The Story About Two Chinese Astronomers Who Failed to Predict an Eclipse of the Sun
A frequently recounted Chinese story says that Hsi and Ho, the court astronomers, got drunk and neglected their duties to ensure that they failed to predict an eclipse of the Sun. For this, the emperor had them executed. So much for negligent astronomers.
If this story had been an account of an actual event, the dynasty mentioned would place the eclipse somewhere between 2159 and 1948 B.C., creating it by far the oldest solar eclipse recorded in history. But all serious attempts to identify one particular eclipse as the source of this story are already abandoned as scholars have recognized that the episode is mythological.
In ancient Chinese literature, Hsi-Ho is not two persons but a single mythological being who is sometimes the mother of the Sun and at other times the chariot driver for the Sun. Later, within the Shu Ching (Historical Classic), parts of which may possibly date from as early as the seventh or sixth century B.C., this single character is split, not into two, but into six.
Inside Shu Ching story, the legendary Chinese emperor Yao commissions the eldest in the Hsi and Ho brothers “to calculate and delineate the sun, moon, the stars, and also the zodiacal markers; and so to deliver respectfully the seasons to the men and women.” In further orders, he sends a younger Hsi brother to the east and another on the south; he orders a younger Ho brother on the west and yet another for the north. Each is responsible for a portion of the rhythms on the days and seasons, to turn the Sun back at the solstices and to keep it moving at the equinoxes.
These mythological magicians are often charged with the prevention of eclipsesohence the story that appears later within the Shu Ching about the emperor’s anger with his servants for failing to prevent an eclipse, not just predict or respond ceremonially to it. The story appears in the chapter that is an exhortation by the Prince of Yin, commander on the armies, to government officials to fulfill their duties on the administration, thereby creating the emperor “entirely intelligent. “If anyone neglects this requirement, “the country has regular punishments for you.”
Now here are Hsi and Ho. They have totally subverted their virtue, and are sunk and lost in wine. They have violated the duties of their office, and left their posts. They are already the initial to permit the regulations of heaven to obtain into disorder, putting far from them their correct business. On the 1st day on the last month of autumn, the sun and moon did not meet harmoniously in Fang.
The blind musicians beat their drums; the inferior officers and common men and women bustled and ran about. Hsi and Ho, even so, as if they had been mere personators on the dead in their offices, heard practically nothing and knew nothing;oso stupidly went they astray from their duty from the matter from the heavenly appearances, and rendering themselves liable towards the death appointed by the former kings. The statutes of government say, “When they anticipate the time, let them be put to death with no mercy when they are behind the time, let them be put to death without having mercy.
We never hear whether Hsi and Ho had been ever tracked down and executed.
The story of Hsi and Ho as drunken astronomers was a myth. But the myth did come true in a sense about 33 centuries later. Chinese history records that in a.D. 1202, for the second time in four years, the chief court astronomer made an eclipse forecast that was not as accurate as predictions from folks with no official scientific credentials or status.
Read additional: http://www.articlesbase.com/astrology-articles/the-story-about-two-chinese-astronomers-who-failed-to-predict-an-eclipse-of-the-sun-654143.html#ixzz0u33uAQUn
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