Wonders, Travels and Scientific Knowledge: Reading al-Sirafi

We recently completed our reading of Sulaymān al-Mahrī’s Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres (Mir’āt al-sallāk li-kurāt al-aflāk), a primer of astronomy for the use, we believe, of mariners and navigators. Only a few indications relate this text to the several other works by al-Mahrī, which are a totally different genre, that of nautical handbooks, and it is in fact remarkable that it is called Mirror of Travellers, because nothing in its contents is obviously related to travelling. It is a rather dry primer of astronomy, not the usual applied uranography of the navigators, i.e. how to use the risings, settings and relative positions of constellations and stars for orientation, but instead drawing directly from the long tradition of Graeco-Arabic astronomic treatises, like Jaghmini’s Mulakhas fī al-hay’a. But anyway, we have written about it in previous posts here.

Perhaps because we were left yearning for that “travelling” offered by the title, this year we are about to start on a well-known work that will surely deliver on this aspect, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s al-Sahīh min akhbār al-bihār wa-‘ajā’ibihā (something like True Stories of the Seas and their Wonders). These travel narratives have been sourced for centuries by historians and geographers, not least students of nautical science, for their valuable data shedding light on the Indian Ocean culture of the Middle Ages.

Delving into this kind of literature with our group, devoted as we are to history of science and technology, makes me think of two ways in which travel and marvels literature benefit the science historian. One is very obvious and it has to do with data and information: simply, there is a wealth of unique or little known phenomena, early mentions of crucial little pieces of information relevant to this or that modern discipline, the name of a place or person, the description of a species, an astronomical occurrence, a linguistic quirk… Very literally, there is no end to the variety.

But there is another less obvious benefit for us in this pursuit: confronting the marvellous, the amazing, incredible and outrageous helps us keep open the door of wonder, to keep a certain kind of humbleness in our gaze. This is directly related to one of the cryptic and haunting aphorisms of Heraclitus: ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον (DK18), “The unexpected shall not be found if it is not expected, for it is beyond searching, impenetrable.”

Good pathbreaking science, the real burning pursuit of knowledge, requires from us always, among other attitudes, the capacity for wonder, the cultivated sense of marvel, a childlike disposition towards the unknown, that open door which might allow us to find otherwise invisible realities. It is as if giving up all bearings with a scientific trust in the unknown. The sense of adventure, of intellectual adventure, “Mi lascio portare dalla fortuna per avere buona fortuna.”

And it is with this intention that we will be starting our semester readings. If you have some Arabic and want to join us, we start this Thursday at 10:00 GMT, on Zoom. You may contact us through the RUTTER website. [Juan Acevedo]

Cosmic Navigation and Cosmic Pilots

As we embark on a new academic year with our Arabic reading group, we start more in earnest to tackle the pages of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak li-kurat al-aflak (Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres), a primer of astronomy for the education of maritime pilots in the early 15th century. Not so much of a primer really, but more like an intermediate-level handbook of cosmography.

The first pages tell us about the order of the heavenly orbs, how the universe is conceived as… an onion (that’s my image, not al-Mahri’s!), or more elegantly, as a compound of concentric spheres, within each of which move the planets or other heavenly bodies. It all starts from the centre of the earth, with the description of the elemental spheres wrapped around it: water, air, fire. This cosmology is of course in all its basics an Aristotelian cosmology, found in numerous accounts over most of ancient and medieval Eurasia. Latin versions abound, including some beautifully illustrated.

Gautier de Metz, 13th century.

Approximately at the same time that al-Mahri was writing his works, Iberian nautical science was being revolutionised by the incorporation of astronomical precision techniques to the extensive tried and tested savoir-faire of the pilots. Long-distance oceanic navigation elicited, or rather forced, technoscientific developments which brought its practitioners to new levels of skill. And yet, East or West, either in Atlantic or Indian Ocean waters, there is the lingering question: Did they really need to know about the system of the cosmos in order to take a ship from A to B? And if they did not need to know those cosmic subtleties, why did they keep learning them? Why would such a practical pilot as al-Mahri, who wrote excruciatingly detailed route descriptions, care to elaborate so much on what was practically philosophical knowledge? Was it just didactic inertia, a superstitious repetition of old doctrines?

The answer is most likely “No, they did not need to know,” just as a mechanic fixing a carburetor does not need to know the laws of physics, or a butcher the details of embryology. A more interesting question may be asked, though, especially in our times, when all the cosmology and astronomy of the nautical sciences has been encapsulated in little devices which use satellite geo-positioning technology, like GPS. The question, and we are only left to ponder, is How did that knowledge impact their navigation? Did it have any practical influence, or was it just a matter of “depth”, of ”taste” (sapere, saber, dhawq) added to the mental framework of the pilots? Next time you meet a 15th-century pilot, we know what to ask him! [JA]

A Planet-Less Nautical Astronomy

From the RUTTER crew conversations logbook, preserved for posterity: We have been wondering at the early modern pilots of the Indian Ocean, who famously used complex combinations of stars to navigate by night—a catalogue of about 150 celestial bodies was in their treatises— but, and here’s the question, without ever even bothering to mention the planets. By this I mean the five known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The same planets without which Ptolemy’s astronomy would have been reduced to nothing, and the same planets without which astrology would have been unimaginable.

The reason for this absence is obvious, and it is a nice etymological lesson. A planet, as is well known, means in the original Greek a “wanderer”, a “vagabond”. Now, if you are going to depend on guidance through the night and through the vast expanse of the ocean, you cannot rely on something changeable. You need fixed, unchanging points of reference, and this is exactly what was provided by the night sky, those wanderers excepted.

How bright they are, and unflickering! We have just been witnessing in Lisbon the approach and conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, every day, in the sunset sky, very impressive. And yet for all their steady light, they are not good for navigation: one day they are here, next day there, one day going straight, next day retrograding… They are strong, but fickle. The importance that they have in the astrological view of the cosmos is quite indicative of the variable state of the world: matters of the world and we are not ruled by stars, which would make us constant, but by those wandering bright lights.

Photo: Jorge Rodrigues da Silva

The lack of importance that the planets have in navigation is, in turn, quite indicative of the nature of this craft, and of how special is the state of being at sea and being in transit to a destination: there is peril, and there is the urgency to reach a place, and so all the variable concerns of the pilot are subordinate to accomplishing his task, as Ibn Mājid says, “going and returning with the passengers and the cargo safe.” [JA]

Infirmities of Time

As a new Gregorian year sets in, and as we start a new year of Arabic readings, this week’s passage of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id could not be more appropriate for a good reflection on the passing of time.

In one of his trademark digressions from the hard technical details of his craft, Ibn Mājid launches into a lengthy poem lamenting the swift passage of time, speaking of lovers in the night, turtledoves, wine and stringed instruments—all the usual imagery of medieval Arabic love poetry—“pierced by dawn and by the muezzin’s voice as if by an arrow.” All this, remember, at the end of a lengthy chapter on sailing seasons, and on the calendrical accuracy and traditional knowledge needed to travel safely across the Indian Ocean. And then comes his reflection after the poem,

“It may be that the monsoon (sailing season) too is afflicted by time with some illness which our minds cannot begin to grasp. Because it is said that every year the season comes later by a quarter of a day of the sphere.”

Layla Visits Majnun in the Palm Grove, page from a 16th-c. manuscript (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

This ingenious return from the romance of the previous verses to the chapter’s subject matter gives us concrete scientific indications and also a cosmological subtlety.

The scientific indication has to do with the specific solar calendar used by the Arab pilots at the time. It is known that it was a variation of the Yazdgerdi calendar, itself a development of the Zoroastrian calendar, but it is hard to pin down exactly which variant. Here it seems clear that it was a calendar of 365 days without any adjustment for the extra quarter of a day (the tropical year has roughly 365 days and a quarter), and this explains the fact that the seasonal dates were shifting, one day every four years—a known feature of some of the early Persian calendars.

The subtlety has to do with the Arabic word ‘illah, translated here as “illness” and often meaning also a “cause”. Suffice to say that the three semi-vowels central to Arabic writing are called hurūf al-‘ilal, “causal letters” or “letters of infirmity”, corresponding to the Hebrew “mothers of the reading” (imot qeri’ah/matres lectionis)—by being “weak”, like “accidents” of the consonantal fabric, they make articulation possible; they are the efficient causes of articulation.

In this particular case, the infirmity is the ever-uneasy discrepancy between solar days and the solar year (why, oh why can’t the sun return to the equinoctial point in an exact number of days!?). But through this “weakness” in the astronomical fabric, how many changes are set in motion, and how much science has developed!

Ibn Mājid’s point is a sort of poignant physico-lyrical subtlety: the order of the world is full of such little ”cracks”, “weak spots” which are as discreet doors to the forces of causality. They are happy accidents, hotspots for discovery, invention, but also turning points away from every stability, and so unhappy and sad from the point of view of the contented lovers.

As we start a new year, here is to many happy accidents of invention and discovery to our readers and colleagues. Kullu ‘am wa antum bi-khayr! [JA]

If You Are Patient…

Speaking of celestial rhumbs, Ibn Mājid is constantly going back to fine points of astronomical observations, how one star is “fettered” to another and how each one pertains to a rich interplay of positions. “Look at it when it is rising, then what is at the zenith and four fingers to the north at the same level. Then look at it when it is culminating, and check what is level with it and what is setting and rising at the same time…” and so on and so forth to a point of baffling complexity. It was the business of the pilots, who watched through the night and recognised the different configurations, as is encapsulated in the following advice:

If you persevere from its rising to its setting, from the beginning to the end of the night, you will see how all the configurations of its altitude measurements take shape through the sky.

Shapes seen in the sky by more than thirty different civilizations.
Design by Eleanor Lutz.

We had had occasion to comment on this “figurative” view of the stars, including its artisanal aspects and some of its more abstract associations. What is peculiar here is the emphasis on the prolonged observation to get “the full picture”, the direct relation between the tenacity of the practitioner and the access to the whole of the material, as it where.

In a few words we get a vivid and timeless picture of the Indian Ocean pilot’s discipline: watching through the night, patiently, registering the manyfold complexity that made wayfinding possible. I wonder to what extent this applies to the proficiency in other arts and techniques: the relentless attention, watching while everyone else sleeps, absorbing those guiding, principial forms—in the end, this is as good an image as it gets of what “in-formation“ used to mean; not just being exposed to data, but imbibing knowledge through the night with diligent eyes, to find a way. [JA]

Us vs. Them: Early Modern Nautical Othering

Reading through the initial pages of chapter 4 of the Fawā’id, we came last week across a remarkable passage on Mediterranean/European vs. Indian Ocean/Arabic nautical techniques. The Westerners are in fact called here by Ibn Mājid “the people of the Egyptian abodes”:

…they have the compass, and in it they have lines, and marks for miles, and their rhumbs are only sixteen… We use thirty-two rhumbs… and they are incapable of understanding our level of attainment, whereas we do reach as far as their knowledge goes and we can sail their ships, for the Indian Ocean is connected to the Atlantic Ocean (al-Bahr al-Muhīt), and it has a knowledge recorded in writings and stellar altitude measures…

Leaving aside other technical details for a future occasion, let us focus on these final lines, where we find one striking assertion and one subtly insightful statement.

The first one is striking if we consider that Ibn Mājid is writing this probably in the 1490s, just as the Portuguese started rounding the Cape (Bartolomeu Dias, 1488), and yet he takes as a given the connection of the two oceans. This is no novelty if we remember that al-Birūnī (11th century), already spoke clearly of this connection with al-Bahr al-Muhīt. Literally the Circumambient, or All-Encompassing Sea, this was the most frequent Arabic name for the Atlantic—while still carrying echoes of the archaic notion of a Universal Surrounding body of water, what the Greeks called Okeanos. We wonder anyway, had Ibn Mājid also had news of the Dias expedition?

Sebastian Münster 1554 map

The second statement is this idea that there was a written body of Indian Ocean nautical science, and that it was this, combined with a certain knowledge of astronavigation, which gave Arab sailors the edge over those “Egyptians”. We have by now got used to Ibn Mājid boasting about his own writings, but here it does certainly sound as if he is referring also to a traditional, well known, nautical corpus. Of these possibly lost writings we have, alas, only the faintest traces left in medieval Arabic literature… what a sunken Atlantis of maritime treasures! [JA]

Sewing Paterns in the Sky

In the beginning of this journey through Kitāb al-Fawā’id, we dedicated one of our very first posts to the idea of mimesis. We were reading about navigation history in the first fā’idah, and about how Noah’s ark resembled the Big Dipper. Now, nearly two chapters later, this same idea reappears in relation to the 26th and 27th lunar mansions, al-far‘ān.

In ancient Bedouin tradition, the stars of the great square of Pegasus were imagined to be the upper open end of a well bucket, from which water would be poured. Seen in the night sky, its shape resembles a square where two parallel sides—one southern, the other northern—are the two lunar mansions called al-far‘ān.

However, neither Ibn Mājid nor Indian craftsmanship considered the four stars to form a perfect square. In fact, the difference between the lengths of the southern and northern sides was a crucial one, for it was the pattern upon which were cut the leech (al-dāmān) and the luff (al-jūsh) of a ship’s sail. Following Ibn Mājid, in Indian traditional craft, such a proportional resemblance was no coincidence. The cutting of the sails (tafsīl) was taken directly from the relative positions of these stars—that is, from the lines imagined in al-far‘ān or the great square of Pegasus. [IB]

Necklace of Suns Excursion

Last week we followed Ibn Mājid’s example and went on an excursion away from our main topic. We did so, nonetheless, because he himself piqued our curiosity again and again through the Fawā’id with his references to what he simply calls the “Nayrūz”. This solar calendar of Persian origin was used by Muslim pilots as the chronological reference for sailing seasons, as a complement to the lunar Hijri calendar they used in everyday life. In the Fawā’id, Nayrūz means simply “the first day of the solar year,” just like the contemporary cognate term, Nowruz.

But there are several kinds of Nayrūz mentioned: the Hindi, the Jalālī, the Arab… So we thought that Sulaymān al-Mahrī, the other luminary of Arab nautical literature, would help us clarify things, and we set about reading his brief Qilādat al-shumūs, the “Necklace of Suns”, where he lists five different calendars known to 15th century pilots: “lunar, solar, Byzantine, Coptic, and Persian.”

The little treatise itself is quite dry, a series of arithmetical formulas used to calculate the “uss”, “basic element” of each calendar. From what we have gathered so far, this has to do with calculating the relation between lunar phases and the beginning of the solar year reckoning, which naturally concerns the relation with the lunar Hijri calendar. There is much to be said about this remarkable occurrence of the perennial dynamics between sun and moon: the predicament of our pilots simply frames anew the old fundamental calendrical riddle, “how to account jointly for lunar and solar cycles, since as humans we rely on both luminaries?” “How to ‘marry’ sun and moon in the calendar for the sake of our science and cognition?”

But to leave on a lighter note for the festive days ahead, consider this instead: early modern Arab pilots, like their medieval forebears, rode the waves and lived their lives in a truly multipolar world, where even time-reckoning was far from uniform, and where several eras coexisted. When reaching lands of different cultures, they were quite practically time travelling, sometimes moving centuries back and forth. While the practical advantages of having world standards are undeniable, what an impoverishment that other eras have today become mere curiosities or exclusively liturgical in purpose. How many eras do we know about today? Today’s solstice must surely be a great occasion for giving them a thought. We wish you all good cheer at this start of new cycles! [JA]

The African Colleagues

A passing commentary by Ibn Mājid last week draws my attention to some aspects of his relation to Africa: “According to the ancients, this mansion (he is referring to Sa‘d al-su‘ūd, mansion 24) is found within the sign of Capricorn, but the people of Zanj (roughly what we know as the Swahili coast) consider that, as of the date of this book, it belongs in Aquarius.”

The intensity and historical importance of the maritime traffic between the west coast of India, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa, has been the subject of much international research, and it has elicited from medieval legends to modern soap operas shared across cultural and national boundaries. This sort of Oceanic triangle, comprising the historical areas of the Arabian Sea and the Sea of Zanj, bears testimony archaeologically, linguistically, religiously, economically and in other domains to perennial cultural exchange. So this is not new, and recent scholarship keeps stretching the historical boundaries of this fascinating record.

A second takeaway from our initial citation is the reference to those Zanji astronomers whom he obviously considered as interlocutors, or who were at least into the details of the overlapping between solar and lunar zodiacs. This amounts to saying they had an interest in both theoretical and practical astronomy, including awareness of precessional shifts. It is an enticing testimony to the collegial relations across the waters, and to the state of astronomical study on the Swahili Coast during the 15th century.

Finally, note the ring of immediacy and adventure when he implies that his book is informed by contemporaneous scientific dialogue between Africa and Arabia, and naturally Persia, Gujarat, Malabar… It makes you wonder to what extent our many new exciting initiatives of Indian Ocean Studies are simply picking up the torch, restarting a tradition of generous exchange which became dormant only a few centuries ago. [JA]