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the night sky
Rob Arnhem digs deep into the Arabic origins of the stars above

There's an active Astronomical Society in Oman, and a top-class planetarium. Outside the bright lights of Muscat, a vaulted night sky is liberally sprinkled with some of the clearest stars you'll see anywhere. As a bonanza, the capital area lies just north of the Tropic of Cancer, thus making most of Oman south to Salalah fall in the sub-tropical latitudes and allowing more stars to be visible. But how many people know that an astronomical number of those stars, not to stretch a point too finely, have Arabic names?

Both astronomy and its older stepsister, astrology, have been with us since our ancestors first gazed at the night sky in awe and tried to make some sense of the universe. For reliable records to be kept, though, we needed writing, and in China, India, Central America and the Middle East, it was the city civilisations that gave birth to astronomy as we know it. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) both needed accurate systems of recording heavenly movements. In Egypt, the rising of the Dog Star, Sirius, heralded the vital news of the rising of the Nile's floodwaters. In Babylon, people worshipped the sun, moon and stars. The Babylonians also developed the calendar we use today, dividing a day into 24 hours and a circle into 360 degrees. This enabled them to measure the passage of the sun across the sky by its progression over 365 days through the 12 'houses' of the signs of the zodiac. This was measured from March, or the spring equinox, when the sun was in the first house of Aries, the ram. In Arabic, the houses are called towers, or burj. The first record of our present signs of the zodiac is Babylonian and dates from about 600BC. The word is Greek for 'animal signs', as the earliest signs were mostly of animals. By 100BC the Egyptians were familiar with all the signs of the zodiac we would recognise today. The Greeks adopted them too and they became general throughout the Mediterranean classical world. The Chinese and Indians have their own system befitting their long history as ancient civilisations. But it's Arabic names that outnumber all the others when it comes to the stars forming those constellations.

In star charts, those maps of the universe, 165 stars have names that are either clearly Arabic or Arabic translations of earlier Greek names. Many of these now have simpler names using the letters of the Greek alphabet, plus the name of the constellation, but they were recorded by Arab and other Muslim astronomers. The great Greek astronomer Ptolemy who lived in Egypt 1,800 years ago listed over 1,000 stars and their measurements, including 48 of the 88 constellations. The ones he didn't name were all hidden from his view, as they were only visible in the southern hemisphere. In the Muslim golden age, centred on Baghdad and Cordoba, several polymath scholars translated the works of Greek scholars into Arabic. Ptolemy's great work the Syntaxis was translated into Arabic as the Almagest, which is how all those present Arabic-sounding names came to us. From the Muslims, the old Greek astronomical tradition they'd preserved spread to Europe during the Middle Ages.

In the Holy Qur'an there are at least 70 references to celestial bodies. Noting the phases of the moon is a crucial part of the lunar Muslim calendar, and the five daily prayers depend on knowing the exact times of sunrise and sunset. Determining the qibla, the direction of Mecca, is also crucial, and the bright star Polaris, the Pole Star, was actually called Al Qibla or Al Jah, and was mariners' most useful star for finding north. Similarly, the star Suhail and Benetnash were also used for setting the qibla. Arabic personal names also continue the link with the heavens. Every Bader and Badria is named after the serene beauty of the full moon, and every Hilal is also the crescent moon. Shamsa is 'sunny'. Such well-known names in Oman as Suhail (Sirius) and Shihab (a blazing meteor, or 'shooting star') further reflect the heavenly bodies. Soraya is the more familiar form of Thurayya.

In Oman, starlore had a very practical and necessary application. In many villages, a deceptively simple-looking setup determines the amount of falaj water a farmer is entitled to for irrigation. It consists of what appears to be just a random number of tall rods and shorter pegs driven into the ground, plus a couple of loose stones, but everyone knows what they mean. It's a sophisticated combination of sundial by day and star watch by night. The times that 12 stars rise in summer and another 12 in winter are known and noted. These determined the length of time each owner was allowed to irrigate his gardens. The Pleiades, Al Thurayya, is one prominent cluster acting as a bright signal in midsummer, when water supply is especially crucial for a good date harvest.