Navigation history question. Muslim mosques all have a wall that face mecca. There is a mosque in China built between 600 to 700 AD. Long before the invention of the maritime clock and age of longitude. Yet the wall facing mecca is pretty accurate. Since I don't know better, it appears to me that the builders of this mosque would have to know the lat and long of these two points and dead reckoning would be extremely improbable. If I remember my math correctly you just solved the great circle with the law of cosines. Could the Arabs have used this equation (after rearrangement) for alignment of their prayer wall. This would suggest that the Arabs knew celestial navigation lat and long centuries before anyone else. There are multiple mosques from Spain to China from 600 to 700 ad and there after, where the prayer wall is aligned properly. I am not Muslim, but I am interested in ancient navigation and ocean crossings going back to the Phoenicians. Most can be explained with latitude and dead reckoning. But this wall alignment has peaked my curiosity.
Celestial navigation is at least 4000 years old, as far we can prove, but there are indications that it may be well over 12,000 years old, as some ancient maps show features that would have only existed back then, and only a civilisation that is very good at navigation could have reached those places, such as Antarctica.
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Navigation history question.
Muslim mosques all have a wall that face mecca. There is a mosque in China built between 600 to 700 AD. Long before the invention of the maritime clock and age of longitude.
Yet the wall facing mecca is pretty accurate. Since I don't know better, it appears to me that the builders of this mosque would have to know the lat and long of these two points and dead reckoning would be extremely improbable.
If I remember my math correctly you just solved the great circle with the law of cosines. Could the Arabs have used this equation (after rearrangement) for alignment of their prayer wall.
This would suggest that the Arabs knew celestial navigation lat and long centuries before anyone else.
There are multiple mosques from Spain to China from 600 to 700 ad and there after, where the prayer wall is aligned properly.
I am not Muslim, but I am interested in ancient navigation and ocean crossings going back to the Phoenicians. Most can be explained with latitude and dead reckoning. But this wall alignment has peaked my curiosity.
Celestial navigation is at least 4000 years old, as far we can prove, but there are indications that it may be well over 12,000 years old, as some ancient maps show features that would have only existed back then, and only a civilisation that is very good at navigation could have reached those places, such as Antarctica.
You don't actually have to decimalize the positions if you can pull trig functions from degrees, minutes, seconds. And Dlo is easier in minutes.
Silliness.
You