Astronomy and ancient eclipse art–Is it a science?

Abstract

This entire interdisciplinary concept and the related research began by seeing a photograph of King Esarhaddon’s stele found at Zincirli (Sam’al), in Turkey. It shows two eccentric circles in the sky, a circle inside a larger one, touching each other above (Figure 1 M–N). This is a rare combination in real life and not really a decorative motif. The photo made an instant impression on the author that it had been a design commemorating an annular–total solar eclipse seen there. A long search in books and articles yielded many similar “records.” The more interesting ones are tabulated in Figure 1. At some of them we inserted a similar real configuration, usually from the nearest such eclipse, computed by the WinEclipse software.