Hi Ogygos,

> >>Unreliable. Jean Richer was not a
> Hellenistic scholar.<<
> What does that have to do with whether he is right
> or not?

It means that he had not made any very profound study of ancient Greek civilization. Therefore, his conclusions about this particular alleged aspect of Greek thought cannot - as Thompson pointed out - be relied on.

> >>He was quite open that his viewpoint arose
> from "intuitive insight/perception." Some of his
> ideas actually came to him in his dreams about
> Apollo.<<
> So is that a bad thing?

Your question is irrelevant in this context; some dreams are good, some bad. Sometimes dreams can provide intuitive perceptions of which the waking consciousness might be incapable (e.g., Coleridge and "Xanadu"). In cases such as the one under discussion here, however, such intuitive perceptions are valid only if there is hard evidence to support them. In Richer's case, there is no such evidence.

> >>Part of the problem is his argument for a
> system of zodiacal projection being established
> circa 800 BCE. Needless to say there is no
> evidence that an evenly divided 12-constellation
> division of the ecliptic had been invented by the
> Babylonians at that date.

> Is this the real problem?

It's a problem for anyone trying to argue that a system of zodiacal projection existed as early as the 9th century BC when there is evidence to show that the concept of the Babylonian Zodiac did not in fact reach Greece until some five centuries later.

> Isn't it the
> difficulty in making accurate geodetic
> calculations at this early age?

This question presumes that this was what was happening in Greece in the 9th century BC or thereabouts. What evidence do you have to support this?

> He is very convincing in showing there was a
> strong astrological relation between the building
> of ancient Hellenic sanctuaries, art on temples,
> even war equipment – shields etc with certain
> animals that we today recognize as being related
> to the zodiac.

Not so convincing, however, if he hadn't studied Hellenic civilization in depth.

> Some problems with his theory are:
> 1) He uses many reference points like Delphi,
> Sardeis, Ammonion(Siwa), Delos, etc., so it’s
> easier for a certain site’s data to agree with a
> certain constellation.
> 2) Some of his distance relations have a strong
> degree of error. One of them is the Delphi,
> Sardeis, Ammonion, isosceles triangle in the cover
> page. I checked it out with Google Earth.

(A shame Google Earth didn't exist in Richer's time ... )

> 3) Some of his alignments also don’t work out.
> For example the alignment of Epicurean Apollo
> temple at Vassai is toward North and Delphi has an
> azimuth of 24 degrees from Vassai.

(I didn't know about these particular discrepancies in the alleged alignments, so thank you for drawing my attention to them.)

If all you're trying to do is to argue that human purpose was at work in locating point A with reference to point B, the existence of errors of angle and distance might not necessarily matter too much: you might be an inaccurate surveyor, but it doesn't mean that there was no intention to survey such-and-such an alignment. For instance, errors can be found in areas where there is evidence of Roman cadastral survey (although Roman surveyors were, on the whole, pretty accurate); but these errors don't mean that there was no survey. In the case of Richer, however, I would suggest that the alignments that you describe here are possibly the sort that might well occur in a dream, but that the errors subsequently revealed in the hard light of day (and Google Earth) appear to fall outside the definition of acceptable survey error, and therefore are not errors as such at all. Instead, they are indications that no such alignment or relationship was ever intended by the original builders of these temples and other monuments.

> Actually there is a very old, very accurate and
> very advanced geodetic code in Hellas that spans
> out to cover all of Europe and beyond.

This is rather a sweeping statement. What evidence do you have to support it?

Hermione
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