Ostriches? What Ostriches!?

The early Arabic sky has some ostriches running through it: one of the lunar stations of early Bedouin astronomy is called The Ostriches (al-Na‘ā’im), and two of the brightest stars in the sky, Fomalhaut (α PisA) and Hadar (β Centauri), are also called “ostriches”, zilmān. We have been reading about these ostriches for long months now and, busy with astronomical and nautical details, we missed the question obvious to any contemporary reader: what ostriches in Arabia?

It is a historically well-known fact that we humans, as cultural and mythical beings, always project on the night sky our lives, including both what surrounds us everyday and what informs our minds. This is how the Greeks had the Ship Argo and their deities and fabled animals above, while in Patagonia they had rheas in the sky, and in Australia emus. Of course, you could say that if the Greeks had a winged horse, the Arab bedouins could very well have had their ostriches and an ice cream cart too, but… is there something missing?

An old picture, and an ancient mosaic from Petra.

As it turns out—and this is the beauty of how uranography and astronomy intertwine with very down-to-earth disciplines across the natural sciences—there were ostriches in Asia Minor and Arabia, but they were hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century. The Arabian ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) was very close genetically to its North-African cousins, and it had an important place in the culture of the Middle East since prehistoric times, but alas, it could not survive the arrival of firearms and motor vehicles.

While they remain undisturbed in the night sky, though, they help us on several fronts. They bring to mind the frailty of life on this sublunar place, and they can make us wonder at how we relate to the configuration of the night sky: while we obviously project parts of our lives on those glittering lights, what do we receive from them? What is the quid pro quo we have with the stars? What does their “life” project on earth? As readers of this blog will remember, there are very early and strong arguments to say that every systematic, controlled, “mathematical” way of pursuing knowledge here below derives from the observation of those ostriches and their celestial companions. There seems to be, in a very strict etymological sense, a dialogue between the stars and men: logos going through between high and low and low and high, for the advancement of science. [JA]