Humanity's earliest attempts to explain the universe rarely reflected facts. We saw mysteries all around us and summoned from our imaginations all manner of gods, giants, and unlikely beasts to explain the unknown on Earth and in the sky. The Egyptians believed the Earth was an egg guarded at night by "a great white bird," the Moon.
The ancient Peruvians
imagined a box-like world
with a ridge-shaped roof
where the Great God lived. To the Greeks, the Sun was a fiery chariot driven by Apollo, and to the ancient Hindus, the top half of the Earth sat on the backs of four elephants who in turn stood on the shell of an enormous tortoise that swam in the seas of the world. Some civilizations thought that the stars were the souls of the dead and that the Milky Way was a path made bright by their migration. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa still call the Milky Way "the backbone of the night", as if we lived within the belly of a great beast and could look up to see its spine high above.
