How the ancients navigated

[annonentity]

At the price of looking like an idiot, I have been thinking about how the ancients could have navigated the Oceans if the suspicion was true that there indeed was indeed a worldwide civilization around the time of the last Ice age.
 I think the Great Pyramid was the major marker not quite at the 23.5 parallel but near enough it might even have had been the summer solstice marker when it was constructed for the purpose of this example.
 The technique is simple enough, and rests on the fact that the suns ground position changes by about a degree each day which is sixty nautical miles. The Sun at the solstices reaches 23.5 degrees north in the northern hemisphere and the same in the southern hemisphere at roughly the tropic of Capricorn. This method requires a static marker like the known position of the GP or in modern times a place on the map or chart. I will give a practical example.
 Say I am in the Western Pacific Ocean on the day of the summer solstice, I know that the suns ground position for that day tracks the 23.5 degrees south line of latitude. Thats as far south as the sun goes south. I look on the Chart and notice that if the suns ground position went down to Sydney. Then it would be... off the top of my head about fifteen days sun distances from Sydney to the 23.5 line of lattitude. I draw a line on the chart from Sydney up to the 23.5 lattitude line,and wait for the sunset that day,In modern times I go out on deck and as the last glimmer of the setting sun shines over the horizon I take a compass bearing of it, Knowing that Sydney is fifteen sun positins south of it , the compass will read approximately fifteen degrees less, so I note the two compass results, and draw the lines on my chart and triangulate my position on the ocean. In Ancient times a hinged stick would do the same thing. Not as precise as present day GPS but with a skillful operator a feasible way to draw a map or chart Islands, without an accurate chronometer.

[Raptured]

One of the Graham Hancock shows touched on this, basically saying how navigating longitude is fairly simple as you could follow the sun but latitude would present a huge challenge to early seafaring races as history has portrayed them.  The point he was making was in regards to how the South Pacific tribes were able to land at distant islands such so early in accepted history as it would take somewhat of a level of expertise to not simply pass them by.

I'm a total believer that we're either not being told everything or that our arrogance has closed our eyes to the possibility that people a long long time ago were much more advanced than what is portrayed

[annonentity]

One of the Graham Hancock shows touched on this, basically saying how navigating longitude is fairly simple as you could follow the sun but latitude would present a huge challenge to early seafaring races as history has portrayed them.  The point he was making was in regards to how the South Pacific tribes were able to land at distant islands such so early in accepted history as it would take somewhat of a level of expertise to not simply pass them by.

I'm a total believer that we're either not being told everything or that our arrogance has closed our eyes to the possibility that people a long long time ago were much more advanced than what is portrayed

  It was longitude which was the difficult one to do . As there had to be an element of time involved. In the Piri Reis maps the prime Longitude seemed to the GP. The maths seem to support this as it appears to be a geometric construction of the northern hemisphere. IE it was yesterday's Greenwich on the prime meridian. So if you were in the Western Ocean you would triangulate from it like the Sydney in my example, and be the place that all maps referenced back to. Using a north or south line from a known structure means that the time component of longitude is the suns ground position for that day. which allows you to triagulate a position.

[AlienSun]

At the price of looking like an idiot, I have been thinking about how the ancients could have navigated the Oceans if the suspicion was true that there indeed was indeed a worldwide civilization around the time of the last Ice age.
 I think the Great Pyramid was the major marker not quite at the 23.5 parallel but near enough it might even have had been the summer solstice marker when it was constructed for the purpose of this example.
 The technique is simple enough, and rests on the fact that the suns ground position changes by about a degree each day which is sixty nautical miles. The Sun at the solstices reaches 23.5 degrees north in the northern hemisphere and the same in the southern hemisphere at roughly the tropic of Capricorn. This method requires a static marker like the known position of the GP or in modern times a place on the map or chart. I will give a practical example.
 Say I am in the Western Pacific Ocean on the day of the summer solstice, I know that the suns ground position for that day tracks the 23.5 degrees south line of latitude. Thats as far south as the sun goes south. I look on the Chart and notice that if the suns ground position went down to Sydney. Then it would be... off the top of my head about fifteen days sun distances from Sydney to the 23.5 line of lattitude. I draw a line on the chart from Sydney up to the 23.5 lattitude line,and wait for the sunset that day,In modern times I go out on deck and as the last glimmer of the setting sun shines over the horizon I take a compass bearing of it, Knowing that Sydney is fifteen sun positins south of it , the compass will read approximately fifteen degrees less, so I note the two compass results, and draw the lines on my chart and triangulate my position on the ocean. In Ancient times a hinged stick would do the same thing. Not as precise as present day GPS but with a skillful operator a feasible way to draw a map or chart Islands, without an accurate chronometer.

 
But who did the initial scientific work that established the placement of the pyramid which then allowed seafarers to use that methodology to travel the globe?

[Raptured]

  It was longitude which was the difficult one to do . As there had to be an element of time involved. In the Piri Reis maps the prime Longitude seemed to the GP. The maths seem to support this as it appears to be a geometric construction of the northern hemisphere. IE it was yesterday's Greenwich on the prime meridian. So if you were in the Western Ocean you would triangulate from it like the Sydney in my example, and be the place that all maps referenced back to. Using a north or south line from a known structure means that the time component of longitude is the suns ground position for that day. which allows you to triagulate a position.

Thank you for the clarification.  I was wrong

[putnam6]

Talk about a lost art or skill, I like to pretend I understand the basics of nautical navigation but I'd need a primer if I were stuck in the Pacific Ocean

[sahgwa]

Call me stupid, but no pyramid needed, didn't ancient seafarers just use the sun and the stars?

As has been mentioned, latitude fine, sunset etc.

Longitude, can't you use stars like Polaris, and constellations like Ursa Major/The Bear, since they will always be north? 

Also Venus is always a westerly direction throughout the year despite Northern or Southern Hemisphere?

You wouldn't even need an astrolabe. 

For fine tuning, you would memorise the location of certain E-W currents?

[annonentity]

Polaris would give you your latitude. But Longitude always seemed to be the problem, in the admiralty tables, it gives you the time that the sun is at a certain position which is its ground position, hats a theoretical line drawn from the center of the sun to the center of the earth, and where it bisects the surface that is the ground position, which is always moving in a sort of spiral beginning the day at ten degrees and lets say ending the day at eleven degrees. The amount of one spiral line to the other is only on average sixty nautical miles, so if you were half a world away from Greenwich you could get pretty good at estimating its position at a certain point in relation to another given point. during that particular day. For practical purposes you would be pretty close, would you really need a chronometer? all you would need to know is the latitude line the sun was running that day, and what day it was during the year, then you could triangulate your position on the earth's surface, using the sunset or sunrise.
 In my example I used a theoretical line of longitude from Sydney  one known position on the map, up to the suns line of latitude on that day and stopped the line where I would estimate the sun to be in that sixty mile spiral for the day.Thats the other known position to make the triangulation. Hard to explain I hope you get the drift.

[sahgwa]

Polaris would give you your latitude. But Longitude always seemed to be the problem, in the admiralty tables, it gives you the time that the sun is at a certain position which is its ground position, hats a theoretical line drawn from the center of the sun to the center of the earth, and where it bisects the surface that is the ground position, which is always moving in a sort of spiral beginning the day at ten degrees and lets say ending the day at eleven degrees. The amount of one spiral line to the other is only on average sixty nautical miles, so if you were half a world away from Greenwich you could get pretty good at estimating its position at a certain point in relation to another given point. during that particular day. For practical purposes you would be pretty close, would you really need a chronometer? all you would need to know is the latitude line the sun was running that day, and what day it was during the year, then you could triangulate your position on the earth's surface, using the sunset or sunrise.
 In my example I used a theoretical line of longitude from Sydney  one known position on the map, up to the suns line of latitude on that day and stopped the line where I would estimate the sun to be in that sixty mile spiral for the day.Thats the other known position to make the triangulation. Hard to explain I hope you get the drift.

Yeah I had mixed up my latitude and longitude, my bad. 
So you can use Polaris to find latitude of course, but say you are in the middle of the Pacific- you know you are going east west due to the sun, but if you want to pinpoint How much 'east west' ie your longitude, could you calculate your distance from Venus using how far it is above the horizon? 

I guess the point is that basic directions are easy, im going north im going south im going east. It's harder to pinpoint exact position.

[annonentity]

I am no expert by any means, and the simpler you can make it the less chances for error., I mean if you outstretch your arm and stick your pinky finger up that's about one degree on the horizon the difference roughly that the difference is between each day's sunrise position. 
 But finding the distance to any celestial body has to have some sort of triangle with at least one known distance on one of the sides and the angles of the triangle measured at the same time. There is also a lot of catches like to make a nice tidy twenty-four-hour day, and a thee hundred and sixty five day year. If you measure the place the earth is in at the same time every year compared to the stars, we are a quarter of a day out each year so that's why an extra day each four  years is added to bring it back into synch . Thats why they tell you to get the current year for the suns declination , but they repeat every four years and depending on when the leap year day was added they just repeat like a big precise celestial clock. Thats why a nice simpler way of doing it must have been used in ancient times.