Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [93]
THE KALEIDOSCOPIC surface of Mars was first revealed by American spacecraft of the Mariner series, but chiefly by Mariner 9, which orbited Mars for a full year, beginning in November 1971, and radioed back to Earth more than 7,200 close-up photographs of its surface. A profusion of unexpected and exotic detail was uncovered, including towering volcanic mountains, craters of the lunar sort but much more heavily eroded, and enigmatic, sinuous valleys which were probably caused by running water at previous epochs in the history of the planet. These new features cried out for names, and the IAU dutifully appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Gerard de Vaucouleurs of the University of Texas to propose a new Martian nomenclature. Through the efforts of several of us on the Martian nomenclature committee, a serious attempt was made to deprovincialize the new names. It was impossible to prevent major craters being named after astronomers who had studied Mars, but the range of occupations and nationalities could be significantly broadened. Thus there are Martian craters larger than 60 miles across named after the Chinese astronomers Li Fan and Liu Hsin; after biologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Wolf Vishniac, S. N. Vinogradsky, L. Spallanzani, F. Redi, Louis Pasteur, H. J. Muller, T. H. Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane and Charles Darwin; after a handful of geologists such as Louis Agassiz, Alfred Wegener, Charles Lyell, James Hutton and E. Suess; and even after a few science-fiction writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Stanley Weinbaum and John W. Campbell, Jr. There are also two large craters on Mars named Schiaparelli and Antoniadi.
But there are many more cultures on the planet Earth—even ones with identifiable astronomical traditions—than are represented by any such list of individual names. In an attempt to offset at least in part this implicit cultural bias, a suggestion of mine was accepted to call the sinuous valleys after the names of Mars in other, largely non-European languages. On this page is a table of the most prominent. By a curious coincidence Ma’adim (Hebrew) and Al Qahira (Arabic: the war god after whom Cairo is named) are cheek by jowl. The landing site for the first Viking spacecraft was in Chryse, near the confluence of the Ares, Tiu, Simud and Shalbatana valleys.
TABLE 1
THE FIRST MARTIAN CHANNELS
TO BE NAMED
Name Language
Al Qabira Egyptian Arabic
Ares Greek
Auqakuh Quechua (Inca)
Huo Hsing Chinese
Ma’adim Hebrew
Mangala Sanskrit
Nirgal Babylonian
Kasei Japanese
Shalbatana Akkadian
Simud Sumerian
Tiu Old English
For the massive Martian volcanoes, one suggestion was to name them after major terrestrial volcanoes, such as Ngorongoro or Krakatoa, which would permit some appearance on Mars of cultures with no written astronomical tradition. But this was objected to on the ground that there would be confusion when comparing terrestrial and Martian volcanoes: Which Ngorongoro are we talking about? The same potential problem exists for terrestrial cities, but we seem able to compare Portland, Oregon, with Portland, Maine, without becoming hopelessly confused. Another suggestion, made by a European savant, was to name each volcano “Mons” (mountain) followed by the name of a principal Roman deity in the appropriate Latin genitive case: thus, Mons Martes, Mons Jovis and Mons Veneris. I objected that at least the last of these had been pre-empted by quite a different field of human activity. The reply was: “Oh, I hadn’t heard.” The outcome was to name the Martian volcanoes after adjacent bright and dark markings in the classical nomenclature.