Karahundj - Page 7

A Complex And Elegant Instrument continued

"The latitude at Sissian is 40°," Herouni says. "From there the position of the sun at mid day on the summer solstice is 50°.

The eye-hole in stone #62 is angled at 50°, just over the tip of the rooster stone (#60). But the angle of the eye-hole in stone #63 (the leveling stone) is 40°, that is, the same angle as the latitude at Sissian. These were the stones we used to watch the summer solstice. We had our telescopes, our instruments hooked up at the same angle, but the stones were still so accurate we wondered why we needed all these expensive tools. The stones were so elegantly correct."

Other stones mark the sun at its zenith at the equinox. "March 21 is the beginning of Spring. We all know that. March 21 was also the beginning of the New Year in the Old Armenian Calendar. These stones were crucial to marking the start of the year." Herouni adds that holes also point to constellations in the night sky, and that the site was also a university.

"Stones #160 and #161 are what I call the university. # 160 looks West to a low hill, and is positioned for an adult to look through it. Right next to it lies stone # 161, which looks at the same point, but is much lower. It is ideal for a child to use. I believe it was used to teach the next generation how to use the complex."

The Zodiac

The one thing Parsamian needed to better date the site was a key inscription or design like the compass and trapezium she found at Metsamor. If she had found that, she could have begun her calculations based on a stellar calendar. But she could not find the key to unlock this final mystery, and so returned to her work at Metsamor and as an astrophysicist at Byurakan.

Herouni believes he has found the key, and using the same method Parsamian used to date the observatory at Metsamor, is conjecturing that the stones are so much older than the excavated graves, it will "shake everyone's theories about when astronomy began."

To put Herouni's theory into perspective, it is important to understand what the classical history of the beginning of astronomy was. That history officially begins around 3500 BC, when Mesopotamians were thought to have built ziggurats (stepped towers resembling a pyramid) in Sumeria, in order to study the night sky. It continues to ca. 2800 BC, when historians thought the division of the firmament into constellations was completed, creating the Zodiac.

It concludes with the first Babylonian Empire (ca. 2400-1800 BC), where historians say the first astronomy really began, as well as the first calendar, a counting system based on 60 (the beginning of time division), and the first navigation. In some histories the whole thing occurred during the Babylonian empire period.