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98-546: The concept was adopted into the subsequent Classical and Medieval models of heavenly spheres , but was dropped with advances in astronomy in the 16th and 17th centuries . Today it is known as a synonym for sky or heaven . In English, the word "firmament" is recorded as early as 1250, in the Middle English Story of Genesis and Exodus . It later appeared in the King James Bible . The same word

196-536: A concrete firmament above the Earth, built by God and lifted up: the firmament is maintained not by any pillars but by God directly maintaining it, in a description resembling that of the Syriac theologian Jacob of Serugh in his Hexaemeron . Another commonality between the two is in describing the firmament as being decorated by stars. The heavens are analogized to a roof, structure, and edifice without crack or fissure. It

294-422: A cosmology without a firmament: an infinite universe in which the stars are actually suns with their own planetary systems. After Galileo began using a telescope to examine the sky it became harder to argue that the heavens were perfect, as Aristotelian philosophy suggested, and by 1630 the concept of solid orbs was no longer dominant. Celestial spheres The celestial spheres , or celestial orbs , were

392-475: A discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages . Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the spiritual plane, where God was at the center and the Earth at the periphery. Near the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante , in

490-400: A dome, or as a tent; the latter inspired from biblical references, though the latter is without an evident precedent. As for its composition, just as in cuneiform literature the rabbinic texts describe that the firmament was made out of a solid form of water, not just the conventional liquid water known on the Earth. A different tradition makes an analogy between the creation of the firmament and

588-472: A leaf. On the other hand, some rabbis viewed it as immensely thick. Estimates that it was as thick as a 50 year journey or a 500 year journey were made. Debates on the thickness of the firmament also impacted debates on the path of the sun in its journey as it passes through the firmament through passageways called the "doors" or "windows" of heaven. The number of heavens or firmaments was often given as more than one: sometimes two, but much more commonly, seven. It

686-542: A magical text to ensure the king's ascent into heaven. It has also been viewed as thematically similar to more developed accounts of the destruction of humanity in the Mesopotamian and biblical flood myths . The reign of Akhenaten – the pharaoh who had attempted to bring about a break in the existent religious traditions – may be the inspiration for the work. The Book of the Heavenly Cow is divided in half by

784-473: A narrative is as well as how myths influence them. James P. Allen's book Genesis In Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts , published in 1988, consists of thousands of texts that discuss the cosmology and cosmogony of Ancient Egypt. It sheds light on a question that plagued the minds of Egyptologists for years, the origin of the world (which the section of the heavenly cow deals with). Anthony Spalinger in 2000 published his translations of

882-458: A predictive astronomical model, but it was discussed by later European astronomers and philosophers. In the thirteenth century the astronomer al-'Urḍi proposed a radical change to Ptolemy's system of nesting spheres. In his Kitāb al-Hayáh , he recalculated the distance of the planets using parameters which he redetermined. Taking the distance of the Sun as 1,266 Earth radii, he was forced to place

980-637: A subsidiary room, but an excerpt from the book was inscribed in a niche in his tomb. Another excerpt is written on a papyrus from the Ramesside period, now in Turin . The book may have originated from the Pyramid Texts 's dawn myth accounts, but by the New Kingdom the idea was developed to explain death and suffering in an imperfect creation. The work has been viewed as a form of theodicy and

1078-522: Is extremely broad and stretched, but it is also constantly broadening. Though there has been some dispute over the exact shape of the Quranic firmament (primarily over whether it is flat or domed), the most recent study by Tabatabaʾi and Mirsadri favors a flat firmament. In addition, there are seven heavens or firmaments and they were made from smoke during the creation week, resembling the view of Basil of Caesarea . The model established by Aristotle became

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1176-616: Is found in French and German Bible translations , all from Latin firmamentum (a firm object), used in the Vulgate (4th century). This in turn is a calque of the Greek στερέωμᾰ ( steréōma ), also meaning a solid or firm structure (Greek στερεός = rigid), which appears in the Septuagint , the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars around 200 BC. These words all translate

1274-731: Is primarily known from cuneiform literature such as the Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš and the Bible : in particular, the Genesis creation narrative as well as some passing references in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah . Between these two main sources, there is a fundamental agreement in the cosmological models pronounced: this included a flat and likely disk-shaped world with a solid firmament. The two primary structural representations of

1372-418: Is unclear whether the notion of the seven heavens is related to earlier near eastern cosmology or the Greek notion of the surrounding of the Earth by seven concentric spheres: one for the sun, one for the moon, and one for each of the five other (known) planets. A range of additional discussions in rabbinic texts surrounding the firmament included those on the upper waters, the movements of the heavenly bodies and

1470-607: The Paradiso of his Divine Comedy , described God as a light at the center of the cosmos. Here the poet ascends beyond physical existence to the Empyrean Heaven, where he comes face to face with God himself and is granted understanding of both divine and human nature. Later in the century, the illuminator of Nicole Oresme 's Le livre du Ciel et du Monde , a translation of and commentary on Aristotle's De caelo produced for Oresme's patron, King Charles V , employed

1568-901: The Biblical Hebrew word rāqīaʿ ( רָקִ֫יעַ ‎), used for example in Genesis 1.6, where it is contrasted with shamayim ( שָׁמַיִם ‎), translated as " heaven(s) " in Genesis 1.1. Rāqīaʿ derives from the root rqʿ ( רָקַע ‎), meaning "to beat or spread out thinly". The Hebrew lexicographers Brown, Driver and Briggs gloss the noun with "extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out )" and distinguish two main uses: 1. "(flat) expanse (as if of ice), as base, support", and 2. "the vault of heaven, or 'firmament,' regarded by Hebrews as solid and supporting 'waters' above it." A related noun, riqquaʿ ( רִקּוּעַ ‎), found in Numbers 16.38 (Hebrew numbering 17.3), refers to

1666-562: The Hexaemeron of Basil of Caesarea the firmament is depicted as spherical or domed with a flat underside that formed a pocket or membrane in which the waters were held. Not all of the Church fathers followed Origen. Manlio Simonetti noted Basil of Caesarea 's "strong tone of criticism" of Origen's teaching. Appealing to a Platonic division between base matter and heavenly or spiritual matter, Augustine of Hippo would distinguish between

1764-531: The Middle Ages . It made no sense under the explanations of the natural world proposed by Aristotle, recalling the statement from Augustine's literal commentary on Genesis: "Our business now, after all, is to inquire how God's Scriptures say he established things according to their proper natures." Scholastic theologians engaged in the pursuit of applying natural science to illuminate the sacred included Alexander of Hales , William of Auxerre (who offered that

1862-571: The Scientific Revolution . In the early 1600s, Kepler continued to discuss celestial spheres, although he did not consider that the planets were carried by the spheres but held that they moved in elliptical paths described by Kepler's laws of planetary motion . In the late 1600s, Greek and medieval theories concerning the motion of terrestrial and celestial objects were replaced by Newton's law of universal gravitation and Newtonian mechanics , which explain how Kepler's laws arise from

1960-470: The Tashil al-Majisti , believed to be written by Thābit ibn Qurra , presented minor variations of Ptolemy's distances to the celestial spheres. In his Zij , Al-Battānī presented independent calculations of the distances to the planets on the model of nesting spheres, which he thought was due to scholars writing after Ptolemy. His calculations yielded a distance of 19,000 Earth radii to the stars. Around

2058-542: The "Destruction of Mankind", in which humanity plots against the Sun God Ra. After Ra consulting with the other gods, the goddess Hathor is chosen by Ra to act as the violent Eye of Ra . She was to deliver divine punishment to humanity and did so by slaughtering the rebels and bringing death into the world. The survivors of Hathor's wrath were saved, when Ra tricked Hathor by putting dyed beer that resembled blood, which Hathor drinks, becoming intoxicated . The final part of

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2156-418: The 16th century. Bede reasoned that the waters might be held in place if they were frozen solid: the siderum caelum (heaven of the celestial bodies) was made firm ( firmatum ) in the midst of the waters so should be interpreted as having the firmness of crystalline stone ( cristallini Iapidis ). A distinctive collection of ideas about the cosmos were drawn up and recorded in the rabbinic literature , though

2254-436: The 6th century BC illustrates a world map. In ancient Egyptian texts, and from texts across the near east generally, the firmament was described as having special doors or gateways on the eastern and western horizons to allow for the passage of heavenly bodies during their daily journeys. These were known as the windows of heaven or the gates of heaven. In Egyptian texts particularly, these gates also served as conduits between

2352-427: The Heavenly Cow was discovered in the outermost gilded shrine of Tutankhamun ; however, the ancient text was incomplete. Three complete versions of the ancient text were discovered on the walls of the tombs of Seti I , Ramesses II , and Ramesses III . Each version of the texts was found in a subsidiary room of the sarcophagus chamber exclusively designed for the Book of the Heavenly Cow . Ramesses VI did not have

2450-475: The Hellenistic Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria , who proposed a distinction between the material and eternal creations but does not appear to have associated matter or materiality with evil. Under Origen's influence the waters above became associated with the spiritual plane of Christian contemplative exercise and the waters below with the demonic and infernal. The firmament is the boundary between

2548-670: The Middle Ages, the common opinion in Europe was that celestial bodies were moved by external intelligences, identified with the angels of revelation . The outermost moving sphere , which moved with the daily motion affecting all subordinate spheres, was moved by an unmoved mover , the Prime Mover , who was identified with God. Each of the lower spheres was moved by a subordinate spiritual mover (a replacement for Aristotle's multiple divine movers), called an intelligence. Early in

2646-456: The Moon and the Sun and four each for the models of the other five planets, thus making 26 spheres in all. Callippus modified this system, using five spheres for his models of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars and retaining four spheres for the models of Jupiter and Saturn, thus making 33 spheres in all. Each planet is attached to the innermost of its own particular set of spheres. Although

2744-481: The Ptolemaic model of "nesting spheres and the cosmic dimensions derived from it". Even following the adoption of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe, new versions of the celestial sphere model were introduced, with the planetary spheres following this sequence from the central Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Mainstream belief in the theory of celestial spheres did not survive

2842-466: The Sun, Moon, and planets, and also the Earth, all just ride on air like leaves because of their breadth. And whilst the fixed stars are carried around in a complete circle by the stellar sphere, the Sun, Moon and planets do not revolve under the Earth between setting and rising again like the stars do, but rather on setting they go laterally around the Earth like a cap turning halfway around the head until they rise again. And unlike Anaximander, he relegated

2940-475: The ancient text containing roots from Late Egypt, it is widely believed among Egyptology scholars that the Book of the Heavenly Cow originated during the Amarna period. The text has three images: With the discovery of the Book of the Heavenly Cow , there have been many publications over the years discussing the contents of the ancient text. In 1876, Édouard Naville published English and French translations of

3038-403: The astronomer Ptolemy (fl. c. 150 AD) developed geometrical predictive models of the motions of the stars and planets and extended them to a unified physical model of the cosmos in his Planetary hypotheses . By using eccentrics and epicycles , his geometrical model achieved greater mathematical detail and predictive accuracy than had been exhibited by earlier concentric spherical models of

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3136-646: The blessed dead, perhaps appoints Geb as his heir, hands over the rule of humankind to Osiris ( Thoth ruling the night sky as his deputy), with Shu and the Heh gods now supporting the sky goddess Nut . Though the text is recorded in the New Kingdom period, it is written in Middle Egyptian and may have been written during the Middle Kingdom period. The earliest known copy of the Book of

3234-479: The body of the cosmos was made in the most perfect and uniform shape, that of a sphere containing the fixed stars. But it posited that the planets were spherical bodies set in rotating bands or rings rather than wheel rims as in Anaximander's cosmology. Instead of bands, Plato's student Eudoxus developed a planetary model using concentric spheres for all the planets, with three spheres each for his models of

3332-425: The causes of their motion. Adi Setia describes the debate among Islamic scholars in the twelfth century, based on the commentary of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi about whether the celestial spheres are real, concrete physical bodies or "merely the abstract circles in the heavens traced out… by the various stars and planets." Setia points out that most of the learned, and the astronomers, said they were solid spheres "on which

3430-479: The celestial spheres as a "great machine of the universe" constructed by God. The explorer Vasco da Gama is shown the celestial spheres in the form of a mechanical model. Contrary to Cicero's representation, da Gama's tour of the spheres begins with the Empyrean, then descends inward toward Earth, culminating in a survey of the domains and divisions of earthly kingdoms, thus magnifying the importance of human deeds in

3528-464: The celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter. Near the end of the twelfth century, the Spanish Muslim astronomer al-Bitrūjī (Alpetragius) sought to explain the complex motions of the planets without Ptolemy's epicycles and eccentrics, using an Aristotelian framework of purely concentric spheres that moved with differing speeds from east to west. This model was much less accurate as

3626-408: The celestial spheres were "imaginary things" and "more tenuous than a spider's web". His views were challenged by al-Jurjani (1339–1413), who maintained that even if the celestial spheres "do not have an external reality, yet they are things that are correctly imagined and correspond to what [exists] in actuality". Medieval astronomers and philosophers developed diverse theories about the causes of

3724-407: The celestial spheres' motions. They attempted to explain the spheres' motions in terms of the materials of which they were thought to be made, external movers such as celestial intelligences, and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed forces. Most of these models were qualitative, although a few incorporated quantitative analyses that related speed, motive force and resistance. By the end of

3822-510: The conception is rooted deeply in the tradition of near eastern cosmology recorded in Hebrew, Akkadian, and Sumerian sources, combined with some additional influences in the newer Greek ideas about the structure of the cosmos and the heavens in particular. The rabbis viewed the heavens to be a solid object spread over the Earth, which was described with the biblical Hebrew word for the firmament, raki’a . Two images were used to describe it: either as

3920-408: The contents of the Book of the Heavenly Cow into German with insight into the overall ancient text. Alexandre Piankoff in 1955 published one of the first translations of the Book of the Heavenly Cow which heavily detailed the creation narrative and Erik Hornung in 1983 did the same thing but in more detail. Antonio Loprieno and James P. Allen are two individuals who have made contributions to

4018-514: The cosmos. In Ptolemy's physical model, each planet is contained in two or more spheres, but in Book 2 of his Planetary Hypotheses Ptolemy depicted thick circular slices rather than spheres as in its Book 1. One sphere/slice is the deferent , with a centre offset somewhat from the Earth; the other sphere/slice is an epicycle embedded in the deferent, with the planet embedded in the epicyclical sphere/slice. Ptolemy's model of nesting spheres provided

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4116-460: The curdling of milk into cheese. Another tradition is that a combination of fire and water makes up the heavens. This is somewhat similar to a view attributed to Anaximander, whereby the firmament is made of a mixture of hot and cold (or fire and moisture). Yet another dispute concerned how thick the firmament was. A view attributed to R. Joshua b. R. Nehemiah was that it was extremely thin, no thicker than two or three fingers. Some rabbis compared it to

4214-541: The divine plan. Book of the Heavenly Cow B C D F G H I K M N P Q R S T U W The Book of the Heavenly Cow , or the Book of the Cow of Heaven , is an Ancient Egyptian text thought to have originated during the Amarna Period and, in part, describes the reasons for the imperfect state of the world in terms of humankind's rebellion against

4312-604: The dominant model in the Classical and Medieval world-view, and even when Copernicus placed the Sun at the center of the system he included an outer sphere that held the stars (and by having the earth rotate daily on its axis it allowed the firmament to be completely stationary). Tycho Brahe 's studies of the nova of 1572 and the Comet of 1577 were the first major challenges to the idea that orbs existed as solid, incorruptible, material objects, and in 1584 Giordano Bruno proposed

4410-410: The earthly and heavenly realms for which righteous people could ascend. The gateways could be blocked by gates to prevent entry by the deceased as well. As such, funerary texts included prayers enlisting the help of the gods to enable the safe ascent of the dead. Ascent to the celestial realm could also be done by a celestial ladder made by the gods. Four different Egyptian models of the firmament and/or

4508-410: The elect, and of the coelestiall angelles." In the sixteenth century, a number of philosophers, theologians, and astronomers—among them Francesco Patrizi , Andrea Cisalpino, Peter Ramus , Robert Bellarmine , Giordano Bruno , Jerónimo Muñoz, Michael Neander , Jean Pena, and Christoph Rothmann —abandoned the concept of celestial spheres. Rothmann argued from observations of the comet of 1585 that

4606-528: The firmament back to the other end of the Earth, from whence it could rise again. In the Testament of Solomon , the heavens are conceived in a tripartite structure and demons are portrayed as being capable of flying up to and past the firmament in order to eavesdrop on the decisions of God. Another example of Jewish literature describing the firmament can be found in Samaritan poetry. The Quran describes

4704-406: The firmament was that it was flat and hovering over the Earth, or that it was a dome and entirely enclosed the Earth's surface. Beyond the firmament is the upper waters, above which further still is the divine abode. The gap between heaven and Earth was bridged by ziggurats and these supported stairways that allowed gods to descend into the Earth from the heavenly realm. A Babylonian clay tablet from

4802-436: The fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere. In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with

4900-453: The fixed stars to the region most distant from the Earth. The most enduring feature of Anaximenes' cosmos was its conception of the stars being fixed on a crystal sphere as in a rigid frame, which became a fundamental principle of cosmology down to Copernicus and Kepler. After Anaximenes, Pythagoras , Xenophanes and Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical. And much later in the fourth century BC Plato's Timaeus proposed that

4998-417: The following morning. The stars are inscribed across the belly of Nut and one needs to identify with one of them, or a constellation, in order to join them after death. The fourth model was a flat (or slightly convex) celestial plane which, depending on the text, was thought to be supported in various ways: by pillars, staves, scepters, or mountains at the extreme ends of the Earth. The four supports give rise to

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5096-404: The fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato , Eudoxus , Aristotle , Ptolemy , Copernicus , and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element ( quintessence ), like gems set in orbs. Since it was believed that

5194-474: The general dimensions of the cosmos, the greatest distance of Saturn being 19,865 times the radius of the Earth and the distance of the fixed stars being at least 20,000 Earth radii. The planetary spheres were arranged outwards from the spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe in this order: the spheres of the Moon , Mercury , Venus , Sun , Mars , Jupiter , and Saturn . In more detailed models

5292-508: The gravitational attraction between bodies. In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre. The fixed stars are also open vents in such wheel rims, but there are so many such wheels for

5390-405: The heavenly realm are known. One model was that it was the shape of a bird: the firmament above represented the underside of a flying falcon, with the sun and moon representing its eyes, and its flapping causing the wind that humans experience. The second was a cow, as per the Book of the Heavenly Cow . The cosmos is a giant celestial cow represented by the goddess Nut or Hathor . The cow consumed

5488-422: The heavens, are not founded on sound rational proofs, and so no intellectual commitment can be made to them insofar as description and explanation of celestial realities are concerned." Christian and Muslim philosophers modified Ptolemy's system to include an unmoved outermost region, the empyrean heaven, which came to be identified as the dwelling place of God and all the elect. Medieval Christians identified

5586-557: The highest starry heaven. General understanding of the dimensions of the universe derived from the nested sphere model reached wider audiences through the presentations in Hebrew by Moses Maimonides , in French by Gossuin of Metz, and in Italian by Dante Alighieri . Philosophers were less concerned with such mathematical calculations than with the nature of the celestial spheres, their relation to revealed accounts of created nature, and

5684-418: The image of the cow and her supporters. There are no visible breaks in the actual text of The Heavenly Cow, aside from the representation of the Heavenly Cow. Due to this presentation method, there are no clear breaks in the text that allow for a clear structuring of the text. However, Egyptologists who examined the text closely suggested a loose division of the text into four sections. The first section describes

5782-491: The implications of the nested sphere model for the dimensions of the universe. Campanus of Novara 's introductory astronomical text, the Theorica planetarum , used the model of nesting spheres to compute the distances of the various planets from the Earth, which he gave as 22,612 Earth radii or 73,387,747 + 100 ⁄ 660 miles (118,106,130.55 km). In his Opus Majus , Roger Bacon cited Al-Farghānī's distance to

5880-559: The inner and outer limits of its celestial sphere and thus its thickness. In Kepler's celestial mechanics , the cause of planetary motion became the rotating Sun, itself rotated by its own motive soul. However, an immobile stellar sphere was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology. "Because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety.... "The spheres ... present us with an object in which

5978-434: The lack of observed parallax indicated that the comet was beyond Saturn, while the absence of observed refraction indicated the celestial region was of the same material as air, hence there were no planetary spheres. Tycho Brahe 's investigations of a series of comets from 1577 to 1585, aided by Rothmann's discussion of the comet of 1585 and Michael Maestlin 's tabulated distances of the comet of 1577, which passed through

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6076-413: The large gaps with the five Platonic polyhedra , which accounted for the spheres' measured astronomical distance. In Kepler's mature celestial physics, the spheres were regarded as the purely geometric spatial regions containing each planetary orbit rather than as the rotating physical orbs of the earlier Aristotelian celestial physics. The eccentricity of each planet's orbit thereby defined the radii of

6174-498: The limited evidence to resolve the question. In his Metaphysics , Aristotle developed a physical cosmology of spheres, based on the mathematical models of Eudoxus. In Aristotle's fully developed celestial model, the spherical Earth is at the centre of the universe and the planets are moved by either 47 or 55 interconnected spheres that form a unified planetary system, whereas in the models of Eudoxus and Callippus each planet's individual set of spheres were not connected to those of

6272-536: The location of the waters as recorded by Moses could only be explained by a miracle), William of Auvergne , and Philip the Chancellor . Whether the firmament was hard/firm or soft/fluid was also up for debate: the notion of a soft or fluid firmament was held until it was challenged in the 13th century by the introduction of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos, a trend that would only culminate in

6370-578: The mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony." C. S. Lewis , The Discarded Image , p. 99. In Cicero 's Dream of Scipio , the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the Dream of Scipio by the Roman writer Macrobius , which included

6468-449: The models of Eudoxus and Callippus qualitatively describe the major features of the motion of the planets, they fail to account exactly for these motions and therefore cannot provide quantitative predictions. Although historians of Greek science have traditionally considered these models to be merely geometrical representations, recent studies have proposed that they were also intended to be physically real or have withheld judgment, noting

6566-557: The motif of the " four corners of the world ". Prior to the systematic study of the cosmos by the Ionian School in the city of Miletus in the 6th century BC, the early Greek conception of cosmology was closely related to that of near eastern cosmology and envisioned a flat Earth with a solid firmament above the Earth supported by pillars. However, the work of Anaximander , Anaximenes , and Thales , followed by classical Greek theoreticians like Aristotle and Ptolemy ushered in

6664-543: The next planet. Aristotle says the exact number of spheres, and hence the number of movers, is to be determined by astronomical investigation, but he added additional spheres to those proposed by Eudoxus and Callippus, to counteract the motion of the outer spheres. Aristotle considers that these spheres are made of an unchanging fifth element, the aether . Each of these concentric spheres is moved by its own god—an unchanging divine unmoved mover , and who moves its sphere simply by virtue of being loved by it. In his Almagest ,

6762-479: The ninth and tenth spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth, and moved the Sun from its orb to the center of the universe . The planetary orbs circled the center of the universe in the following order: Mercury, Venus, the great orb containing the Earth and the orb of the Moon, then the orbs of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Finally he retained the eighth sphere of the stars , which he held to be stationary. The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges , delineated

6860-427: The notions of a spherical Earth and an Earth floating in the center of the cosmos as opposed to resting on a body of water. This picture was geocentric and represented the cosmos as a whole as spherical. One problem for Christian interpreters was in understanding the distinction between the heaven created on the first day and the firmament created in the second day. Origen followed the cosmological dualism of

6958-435: The order of the lower planets was not universally agreed. Plato and his followers ordered them Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, and then followed the standard model for the upper spheres. Others disagreed about the relative place of the spheres of Mercury and Venus: Ptolemy placed both of them beneath the Sun with Venus above Mercury, but noted others placed them both above the Sun; some medieval thinkers, such as al-Bitruji , placed

7056-467: The other planets, and to the edge of the universe: about 73 million miles (117 million kilometres). The nested sphere model's distances to the Sun and planets differ significantly from modern measurements of the distances, and the size of the universe is now known to be inconceivably large and continuously expanding . Albert Van Helden has suggested that from about 1250 until the 17th century, virtually all educated Europeans were familiar with

7154-409: The phenomena of precipitation, and more. The firmament also appears in non-rabbinic Jewish literature, such as in the cosmogonic views represented in the apocrypha . A prominent example is in the Book of Enoch composed around 300 BC. In this text, the sun rises from one of six gates from the east. It crosses the sky and sets into a window through the firmament in the west. The sun then travels behind

7252-490: The physical and spiritual worlds. Origen's model of two heavens was followed by later writers who kept the concept of a spiritual and immaterial heaven of the first day ( caelum ) and the corporeal/sidereal firmamentum . Various views on the materiality of the firmament emerged among the Church Fathers , including that it had been made out of air, out of the four elements, or out of a yet-distinct fifth element. In

7350-404: The planetary orbs, led Tycho to conclude that "the structure of the heavens was very fluid and simple." Tycho opposed his view to that of "very many modern philosophers" who divided the heavens into "various orbs made of hard and impervious matter." Edward Grant found relatively few believers in hard celestial spheres before Copernicus and concluded that the idea first became common sometime between

7448-473: The process of hammering metal into sheets. Gerhard von Rad explains: Rāqīaʿ means that which is firmly hammered, stamped (a word of the same root in Phoenecian means "tin dish"!). The meaning of the verb rqʿ concerns the hammering of the vault of heaven into firmness (Isa. 42.5; Ps.136.6). The Vulgate translates rāqīaʿ with firmamentum , and that remains the best rendering. Near eastern cosmology

7546-480: The publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1542 and Tycho Brahe's publication of his cometary research in 1588. In his early Mysterium Cosmographicum , Johannes Kepler considered the distances of the planets and the consequent gaps required between the planetary spheres implied by the Copernican system, which had been noted by his former teacher, Michael Maestlin. Kepler's Platonic cosmology filled

7644-486: The same motif. He drew the spheres in the conventional order, with the Moon closest to the Earth and the stars highest, but the spheres were concave upwards, centered on God, rather than concave downwards, centered on the Earth. Below this figure Oresme quotes the Psalms that "The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork." The late-16th-century Portuguese epic The Lusiads vividly portrays

7742-459: The sense of hard. The consensus was that the celestial spheres were made of some kind of continuous fluid. Later in the century, the mutakallim Adud al-Din al-Iji (1281–1355) rejected the principle of uniform and circular motion, following the Ash'ari doctrine of atomism , which maintained that all physical effects were caused directly by God's will rather than by natural causes. He maintained that

7840-406: The seven planetary spheres contained other secondary spheres within them. The planetary spheres were followed by the stellar sphere containing the fixed stars; other scholars added a ninth sphere to account for the precession of the equinoxes , a tenth to account for the supposed trepidation of the equinoxes , and even an eleventh to account for the changing obliquity of the ecliptic . In antiquity

7938-614: The sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing the Earth from its central place in favour of the Sun, yet he called his great work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres ). Although Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that, like many of his predecessors, he accepted non-solid celestial spheres. Copernicus rejected

8036-455: The sphere above it and the sphere below. When scholars applied Ptolemy's epicycles , they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them. By combining this nested sphere model with astronomical observations, scholars calculated what became generally accepted values at the time for the distances to the Sun: about 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometres), to

8134-539: The sphere of Venus above the Sun and that of Mercury below it. A series of astronomers, beginning with the Muslim astronomer al-Farghānī , used the Ptolemaic model of nesting spheres to compute distances to the stars and planetary spheres. Al-Farghānī's distance to the stars was 20,110 Earth radii which, on the assumption that the radius of the Earth was 3,250 miles (5,230 kilometres), came to 65,357,500 miles (105,182,700 kilometres). An introduction to Ptolemy's Almagest ,

8232-543: The sphere of Venus above the sphere of the Sun; as a further refinement, he added the planet's diameters to the thickness of their spheres. As a consequence, his version of the nesting spheres model had the sphere of the stars at a distance of 140,177 Earth radii. About the same time, scholars in European universities began to address the implications of the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle and astronomy of Ptolemy. Both astronomical scholars and popular writers considered

8330-517: The sphere of stars with the Biblical firmament and sometimes posited an invisible layer of water above the firmament, to accord with Genesis . An outer sphere, inhabited by angels , appeared in some accounts. Edward Grant , a historian of science, has provided evidence that medieval scholastic philosophers generally considered the celestial spheres to be solid in the sense of three-dimensional or continuous, but most did not consider them solid in

8428-540: The spheres of the new cosmological system in his Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes … (1576). Here he arranged the "orbes" in the new Copernican order, expanding one sphere to carry "the globe of mortalitye", the Earth, the four classical elements , and the Moon, and expanding the sphere of stars infinitely to encompass all the stars and also to serve as "the court of the Great God, the habitacle of

8526-518: The stars of 20,110 Earth radii, or 65,357,700 miles (105,183,000 km), from which he computed the circumference of the universe to be 410,818,517 + 3 ⁄ 7 miles (661,148,316.1 km). Clear evidence that this model was thought to represent physical reality is the accounts found in Bacon's Opus Majus of the time needed to walk to the Moon and in the popular Middle English South English Legendary , that it would take 8,000 years to reach

8624-466: The stars that their contiguous rims all together form a continuous spherical shell encompassing the Earth. All these wheel rims had originally been formed out of an original sphere of fire wholly encompassing the Earth, which had disintegrated into many individual rings. Hence, in Anaximanders's cosmogony, in the beginning was the sphere, out of which celestial rings were formed, from some of which

8722-672: The stars turn… and this view is closer to the apparent sense of the Qur'anic verses regarding the celestial orbits." However, al-Razi mentions that some, such as the Islamic scholar Dahhak, considered them to be abstract. Al-Razi himself, was undecided, he said: "In truth, there is no way to ascertain the characteristics of the heavens except by authority [of divine revelation or prophetic traditions]." Setia concludes: "Thus it seems that for al-Razi (and for others before and after him), astronomical models, whatever their utility or lack thereof for ordering

8820-411: The stellar sphere was in turn composed. As viewed from the Earth, the ring of the Sun was highest, that of the Moon was lower, and the sphere of the stars was lowest. Following Anaximander, his pupil Anaximenes ( c.  585  – c.  528/4 ) held that the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are all made of fire. But whilst the stars are fastened on a revolving crystal sphere like nails or studs,

8918-492: The subject of the Book of the Heavenly Cow . Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian Literature was published in 1996. His book consists of about twenty contributions by Egyptologists. It is mainly devoted to the history and genres that include linguistics, stylistic features, and many images of Ancient Egypt. The section that specifically deals with the Book of the Heavenly Cow is the Myth and Narrative section. It goes into detail about what

9016-399: The sun in the evening and rebirthed it in the next morning. The third is a celestial woman, also represented by Nut. The heavenly bodies would travel across her body from east to west. The midriff of Nut was supported by Shu (the air god) and Geb (the earth god) lay outstretched between the arms and feet of Nut. Nut consumes the celestial bodies from the west and gives birth to them again in

9114-425: The supreme sun god, Ra . Divine punishment was inflicted through the goddess Hathor , with the survivors suffering through separation from Ra, who now resided in the sky on the back of Nut , the heavenly cow. With this "fall", suffering and death came into the world, along with a fracture in the original unity of creation. The creator god now changes into many heavenly bodies, creates the "Fields of Paradise" for

9212-438: The text deals with Ra's ascension into the sky, the creation of the underworld , and with the theology surrounding the ba (soul) . The structure of the ancient Egyptian text the Book of the Heavenly Cow is structured into 330 verses, with half of the text occurring before a description or representation of the Heavenly Cow. The language used in the Book of the Heavenly Cow displays roots from Late Egyptian influences. Due to

9310-527: The turn of the millennium, the Arabic astronomer and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) presented a development of Ptolemy's geocentric models in terms of nested spheres. Despite the similarity of this concept to that of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses , al-Haytham's presentation differs in sufficient detail that it has been argued that it reflects an independent development of the concept. In chapters 15–16 of his Book of Optics , Ibn al-Haytham also said that

9408-473: The version of the Book of the Heavenly Cow from Seti I's tomb. It detailed the contents of the ancient text as well as gave much insight into the Book of the Heavenly Cow . With the discovery of the text in Ramesses III , others published many books regarding the Book of the Heavenly Cow . In 1881 Heinrich published a German-language version (the first of its kind). This version of the book translated

9506-472: The waters above the firmament could be held up given the spherical nature of the cosmos: the solution was to be sought in God's dominion over the cosmos, in the same way that God held up the Earth in the middle of the cosmos though it has no support. About this Ambrose wrote: "Wise men of the world say that water cannot be over the heavens". The debate about the waters being located above the heavens continued into

9604-451: The waters below the firmament and the waters above the firmament. This involved the spiritual interpretation of the upper waters. In this, he was followed by John Scotus Eriugena . In De Genesi ad litteram (perhaps his least studied work) Augustine wrote: "only God knows how and why [the waters] are there, but we cannot deny the authority of Holy Scripture which is greater than our understanding". Ambrose struggled with understanding how

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