The wonder of how Mother Earth was reborn each spring could have motivated attention to which stars the Sun visited in this time of magic. Looking in the list of Babylonian Ecliptic Constellations we could perhaps count the length of the marvellous spring half of the year as the distance from Anunitum to Spica, i.e. approximately as 203 - 17 = 186 days:
The first 11 of these days ended with a pair of stars (the First Point of Aries). 20 - 1 = 19. Otherwise there was a single star for each of the ecliptic stations. 186 - 11 = 175 (= 25 weeks). I decided to change my ordinal numbers so 1-iku should be number 0. At the other end of the list was Spica, also a special case. For instance did the Chinese have Spica not at the end but at the beginning:
Looking in the glyph text we can see that indeed Anunitum appeared close to the Full Moon when the Sun was about to reach Spica:
There was no need to list more than 20 stations for the Sun because these stations would afterwards follow in the same order close to the Full Moon. When Anunitum was at the Full Moon it should have indicated the Sun had reached Apami-Atsa (Child of Waters, θ Virginis). ... The form of the letter θ suggests a midline ('waist'), although the origin of θ is the Phoenician tēth which means 'wheel'. This in turn could have originated from a glyph named 'good' which in Egypt was nfr ... ... needfire ceremonies usually take place near the summer solstice (the Feast of St. John) ... but they occur in several other seasons as well. The summer date of the rite and its accompanying festival have to do, among other things, with fertility, as can can clearly be seen in a variant from the valley of the Moselle preserved for us by Jakob Grimm. Each household in the village was constrained to contribute a shock of straw to the nearby high place, Stromberg, where the males went at evening while the females went to a spring lower down on the slope. A huge wheel was wrapped with this straw. An axle run through the wheel served as the handles for those who were to guide it on its downward plunge. The mayor of a nearby town kindled the straw, for which office he was rewarded with a basketful of cherries. All the men kindled torches and some followed the burning orb as it was released downhill to shouts of joy. The women at the spring echoed these shouts as the wheel rushed by them. Often the fire went out of its own accord before it reached the river, but should the waters of the river extinguish it, an abundant vintage was forecast for that year ...
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