History Online - Eclipses

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Eclipses
Part I

The effect of shifting the dates of eclipses forwards

One important fact discovered in is that all the eclipses of the second class are not dated by the formal astronomical approach traditionally as, for example, in and by 700 B.C. to A.D. 400, but substantially later. These dates sometimes differ from the traditional ones by several centuries. Meanwhile, these new astronomical solutions (dates) fall into the time interval from A.D. 400 to 1600. The forceful distortion of the dates, made by the earlier chro-nologists, and fixed in the classical papers and is due to the pressure of chronological tradition. The astronomers had to look for the required astronomical solutions only within a narrow, prescribed time interval. More than that, in most cases, an exact astronomical solution could not be found, and the astronomers had to exhibit an eclipse only partly satisfying the description contained in the ancient document (see the examples below). In making use of the method of formal astronomical dating, this deviation (strained solution) vanishes, which leads to the appearance of new astronomical solutions (dates), although different from the traditional ones.

Continuing the investigations started in the author has also analyzed the medieval eclipses from A.D. 400 to 1600 on the basis of formal astronomical dating methods. It turned out that the effect of shifting the eclipse dates forwards, which had been discovered in the above-mentioned paper only for ancient eclipses, could be extended also to the eclipses traditionally dated as belonging to the interval A.D. 400-900. In particular, many pieces of written evidence (due to the extreme vagueness of their formulations) proved to admit a large spectrum of astronomical solutions distributed over the entire possible period of history. It is only beginning with about A.D. 900, and not A.D. 400, as was suggested originally that the traditional eclipse dates become satisfactorily consistent with the results of the application of the formal astronomical dating method. Finally, this consistency becomes reliable only after about A.D. 1300.

This result agrees with the theory of empirical corrections employed in (Pp. 4-6), to revise the formulas for the calculation of eclipse dates. Thus, as 21 'basic eclipses' receiving detailed descriptions in at least 10 ancient texts, we can take those dated to the right of (later than) A.D. 840 (42 reports) and distributed in the interval up to A.D. 1386 . On the other hand, we recall that it is since A.D. 1300 (p. 114) that the graph of parameter D' has finally been stabilized and aligned. Thus, this moment of the graph's stabilization coincides with the origin of the interval of reliable consistency of the dates of ancient eclipses and with the results of the application of the formal astronomical dating method. An extremely small number of the dates of eclipses in the time interval from A.D. 400 to 900 we discovered and which do not contradict the formal astronomical dating method, is of little importance statistically. At any rate, this is true from the standpoint of the new computation of the graph of D'.

Before stating the results of the new computations of the graph of D', we shall dwell at length on the effect of shifting the dates of ancient eclipses in the Middle Ages. Above, we have indicated the difficulties facing the astronomers in dating many of the eclipses traditionally. They were caused by the requirement of traditional chronology to place the dates of eclipses in a narrow, prescribed time interval. The formal astronomical dating method removes these obstacles. Because of considerable factual material, we give here only a short summary, the final results, and typical examples.

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