Abstract
In the early fourth century AD, a sudden return of daylight after a darkening of the sky purportedly swayed King Mirian of Georgia to convert to Christianity. Medieval written sources and modern geophysical models suggest that Mirian, whilst on a mountain top near the city of Mtskheta, may have observed a total solar eclipse (TSE). Adjusting for both visibility corrections and constraints on the accumulated clock error known as ΔT, we examine the local circumstances of the TSE of AD 6 May 319, which Gigolashvili et al. (Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions 26, 199–201, 2007; Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion 6, 217–221, 2009) recently proposed as the most likely natural explanation. If the basis for the legendary accounts of Mirian’s conversion is this TSE—but we make no judgment upon this question—then the value of ΔT inferred from written sources agrees well with generally-accepted values, such as those derived by Morrison and Stephenson (Journal for the History of Astronomy 35, 327–336, 2004), namely, ΔT ≈ 7,450 ± 180 s. We also show the extent to which this TSE would have seemed remarkable to observers at Mirian’s presumed location and less so to those nearby at lower elevations.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented as poster papers at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in August 2009 and at the Seventh International Conference on Oriental Astronomy (ICOA-7) in Tokyo (Japan) in September, 2010. An oral version was presented by one of the authors (JS) at the History of Astronomy Division Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle (Washington) on 10 January 2011. The authors wish to thank the conference attendees for comments and constructive feedback as well as Dr Stephen Rapp Jr. of Sam Houston State University (USA), Dr Paul Crego of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and Dr J. Christopher Hunt of the University of Maryland (USA). The authors are especially grateful to Professor Jay Pasachoff of Williams College (USA) for calling our attention to the July 2010 Patagonian eclipse. Finally, one of the authors (WO) wishes to thank Professor Boonrucksar Soonthornthum for offering him a Visiting Professorship at NARIT, where he was able to complete the revision of this paper.
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Sauter, J., Simonia, I., Stephenson, F.R., Orchiston, W. (2015). The Legendary Fourth-Century Total Solar Eclipse in Georgia: Fact or Fantasy?. In: Orchiston, W., Green, D., Strom, R. (eds) New Insights From Recent Studies in Historical Astronomy: Following in the Footsteps of F. Richard Stephenson. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07614-0_3
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