globes, is also shown.

On April 1, 2471 bC an impressive, unpredictable phenomenon occurred over the Delta of the Nile: a total solar eclipse, with totality band almost centered on the sacred city of Buto, and with the capital Memphis very close (>95%) to totality. This date is compatible with existing chronologies for the reign of Pharaoh Shepseskaf, who adopted a clamo...

The Sun Temples of the Vth dynasty are the most elusive Egyptian monuments of the Old Kingdom. Textual sources seem to refer to a different temple for each different pharaoh of the dynasty, but only two have been discovered at Abu Gurab, a few hundred meters north of the dynastic necropolis of Abusir. Previously, the author has proposed a cognitive...

In a recent Antiquity article, Darvill (2022) proposed that the mid third-millennium BC Stage 2 sarsen settings of Stonehenge (comprising the Trilithon Horseshoe, Sarsen Circle and the Station Stone Rectangle) were conceived in order to represent a calendar year of 365.25 days—that is, a calendar identical in duration to the Julian calendar. In the...

The centuriations were public lands delimited and divided in regular lots by Rome as a result of the conquest but also the conceptual appropriation of new territories, which were transformed according to particular ideas of space. Despite previous works rejecting the astronomical hypothesis for the orientation of Roman centuriations, recent publica...

The advent of the Ming dynasty marks a break through in the history of Chinese architecture. The first Ming rulers Hongwu and Yongle were indeed engaged in a huge building effort, aimed at showing symbolically their divine rights to power—the “Mandate of Heaven”. This resulted in as much as three projected capitals in the course of a few decades: f...

In a recent paper in Antiquity (Darvill 2022), the author has proposed that the project of the < > phase (stage 2) of Stonehenge (c. 2600 BC) was conceived in order to represent a calendar year of 365.25 days, that is, a calendar identical in duration to the Julian calendar. The aim of the present paper is to show that this idea is totally unsubsta...

This paper addresses the role of analogical reasoning in archaeoastronomy - the discipline which studies the connections between the ancient monuments and the heavens. Archaeoastronomy is a highly interdisciplinary science, placed at the border between the humanities – especially archaeology – and the scientific approach to cultural heritage. As a...

The Kofun period of the history of Japan—between the 3rd and the 7th century AD—bears its name from the construction of huge, earth mound tombs called Kofun. Among them, the largest have a keyhole shape and are attributed to the first, semi-legendary emperors. The study of the orientation of ancient tombs is usually a powerful tool to better unders...

The Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, is famous worldwide due to the magnificent temple of Heliopolitan Jupiter at Baalbek. In recent years, new research revived the interest in the unsolved problems posed by the Baalbek monuments, including original dating and construction phases, relationships with the landscape, and nature of the cult practiced. In a preli...

Present day Beijing developed on the urban layout of the Ming capital, founded in 1420 over the former city of Dadu, the Yuan dynasty capital. The planning of Ming Beijing aimed at conveying a key political message, namely that the ruling dynasty was in charge of the Mandate of Heaven, so that Beijing was the true cosmic centre of the world. We exp...

Today we explore the sky with powerful instruments and we know that there are millions of galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars. We are accustomed to thinking about the universe from an “unprivileged” point of view. We know, moreover, that the Sun is only one among billions of stars, and a pretty bog standard one at that, and...

The classical world, or classical antiquity, is a traditional all-embracing definition describing the cultures of the Mediterranean area from the Ancient Greek civilisation (eighth century BC) to the end of the Roman Empire. It thus includes Classical Greece, Hellenism, and Rome. This chapter is devoted to this broad historical period, and will pre...

An introduction to Archaeoastronomy in Asia, with a detailed discussion of the Chinese Qin and Han mausoleums, of the temples of Angkor, and of the Borobodur temple complex.

Egypt is a unique place: a short strip of fertile terrain, surrounded by desert, and refreshed only by the River Nile. The climate is consequently arid, but the land is fertile due to the nutritious soil brought by the river during its annual flooding. This land attracted an increasing number of people up until the formation of a unified kingdom ab...

Nowadays most of us do not look at the sky. Nevertheless, most people know “what star sign they belong to”. And yet the vast majority of people do not know what “belonging to a zodiac sign” actually means and have never seen their “sign” in the night sky. Indeed, hardly anyone ever glances at more than a few stars at night– for most people the issu...

Since all the objects in the sky obey to the deterministic laws of physics, their past and future movements are in principle predictable with the use of mathematical equations, especially for the exceedingly short (as compared to the life of the universe or even of the solar system) periods that are the focus of archaeoastronomy, let us say—to embr...

The Maya culture flourished in the area which extends from the Yucatan peninsula to south-east Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras (Coe in The Maya. Thames and Hudson, New York, 2001). Between the third and the ninth centuries AD—the so called Classic period—hundreds of Maya city states developed here; most of them then rapidly collapsed, for un...

In this chapter we shall investigate the place of archaeoastronomy within archaeological research, aiming to assess its methodological affinity with other scientific and humanities disciplines. Our objective is also to understand what the most desirable compromise between a rigorous scientific approach to data and the peculiar, human-dependent natu...

Ancient peoples’ attitudes towards, and relationships with, the natural environment and the landscape were often completely at odds from ours. Two fundamental concepts must be borne in mind, in particular. The first is that ancient man was a religious man, and the second is that religion was bound up with the natural cycles, and these natural cycle...

The connection between astronomy and daily life in ancient times—at least after the definitive establishment of sedentarian life—was far more complex than a simple understanding of natural cycles. We can be sure of this because the sky was linked to a fundamental mechanism of social dynamics: the management of power. To grasp the connection between...

Astronomy and Stonehenge: almost everyone has heard of this connection, so that Stonehenge has to be the almost obligatory starting point for our archaeoastronomical quest.

In recent archaeological investigations of Pompeii’s Regio V Houses, a series of new, rather enigmatic images on the floors of the entrance and of the tablinum of the House of Orion have been unearthed. The aim of the present paper is to analyze their placement in the context of the house plan, give a description of the images, and provide a hypoth...

A detailed visit to the most famous of the places where Feng Shui was applied as the main canon governing the landscape and the architectural projects. It is the valley of the Thirteen tombs of the Emperors of the Ming dynasty in Shisanling, not far from Beijing. The relationship of the tomb’s projects with the landscape are highlighted, as well as...

The advent of the Ming dynasty marks a new period of splendor, in which imperial architecture becomes fully inspired by Feng Shui. This is already evident in the architectural project of the first imperial tomb of the dynasty in Nanjing, Xiaoling, which is accurately described together with its companion, unfinished project: the (little known) huge...

An introduction to the Chinese worldview, which formed over the course of the millennia preceding the Qin unification and later crystallized in that peculiar and complex mixture of natural philosophy, knowledge and beliefs known under the name of Feng Shui.

The Western Han dynasty is the Chinese “Age of the Pyramids”: The Emperors were indeed buried under huge, squared mounds of rammed earth. These mausoleums form a fascinating sacred landscape along the course of the river Wei, not far from modern Xian. The astronomical orientations of these monuments as well as their relationships within each other...

Feng Shui—literally “Wind and Water “- is a geomantic doctrine, that is, a divination practice which surveys the characteristics of a place—morphology, orientation, distribution of waters and vegetation, climate and winds, and so on—to establish whether and to what extent a site under consideration is “auspicious” for the locating of graves, but al...

The Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China, left us magnificent architectural projects, which are sacred landscapes on their own and are thoroughly analysed here. Among them, the Summer palace in Beijing, the mountain resort of Chengde’, and most of all the two magnificent Necropolises usually called the Eastern and the Western Qing tombs...

The Tang and the Song periods are the “golden age” of imperial China under many respects, including art, architecture, and science. The sacred landscape of the Tang mausoleums, based on natural mountains but endowed with spectacular Sacred Ways, and that of the—less spectacular, but fascinating—Northern Song mausoleums are analysed. The curious, pe...

The first sacred landscape of imperial China, the gigantic Mausoleum of the first Emperor Shihuang, is described with a particular attention to the cognitive aspects. In particular, the Terracotta Warriors are framed within the general, symbolic significance of the complex.

This book analyses the magnificent imperial necropolises of ancient China from the perspective of Archaeoastronomy, a science which takes into account the landscape in which ancient monuments are placed, focusing especially but not exclusively on the celestial aspects. The power of the Chinese emperors was based on the so-called Mandate of Heaven:...

In recent archaeological investigations of Pompeii Regio V houses, a series of new, rather enigmatic images on the floors of the entrance and of the Tablinium of the so called House of Orion have been unearthed. These images are presented here together with a tentative interpretation, which is based on a clear analogy of their content with the illu...

Mixing and integrating approaches, resources and tools for an Augmented Book-MOOC on Archaeoastronomy Archaeoastronomy is the relatively new science which deals with the con-nection between astronomical phenomena and the project of many ancient monuments. The initiative presented here is based on the idea that it is nec-essary to integrate differe...

The chain of late Roman fortified settlements built in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt’s Western Desert, represents an interesting case-study to analyse how the ancient Roman town planners interacted with the landscape. A peculiar feature of the site is the existence of a prevailing, north-westerly wind, and it is possible to identify the average azimut...

The temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon is one of the most complex architectural projects ever conceived. Several issues remain unsolved about this site; in particular, the relative chronology and the dates of construction of the two ‘podia’ of the temple are unsure, as well as the true nature of the cult of Jupiter practiced there. We present...

The so-called “Chinese pyramids” are huge burial mounds covering the tombs of the Emperors of the Western Han dynasty. If we include also the mounds of the members of the royal families, these monuments sum up to more than 40, scattered throughout the western and the southern outskirts of modern Xi’an. They are mostly unexcavated and poorly known,...

The so-called “Chinese pyramids” are huge burial mounds covering the tombs of the Emperors of the Western Han dynasty. If we include also the mounds of the members of the royal families, these monuments sum up to more than 40, scattered throughout the western and the southern outskirts of modern Xi'an. They are mostly unexcavated and poorly known a...

The royal Chinese mausoleums of the Tang, Ming and Qing Chinese dynasties are astounding ensables of monuments, conceived and built to assure to the Emperors immortality in the afterlife and perennial fame on earth. To this aim, a series of cognitive elements were embodied in the funerary landscapes selected for such monuments, including astronomy,...

At Thebes, today’ Luxor, two among the most magnificent temples of humanity were built: Karnak, which was the “house” of Amun-Ra, and Luxor. Luxor was dedicated to Amun as well, but the God was worshipped there in a other “form”, Amenenope, the God of renewal. The two temples were connected by a processional avenue, the so-called Avenue of the Sphi...

The world famous Javanese temple of Borobudur is located at the westernmost end of a straight line which includes two satellite temples, Mendut and Pawon. Originally, the three buildings were probably connected by a processional path running along this line. It is shown here that the alignment points, at the horizon, where the sun sets in the days...

A recent exploration has shown the presence of a significant void in the Khufu pyramid. A possible explanation of this space, interpreted as a chamber aimed to contain a specific funerary equipment, is tentatively proposed on the basis of the Pyramid Texts.

The mausoleums of the Emperors and of some members of the royal family of the Western Han Chinese Dynasty are a spectacular ensemble of tombs, covered by huge earth mounds and scattered throughout the outskirts of modern Xi'an. Their inspiration comes from the world-famous mausoleum of the first Emperor of the Qin, who reigned immediately before th...

The chain of late Roman fortified settlements built in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt Western Desert, represents an interesting case study to analyse how the ancient Roman town planners interacted with the landscape. A peculiar feature of the site is the existence of a prevailing, north westerly wind, and it is possible to identify the average azimuth...

We present here in details the results obtained—within a campaign held in August 2015, aimed at a complete re-evaluation of the temples of Akragas—on the Temple of Demeter and Persephone. This temple, built on the eastern slopes of the Athena Rock, belongs to the final phase of the Archaic period (480–470 BC) and is traditionally attributed to the...

The issue of the orientation of Greek Temples has been the subject of much debate since the end of the 19th century. In fact, although a general tendency to orientation within the arc of the rising sun is undeniable, specific patterns and the true meaning remain obscure. With the aim of shedding light on this problem we present here a new, complete...

The burial mounds of the emperors and of some members of the royal family of the Western Han Chinese dynasty, popularly known as Chinese pyramids, are a spectacular ensemble of tombs covered by a huge earth mound, spread in the outskirts of modern Xian. Their inspiring model is the world famous tomb of the first emperor Qin, who reigned immediately...

Today we explore the sky with powerful instruments and we know that there are millions of galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars. We are accustomed to thinking about the universe from an “unprivileged” point of view. We know, moreover, that the Sun is only one among billions of stars, and a pretty bog standard one at that, and...

Astronomy and Stonehenge: almost everyone has heard of this connection, so that Stonehenge has to be the almost obligatory starting point for our archaeoastronomical quest.

Egypt is a unique place: a short strip of fertile terrain, surrounded by desert, and refreshed only by the River Nile. The climate is consequently arid, but the land is fertile due to the nutritious soil brought by the river during its annual flooding. This land attracted an increasing number of people up until the formation of a unified kingdom ab...

Nowadays most of us do not look at the sky. Nevertheless, most people know “what star sign they belong to”. And yet the vast majority of people do not know what “belonging to a zodiac sign” actually means and have never seen their “sign” in the night sky. Indeed, hardly anyone ever glances at more than a few stars at night– for most people the issu...

In this chapter we shall investigate the place of archaeoastronomy within archaeological research, aiming to assess its methodological affinity with other scientific and humanities disciplines. Our objective is also to understand what the most desirable compromise between a rigorous scientific approach to data and the peculiar, human-dependent natu...

This book provides the first complete, easy to read, up-to-date account of the fascinating discipline of archaeoastronomy, in which the relationship between ancient constructions and the sky is studied in order to gain a better understanding of the ideas of the architects of the past and of their religious and symbolic worlds. The book is divided i...

The heartland of the Khmer empire is literally crowded by magnificent monuments built in the course of many centuries. These monuments include the world-famous state-temples, such as Angkor Wat, but also many other temples and huge water reservoirs. Using Google Earth data as well as GIS data and reconstructing the ancient sky with Stellarium, we i...

The final state of spherical gravitational collapse can be analyzed applying to the geodesic equations governing the behavior of light rays near the singularity relatively simple but powerful techniques of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. In this way, explicit use of exact solutions of Einstein's field equations is not necessary, and resu...

The placement of the Middle Bronze Age settlement Villaggio dei Faraglioni on the Ustica island is analyzed from a cognitive point of view, taking into account archaeoastronomy and landscape archaeology aspects. It turns out that the place might have been selected because of its privileged position with respect to the landscape, better than conform...

Among the magnificent temple complexes built during the Khmer empire, two single out both for their distance from the Angkor heartland as well as for their anomalous, not cardinal, orientation: Koh Ker and Preah Khan of Kompong Svay. Their orientations are shown here to be connected with two relevant astronomical phenomena, namely the zenith passag...

The connection between astronomy and daily life in ancient times—at least after the definitive establishment of sedentarian life—was far more complex than a simple understanding of natural cycles. We can be sure of this because the sky was linked to a fundamental mechanism of social dynamics: the management of power. To grasp the connection between...

The classical world, or classical antiquity, is a traditional all-embracing definition describing the cultures of the Mediterranean area from the Ancient Greek civilisation (eighth century BC) to the end of the Roman Empire. It thus includes Classical Greece, Hellenism, and Rome. This chapter is devoted to this broad historical period, and will pre...

Ancient peoples’ attitudes towards, and relationships with, the natural environment and the landscape were often completely at odds from ours. Two fundamental concepts must be borne in mind, in particular. The first is that ancient man was a religious man, and the second is that religion was bound up with the natural cycles, and these natural cycle...

Since all the objects in the sky obey to the deterministic laws of physics, their past and future movements are in principle predictable with the use of mathematical equations, especially for the exceedingly short (as compared to the life of the universe or even of the solar system) periods that are the focus of archaeoastronomy, let us say—to embr...

The Maya culture flourished in the area which extends from the Yucatan peninsula to south-east Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras (Coe in The Maya. Thames and Hudson, New York, 2001). Between the third and the ninth centuries AD—the so called Classic period—hundreds of Maya city states developed here; most of them then rapidly collapsed, for un...

This book provides the first complete, easy to read, up-to-date account of the fascinating discipline of archaeoastronomy, in which the relationship between ancient constructions and the sky is studied in order to gain a better understanding of the ideas of the architects of the past and of their religious and symbolic worlds. The book is divided i...

The issue of the orientation of Greek Temples has been the subject of several debates since the end of the 19 century. In fact, although a general tendency to orientation within the arc of the rising sun is undeniable, specific patterns and true meaning remain obscure. With the aim of shedding light on this problem we present here a new complete, h...

The Pantheon is the best preserved ancient monument in Rome. Originally built under Augustus, its present form is due to Hadrian. In the almost complete absence of written sources, the design and the meaning of the Pantheon remain obscure. However, there is no doubt about the fundamental role of the sun in the project of the building, as well as ab...

The Etruscan religion was characterized by divination methods, aimed at interpreting the will of the gods. These methods were revealed by the gods themselves and written in the books of the Etrusca Disciplina. The books are lost, but parts of them are preserved in the accounts of later Latin sources. According to such traditions divination was tigh...

The two pyramids built during the Old Kingdom by the Fourth Dynasty King Sneferu at Dahshur are usually considered as two consecutive projects, the second - that of the Red Pyramid - being generated by a presumably failure of the first, the Bent Pyramid. In the present paper, we show that the archaeological proofs of such a scenario are far from ob...

Most of the “wonders” of our ancient past have come down to us without written information as to their scope, significance or design. This is obviously the case with monuments built by cultures deprived of written language, like the Incas, yet it is also true of many magnificent monuments which were built by fully literate cultures (such as the Egy...

Augustus' propaganda founded the ruler's power on a series of references to the sky: Caesar's comet, which helped to establish the divine nature of kingship, the completion of the calendar's reform celebrated in the Campus Martius' meridian, and Augustus' association with Capricorn, the zodiacal sign of the winter solstice. Various forms of proof d...

The towns founded by the Romans over the course of some eight centuries of history were always inspired by rigid principles of spatial organization, followed by the Roman military camps as well. The symbolism embodied in such rules was tightly and undubitably connected with the power of Rome. According to a variety of ancient sources, city planning...

Via Appia was built by the Romans around 312 BC to connect Rome with Capua during the Samnite wars. The road is an astonishing engineering masterpiece. In particular, the segment which runs from Collepardo to Terracina – 61 km long – is renowned for being virtually straight; however such a “straightness” was never investigated quantitatively. As a...

The role of the Luxor-Karnak relationship within the sacred space of eastern Thebes during the New Kingdom is analyzed taking into account cognitive aspects. In particular, the orientation of the so-called Avenue of the Sphinxes and the successive bends effected in the enlargements of the Luxor temple are shown to be related to already ancient, fam...

The structure of the Einstein field equations describing the gravitational collapse of spherically symmetric isotropic fluids is analyzed here for general equations of state. A suitable system of coordinates is constructed which allows us, under a hypothesis of Taylor-expandability with respect to one of the coordinates, to approach the problem of...

In recent years, different scientific disciplines, from Physics to Egyptology, from Geology to Archaeoastronomy, evidenced a series of clues pointing to the possibility that the original project of the pyramid complex of Khufu at Giza included also the project of the second pyramid complex at the same site, that of Khafra. The aim of the present pa...

The Domus Aurea, Nero's last "palace" constructed in the very heart of ancient Rome, is a true masterpiece of Roman architecture. We explore here symbolic aspects of the emperor's project, analysing the archaeoastronomy of the best preserved part of the Domus, the Esquiline Wing. In particular, we study the so-called Octagonal Room, the huge vaulte...

Via Appia, built around 312 BC, is an engineering masterpiece, its most striking feature being the segment between Colle Pardo and Terracina, which goes “straight” for about 61 km. We investigate this segment by GPS techniques: results lead to uncover that the original project of the road was based on a complex interplay between geometry and astron...

The ancient town of Tarquinia is the key place of the Etruscan system of beliefs, since its foundations were credited to Tarchon, descendant of the Greek hero Herakles, founder of the Etruscan League, and discloser of the sacred texts of the Etrusca Disciplina. These were said to come from the infant oracle Tages, who sprang out from the terrain in...

NNJ guest editor Giulio Magli introduces the papers on archaeoastronomy in NNJ vol. 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2013).

Augusta Praetoria Salassorum, modern Aosta, was founded around 25 BC to celebrate the victory of Augustus army on the Salassi. Aosta is a city of the founder under many respects; for instance, one of the two twin temples of the forum was devoted to Augustus, and a huge triumphal arc to the ruler still welcomes the town visitors. Recently, a sculpte...

The topography of the pyramids of the twelfth dynasty is explored here in its full historical and chronological context, with the aim of highlighting connections between the architectural choices, religious ideas, and traditions inspiring the reigns of the Pharaohs of that period. There emerges a clear and close connection between the conceptual la...

The megalithic enclosures of Gobekli Tepe (Urfa, Turkey) are the most ancient sacred structures of stone known so far, dating back to the 10 millennium BC. The possible presence of astronomical targets for these structures is analysed, and it turns out that they may have been oriented, or even originally constructed, to celebrate and successively f...