Ancient Egyptians were first to observe solar, lunar eclipses

Ancient Egyptians were the first to observe the solar and lunar eclipse phenomena and even wrote schedules for each, archaeologist Abdel-Rehim Rihan said. Ancient Egyptians were the ones who discovered the natural phenomena not a Dutch scientist in 1783 as claimed in the books of astronomy, Rihan told MENA on Saturday. Ancient observations of solar eclipses have a long history among many different cultures and civilizations which stretches back to at least 2500 BC in the writings that have survived from ancient China and Babylon and Egypt, he added. In ancient Egypt, nearly all of what we know about this civilizations astronomical knowledge comes to us from tomb paintings, a variety of temple inscriptions, and literally a handful of papyrus documents, he said. The oldest known example of a sundial dates from Egypt ca 1500 BC. The fabulous astronomical ceiling of Senmut was painted around 1460 BC which include celestial objects such as Orion, Sirius and the planets Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. The oldest known copies of an almanac date from 1220 BC at the time of Ramses the Great, and later in 1100 BC Amenhope wrote the 'Catalog of the Universe' in which he identifies the major constellations known by that time.