According to my decipherments, the ancients made planispheres of stars within the ellipse of the Milky Way ca. 4000 B.C. or previous -- such as e.g. the Lake Onega Planisphere (my decipherment) now located in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Note that the ancients saw the brightest star groups in the heavens similarly to -- but surely not identically with -- the way we see them today.
The Berbers of North Africa saw heaven's center as a camel chased by hyenas and one or two hyenas could be marked in the stones at Carn Bica, one as a possibly baby hyena (?) in the hand (?) of the king and the other off to the right in the stones -- in our decipherment -- as Boötes, a constellation whose name is a term of ancient unknown origin.
This location of the hyena at "Bootes" (without the Umlaut for search engines) puzzled us greatly since it did not correspond to known ancient names for Boötes in Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names, so we followed a hunch and looked at the languages of Africa, thus discovering that the Bantu Kinyamwezi word for "hyena" is bìtí, which definitely now suggests that the modern and ancient term Boötes may come from an older term in Africa originally meaning "hyena(s)". (Several other Bantu languages have a similar "b-" based term for "hyena" but have lost the T.) See The Bantu Basic Vocabulary Database. Such discoveries occur when the decipherment is sound.
Decipherment and illustration above by Andis Kaulins, December 29, 2013. The illustration is based upon a tracing by Andis Kaulins
(see the traced photo below)
of a photo by Rudi Winter © 2010 at Geograph.co.uk, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).
White marks on stone can sometimes reflect cupmarks and in this case were instrumental to identify the head stars of Scorpio -- lower right hand corner.
Please note that this posting is part of a series of postings by Andis Kaulins on the megalithic sites in the Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire, Wales. See also:
Decipherment of Carn Arthur, Wales, Pembrokeshire as Hermetic Astronomy, "As Above, So Below"
Carn Menyn (Carn Meini, OS Carnmenyn) Deciphered as Marking the Stars of Draco
King Arthur Pictured at Carn Bica Outcrop: Arthur's "Bedd" is the Circle of Precession
What is the Ancient Gaelic Term for "King"?
King Arthur at Carn Bica Outcrop - Visual Interpretation for Those Who May Be Good at Texts but Not At Picture Visualization
What About that Camel in the King Arthur Carn Bica Outcrop?
King Arthur, the Carn Bica Outcrop, A Berber Camel, and Two Hyenas at Heaven's Center in Ancient Astronomy
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