c.1000 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

(additional illustration – 22 July 2022)

There are questions about the drawings on folio 67v-1 which are yet to be investigated. I thought some readers might be champing at the bit, by now, tired of being told how, and why, to do non-theory-driven research and impatient to try out the analytical approach for themselves.

As ever, the pattern for work of this sort, investigating problematic images of unknown cultural origin, begins by asking (not by inventing, imagining, guessing, presuming or theorising) – questions of that ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ sort. So-

• Where and when do we find a practice of drawing stars as circles or, if you prefer, as simple un-filled dots?
• Where and when do we find a practice of providing stars-as-circles with human-looking faces?
• Where and when do we find a practice of grading stars by analogy with social gradations?

Taking our main example as the four stars forming the peripheral ‘West’ emblem and which I’ve identified as tail-stars in Scorpius (remembering they could be drawn facing left or our right, and both are found in copies of al-Sufi’s Kitāb ṣuwar al-kawākib…*

• A copy dated 1260-1280 AD, and suggested made at Marāghah (Iran) can be seen as British Library MS Or 5323. Other copies in Britain include Brit.Lib. Or 1407 ( Brit.Lib. IO Islamic 1407), Brit.Lib. MS Add 7488, (IO Islamic). The Bodleian library holds a copy as Marsh 144.

Below – Scorpius in a thirteenth-century copy of al-Sufi’s text, completed in 964 AD from knowledge of Hellenistic astronomy and the natural astronomy of the Arab traditions. Al-Sufi’s observations were made in Isfahan at a latitude of 32.7N° and included star-magnitudes – information not always agreeing with Ptolemy and not always accurately copied in later versions.

It may assist to have the stars’ descriptions according to the Greek-letter system no longer used by formal astronomy.

Valuable for historical research and normally difficult to access, is

• Claudius Ptolemy’s star catalog, with stars identified [and also] using modern designations, in standard spreadsheet format.

N.B. the downloadable spreadsheet courtesy of John P. Pratt, whose name should not be omitted if making use of his work.

To add to the researcher’s challenges, the relevant manazil is sometimes found as ‘Shūla’ not ‘Shaula’ and while some important primary sources such as al-Biruni, and some conservative secondary sources such as Savage-Smith form that manazil of just two stars – lambda ( λ ) and nu (ν ) Scorpionis– other sources differ in their naming and/or the number of its component stars.

al-Biruni himself says that the two stars λ and ν are known as H’arazah, ‘the joints of the vertebrae’.

Illustrated copies of al-Sufi’s book show many more stars than two for the end of the tail, and a fifteenth-century eastern navigator, Ibn Majid, says of this manazil – which he knows as ‘al-Shūla‘ – that its component stars:

.. are all small stars, the smallest being of the sixth magnitude and the brightest of the fourth.. (p.109)

If you should find, from the balance of evidence you uncover, that you identify here four different stars of Scorpius from those I’ve nominated (see above), then by all means say so, and lay out the path which brought you to that conclusion.

Here’s one hypothetical alternative:

The best evidence will date to before 1440 AD or reflect habits and traditions demonstrably in place before then.

Marginal sources and notes that may assist.

If you looked at the astrological list of manzil that I mentioned and linked in the previous post, you may have noticed that the manazil is there named ‘Shaula’ but only one star is listed for it. By any criterion other than those which might apply to western astrology, that is wrong. It may have been the habit of some astrologers to represent the manazil by just one star. It wasn’t the custom most writers in Arabic or in Persian, nor the understanding of the eastern pilots such as Ibn Majid.

Jobes makes a passing reference to a comment made by Chilmead* about λ Scorpionis, as ‘It is also called Schomlek, which [Joseph?]Scaliger thinks is read by a transposition of the letters for mosklec, which signifieth the bending of the tail’.

• possibly in his translation of Hues. See Brit.Lib. Addit. MS. 31429. ‘A learned Treatise of Globes both Celestiall and Terrestriall . . . written first in Latine by Mr. Robert Hues … Illustrated with notes Inr lo. Isa. Pontanus, and now lately made English … by John Chilmead, Mr. A. of Christ Church in Oxon.,’ London. I have not sighted the original.

• Gertude Jobes, Outer space : myths, name meanings, calendars from the emergence of history to the present day (1964). Use with caution. I regret being unable to add further details, still having my notes but no longer having the book.

To transpose letters in order to avoid speaking a detested or prohibited word, especially a name, is familiar to us from Jewish religious texts but I understand it was also sometimes practiced in Arabic works. For all I know it may have been done by other religious communities, though I would not expect to find it in the west, nor among the Greeks. If we may accept that Scaliger cites some source for his information, then I should say it more likely that ‘Schomlek’ avoided some vernacular form as *S3h-mlk. I should not mention this except that it could prove relevant to the form of cap you see given one of the stars in that detail from folio 67v-1.

In any case, the cap is a last detail which may, or may not, ever be rightly understood and setting that aside, here are the questions likely to shed light on the origin, date and intended purpose for the four peripheral emblems:

1. Where and when do we find a practice of drawing stars (not sun and moon) as circles or, if you prefer, as un-filled dots?
2. Where and when do we find a practice of drawing stars-as-circles with human-looking faces?
3. Where and when do we find a practice of grading stars by analogy with social gradations as apparently intended by giving one of the figures headwear? Is it done by reference to colour, magnitude, the star’s name, a particular legend, or by some other criterion?
4. Is there any gender-differentiation apparent? If so, can you identify a language in which the the gender assigned these stars’ accords with their representation?

..and theorists think pictures are easy: ‘two eyes and commonsense-aka-imagination’. 🙂