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Early observation

Venus is in Earth's sky bright enough to be visible without aid, making it one of the classical planets that human cultures have known and identified throughout history, particularly for being the third brightest object in Earth's sky after the Sun and the Moon. Because the movements of Venus appear to be discontinuous (it disappears due to its proximity to the sun, for many days at a time, and then reappears on the other horizon), some cultures did not recognize Venus as a single entity; instead, they assumed it to be two separate stars on each horizon: the morning and evening star. Nonetheless, a cylinder seal from the Jemdet Nasr period and the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa from the First Babylonian dynasty indicate that the ancient Sumerians already knew that the morning and evening stars were the same celestial object. In the Old Babylonian period, the planet Venus was known as Ninsi'anna, and later as Dilbat. The name "Ninsi'anna" translates to "divine lady, illumination of heaven", which refers to Venus as the brightest visible "star". Earlier spellings of the name were written with the cuneiform sign si4 (= SU, meaning "to be red"), and the original meaning may have been "divine lady of the redness of heaven", in reference to the colour of the morning and evening sky.

The Chinese historically referred to the morning Venus as "the Great White" (Tàibái 太白) or "the Opener (Starter) of Brightness" (Qǐmíng 啟明), and the evening Venus as "the Excellent West One" (Chánggēng 長庚).

The ancient Greeks initially believed Venus to be two separate stars: Phosphorus, the morning star, and Hesperus, the evening star. Pliny the Elder credited the realization that they were a single object to Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, while Diogenes Laërtius argued that Parmenides (early fifth century) was probably responsible for this discovery. Though they recognized Venus as a single object, the ancient Romans continued to designate the morning aspect of Venus as Lucifer, literally "Light-Bringer", and the evening aspect as Vesper, both of which are literal translations of their traditional Greek names.

In the second century, in his astronomical treatise Almagest, Ptolemy theorized that both Mercury and Venus were located between the Sun and the Earth. The 11th-century Persian astronomer Avicenna claimed to have observed a transit of Venus (although there is some doubt about it), which later astronomers took as confirmation of Ptolemy's theory. In the 12th century, the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Bajjah observed "two planets as black spots on the face of the Sun"; these were thought to be the transits of Venus and Mercury by 13th-century Maragha astronomer Qotb al-Din Shirazi, though this cannot be true as there were no Venus transits in Ibn Bajjah's lifetime.