East

East, a bearing of 90 degrees, is the quarter of sunrise, and it is the most consistently privileged direction across unrelated traditions for that reason. The sun does not rise due east except at the equinoxes, moving north in summer and south in winter, and many ancient monuments are aligned to a solstitial rather than an equinoctial sunrise.

Christian churches were built ad orientem, with the altar at the east end, from late antiquity onward, and the dead were buried facing east in expectation of the resurrection; the practice is not commanded in scripture and developed as custom. In Hindu Vastu the east belongs to Indra and is favourable for entrances and for the morning; in Chinese cosmology it is the wood phase, spring, the Azure Dragon and the trigram Zhen. Zoroastrian, Vedic and Roman practice all favour the east in different ways, and in each case the sun is the reason.

The English word east and its Germanic cognates derive from a root meaning dawn, the same root behind the Latin aurora and the Greek eos, and behind the name Eostre, the goddess Bede reports as giving her name to the Anglo-Saxon month that became Easter; the etymology is secure even though almost nothing is known about the goddess. Orientation itself takes its name from the east: to orient something is to turn it eastward, and medieval European maps were commonly drawn with east at the top for that reason. The pattern is strong but not universal, and it is worth resisting the temptation to make it so. Islamic prayer orients to Mecca rather than to a quarter; Jewish prayer orients to Jerusalem; several traditions give priority to the north or to the centre. The privileging of east is a common solution, not a rule.

Medieval European mappae mundi, world maps, conventionally placed east at the top rather than north, following the same orientation-toward-sunrise convention that gives the word orient its meaning, and the largest surviving example, the Hereford Mappa Mundi of around 1300, places the Garden of Eden at the very top of the map, in the far east, with Jerusalem near the map's centre; this is the origin of the now-common but historically specific cartographic sense in which east-up world maps are said to be properly "oriented," a term whose literal meaning, turned toward the east, modern north-up maps have quietly inverted without changing the word itself.