(BBC) Ancient cultures had vastly different interpretations of the dramatic natural phenomenon.

In the days after a Jacobite uprising was quashed in England in 1716, strange lights were seen streaking across the night skies.

They were variously described as looking like "pure flame", "something resembling the pipes of an organ", and a "shower of blood". People also had different interpretations of what they were seeing, from giants with flaming swords to armies fighting in the sky.

During the Jacobite Rebellion, the deposed Catholic Stuarts sought to regain the English throne from the Protestant monarchy, and the interpretation of these visions depended on an individual's political and religious leanings. As one English clergyman and writer wrote at the time, some viewed the "portentous stranger" with anxious amazement. Others, he added, "read, in its glaring visage, the fate of nations, and the fall of kingdoms".

Today we know that the playful displays of colour and shape from the aurora borealis are caused by activity on the surface of the Sun. These light up the skies beyond its usual haunts when solar activity spikes. In recent days, a strong geomagnetic storm has made the northern lights visible in many areas of the UK and the US.

But written records and oral traditions show that people have been fascinated by these dancing colours for millennia -- and have come up with some intriguing theories of what was causing them.

Some of these stories are relics of the past. Norse cosmology's Bifröst, the rainbow ridge that connected the land of mortals with the realm of the gods, for example, may have been a reference to the aurora.

But others remain part of oral storytelling traditions, typically viewed as cultural heritage or moral teaching rather than literal belief.

Until a few decades ago, the earliest reference to aurora was thought to be from China from 193 BC, when an emperor of the Western Jin dynasty wrote that "the sky opened in the north east".

But scholars are now finding even older possible references. Ancient Greek texts, for example, such as Aristotle's Meteorologica from around 330 BC, may be referring to aurora. This describes night-time visions that sometimes take on the "appearance of a burning flame, sometimes that of moving torches and stars".

There's also the mention of a "very red rainbow stretched in the east" contained within astronomical diaries on clay tablets from Babylonia from 567 BC, as well as Assyrian records that predate it by at least a century.

Assyrian scholars carved these references to "red glow", "red cloud" and "red sky" on ancient cuneiform tablets alongside an interpretation of what they represented -- such as omens for historical events -- to inform their kings.

But the known oldest reference may now be a 3,000-year-old text written some 300 years earlier on bamboo slips. In a 2023 paper, researchers identified a mention of aurora in The Bamboo Annals, a chronicle of ancient China. It describes a "five-coloured" event occurring during the night, which the researchers say indicates a "possible extreme space weather event" in the early 10th Century BC.

Researchers can make educated guesses that these poetic descriptions were of aurora by cross-referencing historical accounts with scientific data like past solar activity and the position of Earth's shifting magnetic field, and by ruling out other celestial phenomena.