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Archaeoastronomy of the Temples of the Bekaa Valley
Full text linkThe 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 preliminary paper, we used archaeoastronomy to propose that the project of the Temple of Jupiter was a unified one conceived under Herod the Great, and that the cult was strongly connected to the renewal of the seasonal cycles. Here, we extend and confirm this analysis considering the other temples of the Baalbek proper and the three prominent sanctuaries which lie in the Bekaa Valley on the way to Baalbek from Berytus, showing the existence of an orientation custom which appears to originate in Baalbek and to inform all these sacred places
The Role of Astronomy and Feng Shui in the Planning of Ming Beijing
Full text linkPresent 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 explore here, using satellite imagery and palaeomagnetic data analysys, symbolic aspects of the planning of the city related to astronomical alignments and to the feng shui doctrine, both in its “form” and “compass” schools. In particular, we show that orientations of the axes of the “cosmic” temples and of the Forbidden City were most likely magnetic, while astronomy was used in topographical connections between the temples and in the plan of the Forbidden City in itself
The Orientation of the Kofun Tombs
Full text linkThe 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 understand the cognitive aspects of religion and power in ancient societies. This study has never been carried out in Japan due to the very large number of Kofun and to the fact that access to the perimeter is usually forbidden. For these reasons, to investigate Kofun orientations, simple tools of satellite imagery are used here. Our results strongly point to a connection of all Kofun entrance corridors with the arc of the sky where the Sun and the Moon are visible every day of the year; additionally, these show an orientation of the keyhole Kofun to the arc of the rising/shining Sun, the goddess that the Japanese emperors put at the mythical origin of their dynasty
The dynamical structure of the ADM equations for general relativistic isotropic elastic media
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The dynamical behaviour of homogeneous scalar-field spacetimes with general self-interaction potentials
No full textThe dynamics of homogeneous Robertson–Walker cosmological models with a self-interacting scalar field source is examined here in full generality, requiring only the scalar field potential to be bounded from below and divergent when the field diverges. In this way we are able to give a unified treatment of all the already studied cases—such as positive potentials which exhibit asymptotically polynomial or exponential behaviors—together with its extension to a much wider set of physically sensible potentials. Since the set includes potentials with negative inferior bound, we are able to give, in particular, the analysis of the asymptotically anti De Sitter states for such cosmologies
AN EDUCATIONAL PROJECT IN ARCHEOASTRONOMY: THE POK-COURSERA MOOC COURSE
Full text linkMOOCs, or Massive Online Open Courses, are a relatively new e-learning based tool on web platforms integrating short video lessons, tests and didactic materials. In June 2016 the MOOC platform of the Politecnico of Milan launched a course entitled "Archaeoastronomy: the science of stars and stones" devoted to the general public and exported, since autumn 2016, on the platform Coursera. We briefly overview here the context in which the course has been developed, and the way in which the storyboards of the course which is entirely filmed in the form of, green screen plug-in. of the teacher in the different scenarios object of study - have been developed. After one year, the course has more than 9000 subscribers worldwide, a number which allows us to perform a first evaluation of the most common student's difficulties and critical views
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