Archaeoastronomy in Action: The Role of Images in Understanding and Promoting Astronomical Heritage

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 Egyptians’ pyramids). However, there can be no doubt as to the interest of the builders of most of these monuments in the celestial cycles. Bearing witness to this are the stones themselves, which show clearly that astronomy was integrated as a key ingredient into the design. For this reason the scientific discipline called Archaeoastronomy—the study of the relationship between architecture and the sky—has proved to be an extremely powerful instrument in gaining a better understanding of the ideas of the architects of the past as well as of their religious and symbolic worlds. In recent years Archaeoastronomy has evolved to a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary science examining “the ancient landscape, including the sky”. Archaeoastronomy can be more easily explained to the general public when it is “in action”. In fact it can be said that by orienting monuments to the celestial cycles the ancients left us a series of appointments with the celestial realm. Those fixed with the stars are today lost, due to a physical phenomenon called precession, but can be recreated by computer simulation; in uncountably many cases the connection was however with the sun, and therefore we can feel the emotion of seeing, for instance, the sun rising or setting in alignment with peculiar features of magnificent monuments in specific days of the year more or less in the same manner it was planned to be seen millennia ago. We explore here this issue—and in particular the role of images for understanding and promoting cultural heritage—by showing two key examples: that of the Pantheon on the day of the foundation of Rome and that of the pyramids of Giza at the summer solstice.