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East-Northeast, a Secondary Point of the Compass Rose

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East-Northeast, a Secondary Point of the Compass Rose

East-northeast is a bearing of 67.5 degrees, midway between east and northeast. Sixteen-point and thirty-two-point divisions of the horizon appear in more than one tradition. The Roman wind-rose named twelve winds, the Greek Tower of the Winds in Athens is octagonal and carries eight, and the Chinese compass school works with a ring of twenty-four mountains, that is, twenty-four directions of fifteen degrees each, built from the eight trigrams, the ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches. None of these divisions matches the others, which is a useful reminder that the number of directions a culture recognises is a choice rather than a fact about the horizon. The modern convention of 360 degrees measured clockwise from north is itself inherited from Babylonian sexagesimal arithmetic.

East-northeast is one of the thirty-two points of the traditional mariner's compass rose, bisecting east and northeast at 67.5 degrees. The thirty-two-point system descends from the classical wind rose, the ancient practice of naming directions for the winds that blew from them; the Tower of the Winds in Athens, built in the first century BCE, depicts eight wind deities on its eight faces, Boreas from the north, Kaikias from the northeast, and so on around the compass, a scheme the Roman writer Vitruvius also describes. Medieval and early modern navigators expanded this eight-wind framework first to sixteen and then to thirty-two named points, layering a technical navigational vocabulary onto what had originally been a set of named winds rather than abstract bearings.

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