Arab Tridua: Three-Day “Weeks” in Arabia

This post is about a rather neglected aspect of time division in early Arabia. In his Fawā’id (IV, 7) Ibn Mājid explains: “Every month is divided in ten parts of three days each, and each part has its name.” Then he lists the ten triads or, more specifically, tridua: Ghurar, Nufal, Tusa‘, ‘Ushar, Buhr, Bīd, Durā‘, Muhāq, Hanādis, Ziyād, Surar. Most of the names are straightforward in meaning, relating to the appearance of the moon or to the date count, and the word “three” is implicit. For example, “The three of Tusa‘” (al-thalāth al-tusa‘) means something like “the three [days] of the ninth”, because this triad ends on the ninth day of the lunar month. Al-thalāth al-bīd means “the three of whiteness”, because they are near the full moon.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that the above list actually contains eleven tridua, not just ten. This means to reflect the garbled textual condition in which Ibn Mājid’s list reached his readers in the 15th century, with obvious ingrained misspellings and interpolations. The earlier references I can find for these names are Ibn Wādih al-Ya‘qūbī (9th century) and al-Bīrūnī (11th century), who give slightly different lists. In comparison to them, Ibn Mājid’s does look like the outcome of centuries of Chinese whispers.

Now, al-Bīrūnī explains first that the names are derived “from the distinctness revealed by the state and the curvature of the moon,” and shortly after that they are “taken from the faces of the moon and its curvature.” This is what I find warrants a thought on our concept of “week”. Our weeks derive in part from a division of the lunar cycle in quarters.

Let us leave aside for now the numerological relevance of the division in three, seven or ten, which we have discussed previously. We can see how the beautiful continuum of the lunation allows for as many divisions as our powers of observation allow us to determine distinct—hence nameable—units. How many nights do we need to appreciate each clearly distinct aspect of the moon?

Nama-rupa, in the Sanskrit philosophical terminology, “name-form”: mutually dependent and inseparable aspects of every phenomenon, everything that appears to then vanish “under the Sun.” The gentle and ever-so-fleeting light of the moon is perhaps the phenomenon par excellence, now there, now vanished… What is left to us, puny sublunary creatures is to wield our power to name, and thus, by naming, to create scientia, the knowability and the knowledge, a “possession for ever.” [JA]

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]

Canopus: Gentle Celestial Key

Known in Arabic as Suhayl, Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky, second only to Sirius, and it has a cultural importance which it would be hard to exaggerate. In Islamic civilisation in particular, it is notable because the major axis of the Kaaba is aligned with its rising point.

As we read on through the nautical rhumbs, Suhayl has a prominent place, forming part of a diametrical pair which is closest to the poles. Suhayl would be practically a South Pole indicator, while its complementary opposites (al-Na‘sh, the Plough) would be North Pole indicators. Ibn Mājid explains: “Young and old among the people of the desert and the people of the sea, everyone knows Suhayl by sight.” And he adds: “Nothing is better than Suhayl to take altitude measures among what has been set in motion by the Turner of the Spheres (Tornator Caelorum, al-Dawwār). Southern peoples use it to unlock the routes to all of India and Arabia.”

Finding the South Pole,
approx. below the word “Cross” in the image,
between Canopus, Achernar and the Cross.

It is remarkable that the name Suhayl, a star of such mighty practical importance, should mean literally “the little easy-going one”. As a diminutive of sahl, it has a range of related meanings, all familiar names of gentleness. As we had seen with the Pleiades (Thurayyā, Soraya, Zorayda?), Suhayl has also the discreet yet pervasive distinction of being used as a personal given name; it is a common male name not only in Arabic, but in Urdu, Persian and Turkish as well.

This archaic, indeed pre-Islamic, custom of using star names for children makes you wonder about similar practices across cultures. Apart from Spanish Sol and Luna, Sun and Moon, which are used as girls’ names (in Arabic, Shams is for men while Qamar is for women), I can only recall literary characters like Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials) and Sirius Black and his family of Harry Potter’s characters. I wonder if our readers can tell us about other people named after celestial bodies? Not sure Arthur would count… Any Betelgeuses or Achernars you are acquainted with!? [JA]

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]

Glimpses of Another Astronomy

One of the most powerful recurring impressions, as we read further the Arabic nautical classics of the late 15th and early 16th century, is that they are mirrors or prisms through which we can half discern a very different way of approaching astronomy. It is as if Ibn Mājid and Sulaymān al-Mahrī are themselves manāzil, waystations, and also milestones on the transmission path from a remote and now barely discernible past, and as if they allow us glimpses into an altogether non-Western view and science of the heavens.

Speaking of one of the altitude measures taken in combination with the 23rd mansion, Ibn Mājid explains: “This measuring is reliable and well-known within the lore of substitutions (tabādul) and graduation (tadrīj) of the sky… no other is better known in reliability and usefulness.” These “substitutions“ refer to one of the aspects of the complex observational techniques whereby most points along the ecliptic, and pretty much everywhere through the heavens, are used in combination with other places, regardless of their brightness, because it is a fine-tuned web of relations, calibrated through centuries in a transnational decentralised endeavour.

In fact, and quite remarkably, whereas it seems that European celestial navigation started developing in earnest thanks to national state-sponsored action, the equivalent acquisition of knowledge took place from the Pacific to the Arabian Sea in an organic way, over many boundaries and centuries. This contrast has to do in part with the specific requirements of Mediterranean navigation, but it is nonetheless impressive to find, from Polynesia to Madagascar, from Guangzhou to Aden, such similar traditions of astronavigation, including stellar rhumbs and the use of the 27 or 28 lunar mansions.

In the case of Arab pilots, which we are studying, this astronomical lore was integrated in various degrees with a pre-existing, or perhaps rather overlapping, body of mythical knowledge which brought the stars in direct relation to everyday life in countless ways. Similar integrations can be observed in Indian and Far Eastern astronomical literature, as layer upon historical layer of celestial knowledge blended into an ever enriched tapestry. No small part of the reward in studying premodern nautical literature lies in realising how many different astronomies can be derived from the same stars—as if an archaic science haunts us, silently winking an eye at us from an immemorial past. [JA]

Star-Magical Charm of Scorpio

Reading about the eighteenth lunar mansion, al-Qalb, “The Heart” (of Scorpio), we find once again, but concentrated in one single little passage, several of the themes, the literary and cosmological threads that make the Fawā’id so illuminating and appealing.

On the theme of celestial complementarity, of ever-paired rising and descending stars, which is crucial for the navigational use of the skies, we first find some verses. As earlier in the book, the relations between heavenly bodies are used as pattern and subject of love poetry:

I came across her, when the wind,
Blew on her cheek a curl like the heart of Scorpio.
I asked her for a kiss when we were together,
And she hid from me with a heart of scorpion.

This is presented in the context of Aldebaran (“the eye of the Bull”), just mentioned as the diametrical opposite of this Heart (Antares), and of how both stars are alike in their ill-omened character. But it is Ibn Mājid’s own commentary which brings everything into play: “This poem belongs to permitted magic for love and magnetic attraction of the innermost hearts of men, because of its power, its subtlety, its symbolism, and its correspondence.”

Scorpius (al-‘aqrab) in the sky; a lock of hair (‘aqrab) as a loving memento.

The image of the magically charged lock of hair runs from antiquity in the Song of Songs through to St John of the Cross, and globally across cultures. To write these lines you need a peculiar knowledge of celestial mechanics, to be sure, but also of seemingly unrelated disciplines like prosody, lexicology, astrology, magic, and a keen sense of the concretely human. As Ibn Mājid likes to repeat, nautical knowledge is far from exclusively theoretical, and if anything, it is above all an experiential knowledge.

Traditional navigation skills, in the way they have been preserved by Indian Ocean nautical literature—be it in Arabic or any of the languages of Gujarat, or the Konkan and Malabar coasts—consists of a very synthetic, and not merely systematic, but organic, understanding of man’s situation in the cosmos. Early modern pilots in Ibn Mājid’s lineage were heirs of a tradition beyond our trite dichotomies of humanities vs. science, or arts vs. technology—it was all more roundly human, and for that, so much more enjoyable and rewarding! [JA]

Razor’s Edge Precision in Transmision

We are so used to having international standard measures, printing machinery, and recording devices, that we lose sight of how many practical complications did arise when they did not exist. If you have a navigation instrument, which makes the difference between landfall and shipwreck, or the recipe for a medicine, which becomes deadly poison in an overdose, how do you ensure a fail-safe transmission of the necessary knowledge? The answer is simple: you only rely on direct transmission, “by word of mouth,” viva voce. Learning by the eye and by the hand has no substitute in practical arts. Nonetheless, those who know are driven to write ever-imperfect, intrinsecally flawed, or simply hopeful and well-meaning instructions for later generations.

In the context of Indian Ocean navigation, as mentioned last week, we know that it was not simply about an instrument or a set of instruments, but that a sophisticated system of combined and counterchecked observations came into play with the methods transmitted from pilot to pilot—also, symbolically, “from father to son,” as we had found earlier in Ibn Mājid. Last week we found in the Fawā’id a passing detail on the accurate usage of the altitude measuring instrument, the khashbah or “piece of wood” called kamāl in some specialised literature.

“When positioning the wood to make your measure, there must be a thread’s width between the wood and the star you are measuring, and also a thread, fine as a knife’s edge, between the wood and the horizon.”

Immediately after that, Ibn Majid dedicates a few lines to explaining the “intellectual” (‘aqlī) nature of early nautical science, which comes from “the time of the prophets.” The astrolabe comes up as a token of those times, and its invention is attributed to Lāb, son of Idrīs, the archaic and enigmatic prophet, originator of the crafts and identified with Enoch and with Hermes Trismegistus. Ibn Mājid dares not criticise this prophetic knowledge, but the import of his text is clear, and partly explicit: a person needs to have arrived safely ashore many times, and to have faced disaster, before engaging in any pompous discourse about nautical matters. Caveat nauta!

The Forelegs of the Lion

In ancient Arabian tradition, the constellation of the lion (al-Asad) was depicted in the night sky with two forelegs, al-Dhirā‘ān. It was greater than the zodiac lion familiar to the modern observer, for one of its legs was placed on Gemini (α and β, Castor and Pollux) and the other was on Canis Minor (Procyon and Gomeisa). Taken together—Ibn Mājid tells us—these four stars form the seventh lunar mansion: al-Dhirā‘ān. 

Where navigation is concerned, the knowledge of a lunar mansion also entails the knowledge of possible combinations between its elements and other stars or asterisms. This is so because the alignment between certain stars could indicate not only a specific course or time, but also—and perhaps most importantly—the altitude of the polar star and, thus, the latitude.

Beginning to read Ibn Mājid’s introduction to al-Dhirā‘ān, we readers are immediately apprised of its connection with the Two Vultures (Vega and Altair). Each Leg of the lion is said to rise nearly at the same place where each Vulture rises, but they are located on opposite sides of the sky. This way, by the time Vega is rising on one end, the lion’s leg in Gemini is setting on the other. Eventually, both asterisms are seen leveled just above the horizon—a signal to every pilot (mu‘allim, “the one who knows”) indicating that the polar star is then at its minimum height. [IB]

The Ancient Giant

Going through the fifth lunar station, al-Haq‘ah, we are once again reminded of the baffling historical complexity of the division of the sky, and brought back to more conceptual issues. The name of the station itself means a hair whorl, one among the eighteen types classified by Arabic lexicographers to speak of horses, and it is, apparently, of not much consequence. But then Ibn Majid himself half equates it with “The Giant” (al-Jabbār, Orion), treading in general a blurry line of identification of constellations or asterisms in this area of the sky, between our Gemini and Orion.

As Michelle Adams has explained in her fascinating blog, the customary Arabic name for Gemini, al-Jawzā’, is already witness to a very ancient history of astronomical lore, going back perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. 

Our astronomy is the shreds remaining from an awe-inspiring variety of “takes” on the night skies around the world. Our crucial epistemic need for setting stellar boundaries and naming the stars, as commented here recently, is merely our new attempt at “knowing” those haunting bright objects by which we guide our ways, and it is based on layer upon layer of half-forgotten lore.

Ibn Majid explains that this asterism was worshipped fī qadīm al-zamān, “from ancient times”, a phrase used in Arabic to introduce the no-time of children’s stories: kān yā mā kān fī qadīm al-zamān… “Once upon a time in a past beyond reckoning…”, and perhaps this is as unsurprising as it should be. For in the basic stargazing which underlies the building of astronomy we have such humbling examples, every time, on every corner of heaven, of how the origins of science hark back to a dim horizon, a twilight, the ever-gushing common spring of mythos and episteme. [JA]

Names of Knowing

Wrapping up the chapter on the Pleiades, speaking of their fame and importance, Ibn Mājid reports a remarkable couple of verses which he calls “the best I have ever heard on this matter”:

We are the Pleiades and Orion, we are Arcturus, and Spica and Betelgeuse,
While you are the contemptible stars, seen in the sky and yet unknown.

It is certainy striking that some of the brightest stars in the sky speak and boast about their status, but let us focus instead on the underlying epistemological subtlety.

What appears to make the lesser stars unknown, and perhaps even unknowable (lā tu‘lam), is their lack of name; the Pleiades and the others boast because they have proper names. In fact, even today most stars do not have proper names, and are simply called by a Greek letter and their constellation, e.g. Alpha Centauri. We can ask ourselves, what difference does it make in the way we know them?

In our times, the greatest example of a nomenclature enabling knowledge is perhaps Linnaeus’ binomial system, which in a way was a systematic and comprehensive baptismal rite, in the footsteps of Adam who named things in Paradise: it is just a human trait, and this is why some have spoken of man as homo nominator. Linnaeus himself quoted a remarkable legal maxim:

Nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum.
If you ignore the names, the knowledge of things perishes.

The Animal Kingdom, 
from Linnaeus’ 1735 Systema Naturae.

Arabic ‘ilm (as in tu‘lam above), Greek episteme, Latin cognitio—names of knowledge; names of a knowledge that depends on names. But as craftsmen and mystics show through the ages, there is another “tacit” knowledge, the trade secrets closer to taste, saber, sapere, dhawq, and more related to the senses and movement in general: an embodied skill proper to art and ecstasy, like Greek gnosis and Arabic ma‘rifa. To a certain extent, the two can thrive without each other, but the burning longing is always there, among scientists, technicians, artists and mystics, for the realization of knowledge, when understanding is embodied and the secrets are illuminated. [JA]

Saudosas Plêiades

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?”, God asks of Job in order to put him in his place. The Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, or the Jaguar, the Cabrillas, or many of the other names they are known by, are a constant in human culture from the earliest times. They guided Odysseus through the seas, and were mentioned by Hesiod; they were used for the orientation of sacred buildings from Teotihuacan to the Callanish Stones in the Outer Hebrides; and they were known and cherished, sometimes as the mythic heavenly original home, among New Zealand Maoris and Australian aborigines, in Micronesia, among the Colombian Kogi, the Mayan and all over the Andes.

With such a trajectory, it is little wonder they have not only been the staple of astronomical lore and all its applications, but also of literature, as a testimony to the human need to look at the stars and to relate them to human life and its joys and miseries. If any asterism is witness to the deep-seated love of the stars in humankind, it must be the Seven Sisters. Sappho evoked them from her night loneliness, and this week Ibn Majid regaled us with several examples from the Arabian lands, for there, too, the Pleiades favoured love and abundance.

“They are like a flag and like a bridle and, because of their faint glimmer, they are like the wind passing through, and like unto the trembling earrings of a young woman torn by the pain of separation… and they glitter like a cup passing round a fire from hand to hand.”

Stars of saudade—the untranslatable Portuguese term for a nostalgia that does not belong to the past, because it is out of time, right in the middle of the heart. [JA]