More Catalogs of Comets

In writing about the Comet Book a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it was one of a whole class of books devoted to categorizing comets and trying to predict their effects. I just stumbled across the image above, which is from a Chinese document called the Mawangdui silk, found in a tomb at dated to around 170 BCE. Below is a page from Johannes Hevelius' Cometographia, published in 1668. Funny that Europeans thought comets looked like swords, which never occurred to me, or to the Chinese.