So there was a total solar eclipse today, visible from a wide swath of the US (though not Alaska; we’ll get our chance in 2033). I also happen to have recently been reading about the use of eclipses to date events in oral tradition, which is pretty cool.
The Journal of African History published articles in 1965 and 1968 with maps of known solar eclipse paths (total and annular respectively) within the past few hundred years, as part of a larger project to find ways of building chronologies for African history stretching back before European contact. The 1968 article also includes a list of known eclipses mentioned in oral tradition and tentative identifications with specific dates.
The list includes an eclipse in Uganda in 1520 associated with the oral traditions of the kingdoms of Bunyoro and Ankole as having occurred on the date of a battle between the two kingdoms, with the names of the specific kings involved being preserved in both traditions. This provides a crucial point for grounding the well-preserved king-lists of not just these two states, but several others with which they interacted, calibrating a whole regional chronology. Interesting!
Another much later eclipse in 1835 coincided with the Ngoni people’s crossing of the Zambezi river, part of the large-scale series of migrations in reaction to Shaka’s consolidation of the Zulu kingdom. Also interesting!
The 1965 article goes into some detail on the distinction between total and partial eclipses in terms of the viewing experience, something that a lot of Americans have probably learned about today. The most impressive effects, and most likely to be preserved in oral tradition, are of course those within the path of totality, but this is a very narrow path and it can be hard to determine how close it needs to be to the remembered site of an event in the tradition to form a plausible association. These articles basically settle on the idea that if the path of totality passed through territory associated with the ethnic group from which the tradition is drawn that is plausible enough, even if the specific location in the tradition wasn’t itself in the path of totality. This seems reasonable to me.
I came across these articles as part of my reading on Africa, an outgrowth of my demographic history research project. I’ll have more to say on the African aspect to that, which is quite interesting in its own right, soon. But for now I thought it was cool to bring up this eclipse stuff. There’s no conceptual reason this approach couldn’t be used on the oral traditions of the Americas as well, but to my knowledge it hasn’t. It’s possible that those traditions just don’t have a lot of eclipses in them. Something to look into, maybe!
Gambler's House 