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INUVIK
A professor from the Middle East is proposing that ancient Babylonians and the Gwich'in may have had something in common: the way they looked at the skies.

Dr. Wayne Horowitz of Hebrew University is researching similarities between ancient Babylonian astronomical lore and Inuvik's Gwich'in people. - T. Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo

Dr. Wayne Horowitz of Hebrew University in Israel laid out his evidence of that theory Feb. 8 during a presentation in Inuvik. While only a sparse audience attended the lecture, the participants held a lively discussion.

Horowitz's research is focused on the stargazing knowledge and lore of the ancient Babylonian civilization. He said that knowledge is the foundation of what the ancient Greeks knew, and therefore underlies how Western civilization developed its knowledge of the skies.

Most of that knowledge is now found in ancient written records, which, while informative, don't convey much of how star knowledge impacted the day-to-day culture, Horowitz said. For that, he had to find a somewhat comparable and intact culture.

"So how did you find the Gwich'in?" asked audience member Janet Boxwell.

The answer was simple. Horowitz first visited the Inuvik region in the summer of 1998 with his family as part of an "end-of-the-road" trip to the Arctic. It was there he first became acquainted with the Gwich'in people, and they sprang to mind when he began his "ethno-astronomy project" last year.

Horowitz said he wanted to look at a culture with an astronomical background that has been passed down orally through generations. He is looking to compare the Gwich'in view of the night sky with that of Babylon, the ancient Mesopotamian city-state.

"I'm aiming to recover a world view of the sky," Horowitz said. "I'm trying to recover their knowledge, which there have been few attempts to do in North America, and use it to gain some perspective on how the Babylonians would have viewed the sky.

"I'm trying to learn about the issues in those oral traditions," he added. "I'm trying to understand how it was relevant in peoples lives, how they experienced the stars, and I'm trying to learn how to investigate this kind of evidence with a comparative culture."

So Horowitz, in co-operation with Gwich'in researcher Alestine Andre, is interviewing elders to collect their knowledge.

"Oral traditions should be treated with the utmost respect," Horowitz said. "They are invariably correct."

Amongst his preliminary findings so far is a distinct commonality of interpreting constellation and sky images.

For instance, both cultures have stories of "the man in the moon," Horowitz said. That implies a broader picture of a common thought pattern and imagination over thousands of years that, as he said, is truly intriguing.

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