Starry skies of humanity   Raoul Schrott

In a time before writing, our starry sky was a cinema of the night. Raoul Schrott

UNESCO classifies the starry skies of mankind as immaterial cultural heritage, since a culture can only be understood by people who are also familiar with its starry skies. With their enormous powers of imagination, human beings created their earliest works of art in the stars, thus representing their cultures. They formed the first calendar, which told hunters and gatherers when it was time to hunt which prey and collect which fruits. When humans became sedentary, the stars became even more significant; the rising of individual constellations marked the weeks in which the land was to be prepared, ploughed, sown and irrigated. Without the stars, there would have been no agriculture – and without agriculture, there would have been no cities, temples, writing, power structures or civilisation.

In years of intensive research, the Austrian writer Raoul Schrott has travelled to various countries, researching and collecting constellations for a starry sky atlas. The atlas contains 17 starry skies from all continents: from the ancient Egyptians to the Australian Aborigines, from China, India and Tahiti, from the Inuit, Bushmen and Tuareg. For the Maya, our Great Bear was a divine parrot, for the Incas the one-legged god of thunderstorms, for the Inuit a moose, for the Arabs a funeral bier. Raoul Schrott assembles these star legends to create a unique epic history of humankind. The focus of the presentation is on Mesopotamia, from where we have adopted the vast majority of our constellations.

Raoul Schrott – Reading in German