Re: Effects of Catastrophes on Language

A few months ago on UK TV I saw a series called "Ancient Apocalypse"
about 4 ancient civilizations wiped out by massive natural disasters.
They were:-
- the Mayan civilization :: long drought.
- the Old Kingdom of Egypt :: long drought in the Nile headwaters
area, which kept the Nile so low that the Fayyu_m lake dried up.
- Sodom and Gomorrah :: an earthquake which caused (a) ground
liquefaction and the city area slid into the adjacent Dead Sea, (b) a
massive gas explosion from suddenly released natural gas.
- Minoan Crete alias Atlantis :: the Thera alias Santorini volcanic
eruption.

It is to be wondered why Ptolemy in the Almagest used ecliptic
coordinates in his star catalog? Modern-type right-ascension and
declination would have been much easier. The ecliptic is defined as
"an imaginary line on the sky", etc; but what if that line was real
and visible? If in those times there was much more "zodiacal light",
from there being much more muck in the solar system in the ecliptic
plane, that muck could have been a relic from Napier's breakup of
super-Encke, etc. And, given an ecliptic line marked as a visible line
in the sky, it would be easy for Ptolemy etc to use it as a marker
when surveying the sky.

Or else, many of those old legends of catastrope could be merely
travellers' tales of ordinary volcanic eruptions.