Crossword-Solution: METONIC 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Hence arose the more perfect Neros." It is thought by various writers that the knowledge of the ancient Hindoos regarding the movements of the sun and moon in their cycles of nineteen and six hundred years--the Metonic cycle, and the Neros--proves that long before the birth of Hipparchus the length of the year was known with a degree of exactitude which that astronomer had not the means of determining.

The Chinese boast of having noticed and recorded a series of eclipses extending over a period of three thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, and it is probable that they anticipated the Greeks two thousand years in the discovery of the Metonic cycle, or the cycle of nineteen years, at the end of which time the new moons fall on the same days of the year.

The Metonic cycle is 235 lunations or nineteen years, after which period the sun and moon occupy the same position relative to the stars.

The crescent and disk combined always represent the conjunctive Sun and Moon; and when placed on the head of the Zodiacal Bull, the commencement of the cycle termed SAROS by the Chaldeans, and Metonic by the Greeks; and supposed to be alluded to in Job, by the phrase, "Mazzaroth in his season"; that is to say, when the first new Moon and new Sun of the year were coincident, which happened once in eighteen years and a fraction.

The _Metonic Cycle_, which may be regarded as the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of ancient astronomy, is a period of nineteen solar years, after which the new moons again happen on the same days of the year.