For example, Homer wrote in the Odyssey about events that occurred more than 3000 years ago, thus:

"Glorious Odysseus, happy with the wind, spread sails and taking his seat artfully with the steering oar he held her on her course ['her' is a raft he built to sail away from the nymph Kalypso], nor did sleep ever descend on his eyelids as he kept his eye on the Pleiades [a cluster of stars] and late-setting Bootes [a constellation, an identifiable pattern of stars in the sky] and the Bear [the constellation now known as the Big Dipper], to whom men give also the name of the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion [another easily identified constellation], and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean. For so Kalypso, bright among goddesses, had told him to make his way over the sea, keeping the Bear on his left hand."

 

-- from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, Perrenial Classics edition, 1999, HarperCollins, publishers.