Arabic Star Names: A Treasure of Knowledge Shared by the World

The origin of star names

Regardless of origin, almost all star names belong to old traditions. They are a part of the collective cultural heritage of humanity. Modern astronomers study many stars too faint to see without a telescope, and these are so numerous they are known only by catalogue numbers and coordinates. As a result, official star names are essentially limited to the old names, and typically only bright stars have names.

The majority of stars names are related to their constellation, e.g., the star Deneb means "tail" and labels that part of Cygnus the Swan. Others describe the star itself, such as Sirius, which translates literally as "scorching," apt enough for the brightest star in the sky. Quite a lot of prominent stars bear Arabic names, in which al corresponds to the article "the" and often appears in front, e.g., Algol, "The Ghoul." Its inclusion has become somewhat arbitrary over time. Hence, several star names of Arabic origin are given elsewhere with or without the al- prefix. Most other names of stars inherited from the past have Greek, Latin or Chinese labels.

History of Arabic Star Names

Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer who lived and worked around 100-178 CE in Alexandria, Egypt, collected ancient Greek descriptions of 1,022 stars in his famous book The Great System of Astronomy, popularised under its shortened Arabic title, the Almagest. Ptolemy's catalogue of stars arranged into 48 constellations, with estimates of their brightness, based largely on the observations of the Greek earlier astronomers, such as Hipparchus.

Ptolemy's book was translated twice into Arabic in the 9th century and became famous. Many of the Arabic-language star descriptions in the Almagest came to be used widely as names for stars. The leading expert on star names in Islamic astronomy, the German historian Paul Kunitzsch, has identified two traditions of star names in Muslim heritage. The first is the traditional star folklore of the Muslim peoples which he has named "indigenous-Arabic", the second being the scientific Islamic Arabic tradition, which he designates "scientific-Arabic".

When the Arabic texts were translated into Latin beginning from the 12th century, the Arabic tradition of star names was passed down to the Latin world. However, this happened often in a highly corrupted form that either changed the meaning, or in extreme cases gave birth to words with no meaning at all. Other names were mistakenly transferred from one star to another, so that a name might even refer to a different constellation (Greek or Arabic) rather than to the one of the star's actual residence.

Nevertheless, even with these shortcomings, the majority of star names adopted since the Renaissance are Arabic in origin. In 1603, German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-1625) instituted a system of assigning Greek letters to stars (Bayer designation), consisting of a lowercase Greek letter followed by the genitive name of the constellation. The letters are usually assigned to the stars in the order of their brightness within a given constellation. For instance, the brightest star in a constellation "Alpha" was rendered as "the second Beta," and so on. To the Greek letter name is appended the Latin possessive form of the constellation name. Thus the brightest star in Lyra, Vega (an Arabic proper name), becomes Alpha of Lyra or Alpha Lyrae (where "Lyrae" means "of Lyra").

Al-Sūfī's Book of the Fixed Stars

One of those who left an indelib`le influence on the Arabic observation and study of stars is the astronomer Abū al-Husayn ‘Abd Al-Rahmān al-Sūfī (903-986), known also by his Latinized name of Azophi, who systematically revised Ptolemy's catalogue of stars. Al-Sūfī produced a revised and updated version of Ptolemy's Almagest in a major book called Kitab suwar al-kawakib (The Book of Fixed Stars), completed around 964 CE. Built on the basis of the Greek astronomical heritage, the work of al- Sūfī contained a listing of the Arabs' own star names, magnitudes determined by al-Sūfī himself, and two drawings of each constellation, one as it is seen in the sky and one reversed right to left as it would appear on a celestial globe. The oldest surviving copy was produced by his son around 1010 CE and is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Marsh 144).

According to Paul Kunitzsch, the German authority on Arabic star names, local tradition of the peoples of Islamic lands in the Arabian Peninsula and in the Middle East had their own names for various bright stars such as Aldebaran, and they commonly regarded single stars as representing animals or people. For example, the stars we know as Alpha and Beta Ophiuchi were regarded by them as a shepherd and his dog, while neighbouring stars made up the outlines of a field with sheep. Some of the Arabic names were already so many centuries old that their meanings were lost even to al-Sūfī and his contemporaries, and they remain unknown today. Other star names used by al-Sūfī and his compatriots were direct translations of Ptolemy's descriptions. For example, the star name Fomalhaut comes from the Arabic meaning "mouth of the southern fish", which is where Ptolemy had described it in the Almagest.

Al-Sūfī did his own brightness and magnitude estimates which frequently deviated from those in Ptolemy's work. He identified the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is visible from Yemen, though not from Isfahan in the centre of Iran where he worked; it was not seen by Europeans until Magellan's voyage in the 16th century. He also did the earliest recorded observation of the Andromeda Galaxy, which he described as a "small cloud". He observed that the ecliptic plane is inclined with respect to the celestial equator and more accurately calculated the length of the tropical year. He observed and described the stars, their positions, their magnitudes and their colour, setting out his results constellation by constellation. His famous Book of Fixed Stars was translated into Latin and had a major influence in Europe since the 13th century, both by its textual descriptions and pictures.

List of star names having Arabic origin

In the following, we present a list of Arabic Star Names. This list does not contain all documented star names in the Arabic nomenclature. Note also that some stars may have more than one Arabic name (such as: Gamma Gem, Eta UMa, Beta Cet, Lambda Ori, Alpha Psc, Beta Ori ), and that some star names may be composites of Arabic and Latin words (such as: Alula Australis (Xi UMa). Some of the above names are still used in the sky atlases, while others are rarely used, and others disappeared from astronomical atlases.

Annotated Resources:

Gibson, Steven, "Star Names". Online at: http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/starnames/ (accessed October 2007).

Gingerich, Owen, "Zoomorphic Astrolabes and the Introduction of Arabic Star Names into Europe", in From Deferent to Equant. A Volume of Studies on the History of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East in Honour of E.S. Kennedy. Edited by David A. King and George Saliba. New York: New York Academy of Science, 1987, pp. 89-104.

Harper, David, and Stockman, Lynne Marie, "(Un)Common Star Names": http://www.obliquity.com/skyeye/misc/name.html (dated: 1995-2007).

Hinckley Allen, Richard, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. Dover reprint, 1963; revised edition (first edition in 1899).

Ibn al-Salāh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad, Zur Kritik der Koordinatenüberlieferung im Sternkatalog des Almagest. Arabic text, German translation and introduction by Paul Kunitzsch. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975.

International Astronomical Union, IAU, "Buying Star Names". Online at: http://www.iau.org/BUYING_STAR_NAMES.244.0.html (accessed October 2007).

International Astronomical Union, IAU Commission 5, "Star names: history", by Marion Schmitz, Chair of IAU Working Group on Designations. Online at: http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/IAU/starnames.html (posted 21 September 2004)).

Jordanian Astronomical Society, The "Arabic star names". Online at: http://www.icoproject.org/star.html.

Kunitzsch, Paul, Arabische Sternnamen in Europa. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1959.

Kunitzsch, Paul, "On the Medieval Arabic Knowledge of the Star Alpha Eridiani." Journal for the History of Aarabic Science vol. 1 (1977): pp. 263-267.

Kunitzsch, Paul, "Der Sternhimmel in den ‘Dichterischen Vergleichen der Andalus-Araber'." Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft vol. 128 (1978): pp. 238-251.

Kunitzsch, Paul, Über eine anwā'-Tradition mit bisher unbekannten Sternnamen. München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1983.

Kunitzsch, Paul, Claudius Ptolemus. Der Sternkatalog des Almagest: Die arabisch-mittelalterliche Tradition. Vol. I: Die arabischen Übersetzungen. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986 (edition and German translation of two Arabic versions of the