The Fascination of Time

There is a common thread in all ancient cultures, the very unusual fascination of the old civilizations for astronomy and time.

From the primitive paleolithic cultures like Stonehenge to the Greek antiquity, from the Mayan civilization to The Egyptian pharaonic empire, we have found very concrete and powerful evidence of their preoccupation and fascination with astronomy and time.
There is no doubt about it the only question is "Why?"

There are some attempts to explain it like "They need it to keep time because they needed to know when to plant their crops and when the rainy season will come" and stuff like that.
But that is a very weak argument not false but incomplete.

If you are familiar with the Vedic scriptures you have probably heard of the "Yugas" or cycles of time.
Yuga in Hinduism is an epoch or era within a four-age cycle.
A complete Yuga starts with the Satya Yuga, via Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga into a Kali Yuga.
Our present time is a Kali Yuga, which started at 3102 BCE with the end of the Kurukshetra War (or Mahabharata war)

Not coincidentally the Greeks divided the time into a similar 4 ages structure: The Golden age, the Silver age, the Bronze age and the Iron age.
According to the ancient wisdom, we are now living in the Kali Yuga or the Iron age which is the last of the periods - the end of time.

Two things.
One: the Yugas are based on the Galactic precession, the Sun circular movement around the galaxy.
How the hell that they know there is a galaxy and the galaxy is rotating. How did they measure it when we, the modern civilization, thought the Earth was the center of the universe till  Giordano Bruno and Galileo? 
What does the galaxy moving have to do with planting the crops or tending the cows, or anything else?
Why did they do it? There has to be an explanation for it.

Second: All ancient civilizations saw time as a cyclical occurrence not a linear one.
It is funny that even now at this moment 2018 AD we believe in a linear time. We believe that progress and growth just keep on happening forever.

That view is obviously false. Nothing keeps on growing forever sooner or later we will run out of natural resources and space to expand and a collapse of the of the human society is inevitable. ( I know; if we learn to live in harmony with mother Gaya we can attain a sustainable symbiotic existence. The humankind will destroy itself in a global war before we learn to live in harmony with anything.)

But the old wisdom tells us that time is cyclical and all are warning us of the inevitable decay of the human civilization.
According to the Sanscrit texts, we are now living in the Kali Yuga the age of the Kali goddess of destruction.

Kali Yuga: The final age. It is the age of darkness and ignorance.
People become sinners and lack virtue. They become slaves to their passions and are barely as powerful as their earliest ancestors in the Satya Yuga.
Society falls into disuse and people become liars and hypocrites.

Knowledge is lost and scriptures are diminished. Humans eat forbidden and dirty food.
The environment is polluted, water and food become scarce.
Wealth is heavily diminished. Families become non-existent. By the end of Kali Yuga, the average lifespan of humans will be as low as 70 years.

I know what you are thinking "this is the same BS as the Mayan end of time calendar" You are right in the sense that time cannot physically end but "the end of time" is a metaphorical expression, it is a warning that time is running out and we have to wake up before our civilisation will colaps due to our ignorance and greed.