Ursa Minor The tradition of naming the northern constellations "bears" appears to be genuinely Greek, although Homer refers to just a single "bear". The original "bear" is thus Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor was admitted as second, or "Phoenician Bear" (Ursa Phoenicia, hence Φοινίκη, Phoenice) only later, according to Strabo (I.1.6, C3) due to a suggestion by Thales, who suggested it as a navigation aid to the Greeks, who had been navigating by Ursa Major. In classical antiquity, the celestial pole was somewhat closer to Beta Ursae Minoris than to Alpha Ursae Minoris, and the entire constellation was taken to indicate the
Ursa Major has been reconstructed as an Indo-European constellation. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century AD astronomer Ptolemy in his "Almagest", who called it Arktos Megale. It is mentioned by such poets as Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Federico Garcia Lorca (in "Song for the Moon"). The Finnish epic Kalevala mentions it, Vincent van Gogh painted it. In 2009, the American rock band Third Eye Blind named their fourth album, "Ursa Major", after the constellation. It may be mentioned in the biblical book of Job, dated between the 7th and 4th centuries BC, although this is