Under One Sky: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East (AOAT 297), “The Earliest Datable Observation of the Aurora Borealis”
“This and other observations in the month imply that the auroral display occurred on the night of March 12/13 in 567 BC”
A peer-reviewed chapter analysing the observations in VAT 4956. Its dating of the phenomena to 568/567 BCE is independent of the lunar-position argument.
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Provenance and verification note for Under One Sky: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East (AOAT 297), The Earliest Datable Observation of the Aurora Borealis
Confidence note. The chapter itself was NOT opened in this session. The quoted sentence is the note recorded against this discussion in the eBL bibliography for VAT.4956, read on 19 September 2026 in the eBL API record (archiveUrl above); that record gives the chapter’s pages as 421-428. Hermann Hunger’s review of Furuli separately reports that Stephenson and Willis concluded the date 568/7 BC can be “confidently affirmed” and gives the pages as 423-428; The Watchtower of 1 November 2011, note 18a, gives them as 420-428. The three page ranges disagree and the discrepancy is unresolved.
Corroborated by. src-chr-e-hunger-review-furuli, src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-eclipse
Notes. The chapter is cited here for the fact of the study and its conclusion; no wording or page range from it is quoted, because a copy could not be opened.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-stephenson-willis-2002