2023-04-19 05:28:31
Written by: Shadi Abdel Hafez
Arab stories.. People circulated them for entertainment and sermons thousands of years ago.. They traveled from the Arabian Peninsula to the contemporary International Astronomical Union.. Through a long series of translations that draw attention to the fact that the Arab region once witnessed a scientific renaissance that affected the whole world. The names of the current stars are linked to the story ancient Arabic.
A Bedouin man accompanied me in a wilderness at night, so I went to ask him about the localities of a people among the Arabs and their waters, and he made me point to every locality with a star and every lost place with a star. .
With this piece of prose, Ibn Qutayba al-Dinuri – a writer and jurist who lived in the Abbasid era – opens his widely known book on the heritage of the stars among the Arabs, called “Anwa in the Seasons of the Arabs”, and from it we can conclude how the stars played an important role in the daily life of the Arabs in the past, the matter Which called on them to understand it instinctively, as well as to master its study. This was the nature of things, to grow up knowing about the stars, just as a child grows up now knowing smart phones, for example, and with his young age he becomes proficient in dealing with them.
And because the stars seemed eternal to the inhabitants of the ancient world; Because astronomically it appears in the same place every year without change, they have added various degrees of sacredness and romance to it, even if this differs in different peoples, and we can find this clear, for example, in what we now know as the constellation of the Dragon Draco, and the constellation as an astronomical definition is a group of stars that take a distinctive shape In the sky, these stars are not related to each other and are not actually close to each other, but they appear to us, the inhabitants of the earth, as well.
a dragon in the sky
In the ancient Greek myth, the constellation represented a dragon with large yellow eyes that protected the treasures of Zeus, the king of the gods of the Olympian mountains. Some of King Cadmus’s men approached this cave, and the dragon killed them. The city of Thebes, as for Zeus, he raised his dragon to the sky to glorify him, and to guard the treasures of heaven instead of the treasures of the earth.
But the strange thing is that if you decided to meditate on the names of the stars of the constellation currently documented by the International Astronomical Union, you would find that they are Arabic, related to what the Arabs saw thousands of years ago in that region.
For the ancient Arabs, the sky was simply their environment in which they lived, including domestic and predatory animals. Take, for example, Al-Awa’id, which is a group of four stars that take a distinctive shape and represent the head of the constellation of the Dragon. For the Arabs, it represented a group of camels that turned around to protect a baby camel from wolves. (which is represented by the two stars of the wolves and the nails of the wolf), as well as Al-Daih, which is the bright star that represented the hyena.
This infant was called the quarter, meaning the child of a she-camel born in the spring. It is a dim star in the midst of spells. You only see it on a dark night and if your eyesight is sharp (the luminosity of the star is about 5.75, i.e. at the maximum capabilities of the naked eyes).
In addition to the previous story, you will find one of the aspects of the desert also present in the first stars of the constellation, and it is called the “dancer” Alrakis, and the dancer from the camel is the one who runs fast, and you can also find in the constellation three stars that the Arabs called in ancient times, as if they are not three visible stars, but rather Three pieces of rock were placed together to form a triangle, between its ribs a fire was ignited and a pot was placed over it to cook food.
Traveling names
You can clearly notice the association of the names of the current stars with the ancient Arab story, although the constellation itself is Greek in name and shape, for this reason related to the history of Arab astronomy. The Arabs began to study the night sky when several books were translated into Arabic during the Abbasid era, including the book “Almagest”. of Ptolemy, who is considered a center of Arab astronomy; As the Arabs transferred from it, then added to it and corrected it, and among the Arabs added to the Almagest were the names of the stars inspired by the ancient Arabian desert, which was saturated with its heritage.
And when the translation movement was reversed after several centuries from Arabic into Latin, and the Arabs were known at that time for progress in all sciences, especially astronomy, Arabic books were translated such as “Images of the Fixed Planets” by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (the astronomer who lived about 1100 AD years ago in It is now known as the Greek city of Shiraz), into Latin and transferred with it the names of the Arab stars, and until now those stars are still documented in astronomical atlases.
And because the translation from Arabic into Latin was inaccurate (as was the usual translation in those times), the names of some stars were modified. Take, for example, the stars Aldhiban and Althebyne in the constellation of the Dragon, both of which are different images and distorted for the designation “the two wolves”. From “Al-Athafi”, while Al-Daih was a little close to his Arabic name when he wrote Edasich. You will often notice that the Latin translation from Arabic was modified, and perhaps a point was lost here or there, so the name was completely reversed.
And because the Arabs in the past had control in the field of science, the names of some stars were associated with Greek, and were not originally Arabic, but the Europeans converted them to Arabic, such as the dragon star, for example, Eltanin. indicates that it may have been entirely composed by a foreigner, in the sense that the Europeans gave an Arabic name to this star. Because the Arabic language was then the language of astronomical conventions.
Saad who filled the sky
Nine stars in only one constellation, it had an Arabic name of origin, and you can notice that in all the constellations, but let us now move on to an ancient Arab heritage tale that was present in 10 other stars with the clear name. The story says that one of the desert princes named Saad decided to travel with the gathering of his men during the winter, and before traveling, his father advised him to slaughter his camel if the cold wind blows.
After the hero of the story traveled halfway, the weather changed suddenly and became very cold, and rain and snow fell abundantly. Here, Saad implemented his father’s advice and slaughtered the camel and took refuge in its bowels, hence the name “Saad the Slaughterer.” Days later, Saad felt hungry and had no choice but to He ate camel meat, and thus became “Saad Balaa”. After the cold and rain ended and the sun shone, Saad rejoiced and celebrated his survival, becoming “Saad Al-Saud”. Saad made a coat out of the camel’s hair and took the remaining meat in his sleeve, fearing that the cold would come again. He was called “Saad Al-Khabaya”.
The story of “Saad” includes astronomical and climatic knowledge. As it passes in 50 consecutive days, starting from February and reaching March, which is a period in which the weather changes from winter to spring, and is characterized by weather fluctuations, so the weather is hot and sometimes it is cold, and the Arabs in the past used to hedge for that period, so they did not lighten their clothes and did not go out to travel except While rarely.
The Arabs divided the year into 28 climatic seasons, each of which passes in about 13 days, and each of them has a specific climatic circumstance, and accordingly this affects people’s clothing, food, cultivation, and movements in the desert in the past, and because the stars change every year with the change of seasons, people have linked the climatic conditions And a specific group of stars, and the stars of Saudization were present in several places in the contemporary night sky, including the four Saudizations related to the story of Saad in the constellations of Capricorn and Aquarius.
Image of the constellation Aquarius in the Fixed Planets Picture Book
In the constellation of Capricorn, you find the star of the slaughterer, Dabih, which refers to Saad the slaughterer, and next to it you find the star of the sheep, Alshat, which is a reference to the camel that Saad slaughtered. This simply means that an ancient Arab tale, which people circulated for entertainment and sermon thousands of years ago, has traveled from the Arabian Peninsula to the contemporary International Astronomical Union, through a long series of translations indicating that this region of the world once witnessed a civilizational renaissance that represented a mark in the history of science. .
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