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An Unknown Arabic Source for Star Names

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Paul Kunitzsch
Paul Kunitzsch*
Affiliation:
(University of Munich), Davidstr. 17, D-8000 München 81, West Germany

Extract

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Arabic star names are well known in two areas: in the Orient itself, i.e. in the Arabic-Islamic civilization, and in the West where many of them were adopted since mediaeval times and continued to be used until today.

The complex known in modern Western astronomy as “Arabic star names” is the result of a historical development of almost exactly one thousand years. In mediaeval times, those names were introduced into Western use by Latin translations of Arabic astronomical and astrological works. Afterwards, since Humanist and Renaissance times, and until this present century, Western astronomers used to pick up more “Arabic” names from philological studies of orientalists who tried to describe and explain the stellar nomenclature of the Arabs and other Oriental peoples. As outstanding examples, I mention the studies of Joseph Scaliger and his follower Hugo Grotius (both printed in 1600) whose nomenclature was borrowed by Johannes Bayer into his star atlas Uranometria of 1603; Thomas Hyde’s commentary to his edition of Ulugh Bēg’s star catalogue (Oxford, 1665) from which Giuseppe Piazzi borrowed a great number of names into the second edition of his Palermo Catalogue, 1814; German studies by F.W.V. Lach (1796) and Ludwig Ideler (1809) which were used by continental astronomers such as J.E.Bode and many others; and still the book on star names by R.H. Allen (1899) from which several new names appear in astronomical books and atlases of our times.

Type
Mediaeval Astronomy
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 91: History of Oriental Astronomy , 1987 , pp. 155 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

References

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