Sky & Telescope - May 2023 - 28

HESIOD: NEUES MUSEUM / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / CC BY-SA 4.0; FARNESE ATLAS:
NAPLES ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / CC BY-SA 3.0
Astronomy History
names Lugal (King) and Absin (Ear of Grain), respectively
(S&T: Jan. 2018, p. 66).
Some popular star names do appear to be native to Greece
rather than Mesopotamia. For instance, Sirius is a Latinized
form of Seirios, Greek for Scorcher. That presumably reflects
the belief that when this star first appears in the predawn sky,
the combination of its heat with the Sun's is responsible for
the hottest days of the year. Even today these are sometimes
called the " dog days of summer, " a reference to Cyon, the
Dog, another common Greek name for the star.
Most of the entries in Ptolemy's star catalog include only
their celestial coordinates, magnitudes, and positions within
the constellations; for instance, he noted that Denebola
marks the tail of Leo, the Lion. These descriptions ended up
supplying a large number of our modern star names after
being translated into Arabic and then transliterated into
Latin. Let's turn to that story now.
EARLY GREEK STAR NAMES Arcturus and Sirius are
probably the oldest star names that remain unchanged except
for minor tweaks in spelling and pronunciation. Both appear
in the didactic poem Works and Days, written around 700 BC
by the Greek poet Hesiod, thought to be the subject of the
Roman bust shown above.
The Golden Age of Islam
The Roman Empire, which replaced Greece as the dominant
power in the Mediterranean starting about 200 BC, had two
main languages. Latin, the mother tongue of Rome, became
the common language in the western half of the empire,
while Greek continued to be used in the east and prevailed as
the primary language of science and scholarship throughout.
During the empire's heyday all cultured people were
bilingual in Latin and Greek, so scholarly texts were rarely
translated. But knowledge of Greek was lost in the Western
Roman Empire when it came under pressure from barbarian
invasions around AD 400, making life untenable for educated
urban elites. What we now call Western Europe was cut off
from Greek culture, marking the beginning of the Dark Ages,
when written records from Western Europe dried to a trickle.
Meanwhile, the ancient civilizations of the Middle East
came under the sway of Islam. In the late 700s Islamic
caliphs funded large-scale efforts to translate Greek, Persian,
and Sanskrit classics into Arabic, the language of the holy
Koran. Thus was born the Golden Age of Islam, when scholars
synthesized the best of the older cultures and added their
own distinctive contributions.
When Europe started to reawaken from its long intelSTARS
IN STONE The Farnese Atlas, probably carved
around AD 150, is the oldest known depiction of the GrecoRoman
constellations. Some scholars surmise that the cusps
of the constellation figures were intended to denote stars,
but the stars themselves are not shown. This echoes the fact
that Greco-Roman literature includes more than 50 names for
constellations and asterisms but fewer than 20 star names.
lectual slumber, it naturally looked to the Islamic world
for instruction. Scholars flocked to Spain, which had been
conquered by Islam during its initial military expansion.
Cultural diffusion got a big boost after AD 1085, when
Christians repossessed the ancient Spanish city of Toledo
and its huge library, which housed Arabic translations of the
Greek classics. Successive archbishops of Toledo encouraged
local and visiting scholars to translate those books at first
into Spanish and later into Latin, which became the primary
language of science for the next six or seven centuries.
As a result, Western Europe first encountered the Almagest
through Gerard of Cremona's Latin translation of an Arabic
translation of the Greek original. The title Almagest is in fact
Arabic; the original Greek name was Mathematike Syntaxis.
28 MAY 2023 * SKY & TELESCOPE
Sky & Telescope - May 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - May 2023
