ABSTRACT
Traditional peoples throughout the world and in every era have watched the sky. Many things do die in the winter, and the world comes to life in the spring. In more tropical environments the basic pattern is the same, but it is linked with the cycle of rain and drought. Despite the obstacles in the evidence, systematic observation of the sky has a respectable antiquity. It was a fundamental activity something that just about everybody did. Equating the celestial pole with the emperor was more than evocative allusion. Equating the celestial pole with the emperor was more than evocative allusion. It was symbolic language that established a relationship between the world, the emperor, and the sky with economy and precision. The astronomical phenomena that supplied our ancestors with cyclical time told them the same story again and again: Things come. Things go. Things come again. This pattern was paralleled in the seasonal cycles of vegetation.
