PICTURES IN THE SKY For thousands of years people have looked at stars and identified patterns Connecting the stars in their minds people saw imaginary pictures of animals and objects These star patterns are called constellations In scientific terms constellations are not real The stars in constellations The Big Dipper is an easily seen pattern in the night
are often very far away from each other and therefore not close enough to form patterns They only appear close together to us on Earth Constellations are like a map making it an easy way for scientists to locate certain stars in the sky They have also been used for navigation on land and at sea for ages Many cultures have built legends and stories around constellations giving them special meaning The word constellation comes from two Latin words con meaning with and stella meaning star A sailor can navigate by looking at the
ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA I In 3300 BCE a group of nomads or wanderers called the Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia which U is in modern day Iraq It was there that the first civilizations A were formed EN Historians think they also were the first people who named star patterns in the sky Historians believe that the This painting depicts rams being Sumerians named led into the Sumerian city of Ur the constellations after the animals
THINK ABOUT IT living around them such as bulls rams and lions Imagine you lived in The Sumerians ancient Mesopotamia kept written records Would you keep a record of what you saw in the sky by drawing pictures on J clay tablets writing in a system called cuneiform They all recorded their observations I about the Sun Moon and other stars Their records Eas 22 and legends were passed An ancient Sumerian on to other people who record with drawings and settled in the same area cuneiform right including the Babylonians and Assyrians 0
