The legend of Cangjie

After unifying China, the Yellow Emperor, being terribly dissatisfied with his Quipu method  of recording information, charged Cangjie of creating characters for writing. Cangjie then settled down on the bank of a river, and devoted himself to the completion of the task at hand. ... One day, Cangjie  saw a phoenix flying in the sky above, carrying an object in its beak. The object fell to the ground directly in front of Cangjie, and he saw it to be an impression of a hoof-print. Not being able to recognize which animal the print belonged to, he asked for the help of a local hunter passing by on the road. The hunter told him that this was the hoof-print of a Pixiu. This conversation with the hunter greatly inspired Cangjie  ... From that day forward, Cangjie paid close attention to the characteristics of all things, including the sun, moon, stars, clouds, lakes, oceans, as well as all manner of bird and beast. He began to create characters according to the special characteristics he found, and before long, had compiled a long list of characters for writing. To the delight of the Yellow Emperor, Cangjie presented him with the complete set of characters.
Adapetd from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie

Cangjie

Public domain image

Empresa destruye patrimonio cultural

Empresa destruye patrimonio cultural
"El observatorio más antiguo de América, es afectado por trabajos de empresa autorizada por el INC. Desconocen informes que dan cuenta de restos arqueológicos alrededor de área patrimonial."
http://www.connuestroperu.com/actualidad/miscelanea/22-miscelanea/22705-empresa-destruye-patrimonio-cultural

Ancient solar observatories: Syrian desert

The Syrian desert is covered by ancient stone structures created during Neolithic times, as I discussed in the paper, Stone circles on the harraat of Syrian desert, published at http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4665
Some of these stone structures are circular, with radial lines of stones. These circles have been also compared with Stonehenge. Therefore, we can ask ourselves, are these solar observatories too, as Stonehenge is.
The answer is probably so, see my paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2591
I used a software for the solar energy applications to see the direction of sun on sunrise and sunset of solstice. It seems that there is a good agreement. Therefore, the Syrian stone circles are probably the Stonehenges of Middle East.

This is one of the stone structure of Syrian Desert. The image shows directions of sun during the day. “The lines on the drawing show the direction and height (altitude) of the sun throughout the day. Thicker and shorter lines mean the sun is higher in the sky. Longer and thinner lines mean the sun is closer to the horizon”, according to Sollumis.com http://www.sollumis.com/. On the left, the site as it appears in the Google Maps. In the middle, the direction of the sun on the summer solstice, choosing the center of the circle for observation. We see that, at sunrise, the sun is passing near the dot. At the sunset the direction is that of a line. In the image on the right, we see the direction of the sun on winter solstice. At sunrise, the lines is passing between dots. The sunset has the direction of a radius (images have been obtained from original provided by Google Maps and sollumis.com).

Circles and lines!

Alignemnt at the sunrise on the winter solstice

At the site http://www.dp-news.com/en/detail.aspx?articleid=97188
it is told that "He (David Kennedy) explains that they come in a huge variety of forms, some being ‘kites’, structures that funnelled animals, some being seemingly random meandering lines of stone and others being rectangular. None are believed to be aligned with the stars, which has added to the mystery surrounding their purpose." Well, in my opinion it is not so.