The Legend of Sirius

The Western name of Sirius is Sirius, which comes from the Greek Σερίο, which means "scorched". The summer heat comes after the sun rises first. The ancients believed that Sirius and the sun rise at the same time. It is summer, and the light of Sirius and the light of the sun combine to cause the hot weather in summer, so Sirius is called Sirius. The ancient Greeks called summer "the Day of the Dog" because only dogs would go crazy and run out in such hot weather, so this star was also called the "Dog Star".

In ancient Egypt, every time Sirius rose from the eastern horizon at dawn (this phenomenon is called "sunrise" in astronomy), it was the time when the Nile River flooded once a year. The flooding of the Nile River irrigated large areas of fertile land on both sides, so the Egyptians began farming again. The ancient Egyptians recognized that when the star rose with the sun, the Nile Delta began to flood every year.

And they found that the time interval between Sirius's two risings with the sun was not 365 days in the Egyptian calendar year but 365.25 days. Ancient Egypt determined the day when Sirius rose in the east before dawn as the beginning of the year. It can be said that the predecessor of the "Gregorian calendar" we use was first born in ancient Egypt.

Extended information

In Chinese astronomy, this star is called Sirius (Wolf in the Sky); Chinese romanization: Tiānláng; Japanese romanization: Tenrō; Korean romanization : Cheonlang), among the twenty-eight Chinese constellations, Sirius belongs to Jingsu and is the official Sirius star inside it. Sirius is the only star among the star officials.

The ancient Chinese imagined the combination of some stars in the constellations of Puppis and Canis Major as a large bow spanning the southern sky, and classified them into the arc star. In this combination, the arrow points directly toward Sirius. It means "shooting the wolf". This is the origin of the sentence "Look northwest and shoot at the wolf" in "Jiang Chengzi·Hunting in Mizhou". Regarding the Hushi Star Officer, the ancients also had a saying: The bow of the sky is stretched, and all the troops in the world are exhausted. That is, astrologers use it to predict military situations.

A similar combination also appears in the murals of the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt. In later Persian culture, the star was called Tir and was thought of as an arrow. The goddess Satis painted her arrows on the minotaur goddess Hathor (Sirius).

Baidu Encyclopedia-Sirius (α Canis Major)