Mawangdui silk atlas of comets

168 BCENotable

A silk manuscript sealed in a Han tomb in 168 BCE shows drawings of comet types with the omens each foretells. It is the oldest known comet atlas.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First atomic nuclei form → First stars ignite → First galaxies assemble → Milky Way takes shape → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Lobe-finned fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → End-Triassic extinction → Pangaea breaks apart → Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum → Early primates → First anthropoid primates → Apes split from monkeys → Great apes split from gibbons → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Earliest firm records of Halley's Comet → Mawangdui silk atlas of comets

The story

In 1973 archaeologists opened Tomb 3 at Mawangdui, near Changsha in Hunan, China. The tomb, sealed in 168 BCE and belonging to a noble Han family, held many silk manuscripts, including a text now called the Book of the Heavenly Bodies or the silk comet atlas. It shows about 250 drawings of clouds, stars and comets, among them 29 comets, each with a short caption naming the form and the event it announced, such as war, famine or the death of a ruler.

The atlas was copied from older sources, so it reflects observations and lore from the Warring States period and the early Han. It groups comets by shape: how many tails, whether the head is round, and the way the tail bends. Chinese astronomers did not know comets orbit the Sun, but by sorting appearances and matching them to outcomes they built a catalog that later astronomers could mine. It shows that systematic comet watching in China was already old when Europeans were still debating whether comets were in the air or in the heavens.

Why it mattered

Gave modern scholars the earliest surviving picture catalog of comets from any culture.
Shows how Han court astrology depended on organized, recorded sky watching.
Supports later efforts to match Chinese records to returns of Halley's Comet and other periodic comets.