![]() The voyage of the Greek navigator Pytheas of Massalia is a particularly notable example of a very long, early voyage. ![]() For example, Apollonius would have used β Draconis to navigate as he traveled west from the mouth of the Alpheus River to Syracuse. To navigate along a degree of latitude a sailor would have needed to find a circumpolar star above that degree in the sky. The sailor replies with his description of the use of circumpolar stars to navigate by. In the mid-1st century AD Lucan writes of Pompey who questions a sailor about the use of stars in navigation. īy the third century BC the Greeks had begun to use the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, to navigate. The pole stars were used to navigate because they did not disappear below the horizon and could be seen consistently throughout the night. Around 1000 BC the constellation Draco would have been closer to the North Pole than Polaris. This change in the position of the stars is due to the wobble of the Earth on its axis which affects primarily the pole stars. The positions described do not match the locations of the stars during Aratus' or Eudoxos' time for the Greek mainland, but some argue that they match the sky from Crete during the Bronze Age. The Greek poet Aratus wrote in his Phainomena in the third century BC detailed positions of the constellations as written by Eudoxos. ![]() Written records of navigation using stars, or celestial navigation, go back to Homer's Odyssey where Calypso tells Odysseus to keep the Bear (Ursa Major) on his left hand side and at the same time to observe the position of the Pleiades, the late-setting Boötes and the Orion as he sailed eastward from her island Ogygia traversing the Ocean. Here the sailors would use the locations of particular stars, especially those of the constellation Ursa Major, to orient the ship in the correct direction. Both of these trips would have taken more than a day's sail for the Minoans and would have left them traveling by night across open water. The Minoans made sea voyages to the island of Thera and to Egypt. Their palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries exhibit architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes, as well as the rising and setting of particular stars. Minoans of Crete are an example of an early Western civilization that used celestial navigation. Sailors navigating in the Mediterranean made use of several techniques to determine their location, including staying in sight of land and understanding of the winds and their tendencies. Settlers from Borneo reached Madagascar by the early 1st millennium AD and colonized it by AD 500. Meanwhile, Austronesians in Island Southeast Asia began the first true maritime trade networks by about 1000 BC, linking China, southern India, the Middle East, and coastal eastern Africa. Songs, mythological stories, and star charts were used to help people remember important navigational information. ![]() Polynesian navigators used a range of tools and methods, including observation of birds, star navigation, and use of waves and swells to detect nearby land. Within the next few centuries Polynesians reached Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island and possibly South America. In this region, a distinctive Polynesian culture developed. By about 900 BC their descendants had spread more than 6,000 kilometers across the Pacific, reaching Tonga and Samoa. Their first long-distance voyaging was the colonization of Micronesia from the Philippines at around 1500 BC. Navigation in the Indo-Pacific began with the maritime migrations of the Austronesians from Taiwan who spread southwards into Island Southeast Asia and Island Melanesia during a period between 30 BC. Map showing the seaborne migration and expansion of the Austronesians beginning at around 3000 BC ![]()
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