The Orientation of the Kofun Tombs

Abstract

The Kofun period of the history of Japan—between the 3rd and the 7th century AD—bears its name from the construction of huge, earth mound tombs called Kofun. Among them, the largest have a keyhole shape and are attributed to the first, semi-legendary emperors. The study of the orientation of ancient tombs is usually a powerful tool to better understand the cognitive aspects of religion and power in ancient societies. This study has never been carried out in Japan due to the very large number of Kofun and to the fact that access to the perimeter is usually forbidden. For these reasons, to investigate Kofun orientations, simple tools of satellite imagery are used here. Our results strongly point to a connection of all Kofun entrance corridors with the arc of the sky where the Sun and the Moon are visible every day of the year; additionally, these show an orientation of the keyhole Kofun to the arc of the rising/shining Sun, the goddess that the Japanese emperors put at the mythical origin of their dynasty.

Satellite-Aided Analysis of the Position of the Sun Temples and the Dynastic History of the Vth Egyptian Dynasty

“…For archaeology, GEP is already the instrument of choice for many-technically simple but fruitful-remote sensing investigations [11]. As a matter of fact, GEP has been recently used in a variety of archaeological scenarios: for instance, we recently carried out a complete satellite survey of the imperial tombs of Japan [12], and it has been used in Egypt to study activities that threaten archaeological sites [13]. These applications in archaeology add to the impressively growing number of scientific applications of GEP and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) in several different fields.…”