Als´ sunship, solar year calendar and sun indicator

To keep track of the seasons, to measure them in days and solar months, to predict the time for sowing and reaping and to know the rythm of the day and dividing the day into hours and then into weeks. During the Antiquity these were the divine sciences of people in the highly developted cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. But they were not alone, for the people who once erected the fabulous sunship Ales Stenar had also acquired the knowledge after thorough studying of their heavenly sources of inspiration: the magical golden sun’s constant and cyclical rebirth and death far away on the horizon.

Therefore Ales Stenar got its mysterious shape of a ship from the sunrise and sunset, but also as an incredible creative manifestation, developed from the sun worshippers’ own divine conception, that of the sungod’s ship, which every day carried the sungoddess over the skyblue cosmic sea to bring to the people of the world power and warmth, fruit and crops and after death a rich eternal life. On this foundation the heavenly sungods earthly sunships was established and with its magical rocks it marked 365 days of the solar year, the sacred days of the gods and the solar months. With the shadow from a sunstaff one could calculate the sun’s guardians in the four cardinal points, eyktir, a time of 3 or 1,5 hours.

The sunship and solar year calender Ales Stenar is 67 meters long and 19 meters wide ("amidships"),and is firmly established on an altitude of 42 meters, 150 meters from the sea (the Baltic sea), near Kåseberga, (ca 400-700 b.C).

The location of the gigantic outdoor calender is chosen with the utmost astronomical concern for the sun’s yearly path across the sky (the Ecliptic).

But the sunship, which consists of 58 sunrocks and two keelrocks, is also a part of a very carefully calculated fundamental plan, which exactly corresponds to the ancient geometry’s most sacred principle, that of the circle and the square. A "dualistic system", where the circle symbolised "the divine heavenly power" and the square "the earth, the people and the four, eight or sixteen cardinal points".

The creators of the sunship had this dualistic way of thinking as their foundation, when they learned to measure time by following the sunrise at the winter solstice in the southeast and to the turning of the sun at the summer solstice in the nortwest (Midsummer Eve), and back again to the sun’s yearly turningpoint in the southeast at the winter solstice.

After the the calenderbuilders had decided that the solar year calendar should symbolise the sungod’s heavenly ship, they probably have put out smaller stones to mark the sun’s rise and set at the horizon. This has of course taken a long time and demanded great patience, when you consider that the sun could not be studied on cloudy days. During these days the calendarbuilders have been forced to calculate the sun´s possible positions on freehand, and then they have had to wait a whole year for the next sure marking. At the same time they probably counted the days very carefully in 30-days intervals, solar months.

When they after some years of daily observations, and surely also a lot of corrections, had obtained enough knowledge about the solar orbit’s cycle, the finetuning of the solar year calendar could begin. Then, the smaller stones were probably replaced with wooden poles, and finally when the solar year calendar was completely fixed with 60 permanently situated blocks of stone. The 32 sunstones of the opposing calendarflanks then stood in an almost precisely seasonbased connection to each other and in this way they marked the sunstones’ function as indicators of markdays, the days then the sun rose and set in them according to the constructed schedule. Together with the other 28 blocks of stone in the divine sunship all the 60 sunrocks must have had an enormous numbersymbolic importance for the sunpeople in Österlen. During the younger nordic Bronze age, the number 60 symbolised in the Mediterranean cultures the most sacred number in the universe, from an old Babylonian model. The fact that this symbolic number was known also in Scandinavia during this age should be quite obvious with the creation of Ales Stenar.