Ancient Mesopotamian religion.) Possible pre-Hipparchian recognition of precession Giorgio de Santillana (1902 – 1974) became professor of the History of Science in the School of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954, and along with Hertha von Dechend, published Hamlet's Mill, An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time in 1969. It was an attempt to marry science and mythology that had become separated by the ancient Greeks. Santillana and von Dechend believed that the old mythological stories handed down from antiquity were not random fictitious tales but were accurate depictions of celestial cosmology clothed in tales to aid their oral transmission. The chaos, monsters, and violence in ancient myths are representative of the forces that shape each age. They believed that ancient myths are the remains of preliterate astronomy that became lost with the rise of the Greco-Roman civilization. Santillana and von Dechend state that ancient myths have no historical basis but a cosmological one based on a primitive form of astrology. They recognized the importance of the heliacally rising constellation as markers for the astrological ages and wrote that knowledge of this phenomenon had been known for thousands of years previously. They state that to understand ancient thinking it is necessary to understand astrology, not the modern sun-sign or horoscopic astrology, but the astrology of ancient times which was the lingua franca of ancient times. Gavin White supports the mythological connection between precession of the equinoxes and some ancient star myths. They go further and state that our knowledge of the dawn of astrology and its relationship to ancient myths and star names is limited, and only extends back to about 2100 BC, which was during the Renaissance of Sumerian Culture; we are not able, they say, to examine older material on the subject. In Hamlet's Mill it is stated that the ancient Greeks knew of three successive destructions that correlate to three ages, and that since the beginning of history the vernal point has moved through Taurus, Aries, and Pisces. Hesiod in Works and Days refers to five successive ages. White states that the stars and many constellations were first organized in Mesopotamia region in the 5th millennium BCE but many of these constellations had to be reorganized by the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE due to the shift in the heavens caused by precession of the equinoxes. Some ancient constellations were removed