THE RITUAL OF BARROWS AND CIRCLES, 227 



" be placed in such a manner that those passing by may look 

 " towards them and make their obeisance." * 



The Chaldaeans were the first astronomers. Four thousand 

 years ago they raised towers for the study of the heavens. They 

 made a map of the stars, and differentiated the planets. They 

 conceived the signs of the zodiac. They recognised the annual 

 displacement of the equinoctial point upon the ecliptic. They 

 determined the mean daily movements of the moon and foretold 

 her eclipses. But was this pursuit undertaken solely from a love 

 of science ? By no means. Cicero remarked that the 

 astronomic learning of the Chaldaeans was acquired that they 

 might be " able to predict what would happen to each individual, 

 and with what destiny each person was born " ; f and they 

 claimed ability to assign for him, before he undertook any 

 important work, the hour in which his star would be in the best 

 quarter of the sky, and in the most propitious relation with other 

 stellar movements. 



All the buildings of these men, these Chaldaeans and Assyrians, 

 whose desire was to " hitch their wagon to the stars," were 

 oriented. Always rectangular, or even square on plan, it was 

 sometimes the faces, but more often the angles, of their buildings 

 that Avere turned to the four cardinal points, one corner in the 

 latter case being directed to the north. Modern astronomical 

 observatories face the true south. 



Far different from the wide and elevated plains of Chaldgea 

 was the narrow land of Egypt, following the course of the Nile, 

 and often walled in by cliffs. But the desire of the Egyptians 

 was less to obtain from the stars a successful career in this life, 

 than to link the destiny of their dead to the course of the sun, 

 who sank every evening behind the Libyan chain. All the 

 Egyptian cemeteries were placed, when practicable, on the left 

 bank of the Nile, and all the known pyramids were built in the 

 west. The mourners who followed a funeral procession 



* Lib. IV. c. 5. 



t DeDivinat. I. 1-2. 



