MARS

Across the gulf of space, no other planet has fired humanity’s imagination so much as the Red Planet, and it has frequently been associated with violence, war and death. To the ancient Sumerians it was Nergal, a god of war and plague who presided over the netherworld. In Mesopotamia it was the ‘star of judgement of the fate of the dead’. The Chinese associated it with the element fire, while for the people of the Tiwi Islands off the coast of Australia the planet was one of the four wives of the Moon Man, who followed the path of the Sun Woman through the sky – the other wives were Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The planet was a familiar sight to the astronomers of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Rome – where Mars was the god of war – and Greece, where Aristotle noticed that the planet vanished behind the Moon during an occultation, proving it was farther away.