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Ulugh Beg's Catalogue of Stars, Rev. from All Persian Manuscripts

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Ulugh Beg's Catalogue of Stars, Rev. from All Persian Manuscripts -'^. iJ47 .^'> ^*"> ; r^* \ •— SVt^ >.: -<^ »-»S . - -^r jltl)ata, £}eni loth THE GIFT OF •bonfvuaui' ^rOTAjdjjXKuy\ QB 6.047"^°'"*" ""'"""V Library "I"&.^Sj,S?.!SSy? Of Stars, rev. from 3 1924 012 303 800 :^g5J^v,^.>. lb ULUGH BEG'S CATALOGUE OF STARS Revised from all Persian Manuscripts Existing in Great Britain, with a Vocabulary of Persian and Arabic Words BY Edward Ball Knobel Treasurer and Past President of the Royal Astronomical Society The Carnegie Institution of Washington Washington, 1917 Cornell University Library x^ The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012303800 ULUGH BEG'S CATALOGUE OF STARS Revised from all Persian Manuscripts Existing in Great Britain, with a Vocabulary of Persian and Arabic Words BY Edward Ball ^obel Treasurer and Past President of the Royal Astronomical Society The Carnegie Institution of Washington Washington, 1917 ^^ CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON Publication No. 250 PRESS OF GIBSON BROTHERS WASHINGTON PREFACE. The present work forms a sequel to the volume on Ptolemy's Catalogue of Stars. Dr. Peters most carefully studied the printed editions of Ulugh Beg's cata- logue and devoted much care to the identification of the stars. He computed the positions of the stars for the epoch 1437.5 from Piazzi's catalogue with Maedler's proper motions. Some 300 of the stars have been re-reduced from the recent catalogues of Danckwortt and Neugebauer with modern proper motions, but the resulting corrections are very small. Peters examined three Persian manuscripts at Paris in 1887, but his collation was incomplete; no doubt it was curtailed by want of time, as he was then more particularly engaged on the Ptolemy manuscripts. I much regret that on account of the war I have been prevented from visit- ing Paris to investigate completely the five or six codices of Ulugh Beg in the Bibliotheque Nationale. England, however, is particularly rich in manuscripts of Ulugh Beg, and in the present investigation twenty-two Persian and Arabic manu- scripts have been carefully examined and collated and I believe that all the informa- tion on the subject in this country is now practically exhausted. From the care with which they have been written, probably the most important of these codices are those at the British Museum numbered 11637 and 16742. Nevertheless, as is explained in the following pages, it is doubtful whether it is possible to accurately reproduce the original catalogue. My endeavor has been to make this investigation as exhaustive as possible, and by giving the full collation of the manuscripts examined to place all available material at the disposal of astronomers. No attempt has been made to give the Persian or Arabic names of stars, a subject which has been so fully dealt with by Ideler in his classic work. Dr. Peters prepared with much care a vocabulary of Persian words found in the description of the stars. This I have revised and amended and it will be found in pages 95 to no. I acknowledge with much gratitude the generosity of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in publishing this work, which completes the long labors of Dr. Peters and myself on the ancient catalogues. Edward B. Knob el. 32 Tavistock Square, London. June 16, IQ16. CONTENTS. PAGE. Preface 3 Historical 5 Drawing in Persian Manuscript, Brit. Mus. Add. 7702 12 Ulugh Beg's Catalogue of Stars, Catalogue 1 25 Catalogue II 52 Notes to the Catalogue 75 List of Manuscripts Collated 85 Collations of Manuscripts 86 Appendix: Persian and Arabic Vocabulary 95 4 : HISTORICAL. From the time of Ptolemy in the second century until the middle of the fif- teenth century, there exists no catalogue of stars mac^e from original observations. In the year 1437 Ulugh Beg published his catalogue made at the observatory of Samarkand. Some account of this observatory and of Ulugh Beg and his assistant astronomers has been given by Hyde in his edition of the catalogue, by Delambre (Hist, de I'Astronomie, Moyen Age), by Sedillot (Prolegomenes des Tables d' Oloug Beg), and by Baily in his edition of the catalogue (Royal Astronomical Society Mems., Vol. XIII). The astronomy of the Arabs is not rich in original observations of position. The three most important possessions in observational astronomy which the Arabs have left to posterity are (i) The Hakemite tables of Ebn lounis, which contain numerous observations of eclipses (discussed by Newcomb); some 54 observations of conjunctions of planets with each other and with stars; determination of the mean motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets; and several observations of the Equinox. (2) The Uranometria of Abd Al Rahman Al Sufi, which must always be considered a work of the highest value. (3) The catalogue of stars of Ulugh Beg, which, having been made mainly from origi- nal observations, thus possesses a unique interest. Mirza Ulugh Beg bin Shahrukh bin Timiir Kurgan was the most famous as he was the last conspicuous representative of Arabian astronomy. His biographer, Abu Muhammad Mustapham, thus describes him: "Fuit Rex Justus, doctus, per- fectus, praesertim in mathematicis, scientiam et ejusdem cultores dilexit." The observations embodied in Ulugh Beg's Tables (commonly designated as Zij Ulugh Beg, also as Zij i SiiltanI Kurghani, Zij jadid i Sultani, and Zij jadid i Kurghani), were commenced, as the author states in the preface, by his master, Salah ud-Din Musa, called Kazi-Zadah Rumi, and by Ghiyas ud-Din Jamshld. The latter, however, having died in the early stage of the work, and the former before its conclusion, it was carried on and completed with the assistance of a youthful astronomer, 'Ali bin Muhammad Kushji, whom Ulugh Beg calls his beloved son. Another author states that there was a fourth astronomer named Mu in ud-Din. The building of the observatory northeast of Samarkand is recorded by the contemporary author of the Matla' us-Sa'dain among the occurrences of A. H. expressly state the date of his composition, but it was 823 . Ulugh Beg does not probably A. H. 841= A. D. 1437, consequently the observations were carried on from A. H. 823 to 841 (A. D. 1420 to i437)-* Ulugh Beg, the grandson of Tamerlane, who was of Mongol extraction, was himself a Turk. The question has been raised whether he wrote his astronomical tables in Turkish, Persian, or Arabic. No Turkish manuscript of them is known. D'Herbelot says that the tables were originally composed in Arabic and were translated into Persian by Mahmoud bin Muhammad, surnamed Mirem, in the year A. H. 904 = A. D. 1498, who dedicated them to the Sultan Bajaset II (1447-15 12), *Rieu, British Museum, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts. 6 Ulugh Beg's Catalogue of Stars. and he adds that they were translated into Persian by Ali Al Kushji (1445). This question was investigated by M. L. A. Sedillot, who came to the conclusion that they were written originally in Persian and were translated into Arabic. There exist at the Bibliotheque Nationale four manuscripts of Ulugh Beg's tables in Arabic, which are now considered to be translations from the Persian, though formerly the opposite view was held. M. Sedillot remarks particularly on the Paris Arabic Manuscript 2460 (now 2535), which is well written and complete. All of this manuscript is in Arabic except the catalogue of stars, which is in Persian. From this we should infer that as the catalogue would be the most difficult part of the work to translate, the scribe merely copied it from the original, and this offers additional evidence that the original work was in Persian. The Bodleian Library possesses two manuscripts of Ulugh Beg, E. D. Clark 18 and Marsh 578, both in Arabic. In the codex Clark 18, of the sixteenth cen- tury, it is stated that it is the Arabic version made from the Persian by Yahya bin Ali Al Zamai, who was induced to do it by Shams-eddin bin Abulfath As-Sufi, who lived about A. D. 1450 (Ulugh Beg died 1449). Unfortunately the manu- script is incomplete and does not contain the catalogue of stars. Codex Marsh 578, of a much later date, is only fragmentary, and likewise does not contain the catalogue. St. John's College, Oxford, possesses an Arabic manuscript of Ulugh Beg, being No. 91 of their collection. It is incomplete and does not contain the catalogue. On the second page is written "Astronomia Ulug Beigi in linguam Arabicam conversa, transcripta fuit pars prima codicis nostri anno Hejira 939, i. e., A. D. circ. 1532." The statements in D'Herbelot conffict with Bodleian Manuscript Clark 18 and St. John's College 91, and the general presumption is that the original was in Persian. Ulugh Beg's work entitled "Zij Ulugh Beg" consists of a Preface to the tables in four parts. The chapters of this which are given below have been taken from M. L. A. Sedillot (Prolegomenes des Tables d'Oloug Beg) and confirmed by reference to the Royal Astronomical Society Persian manuscript, which is com- plete; and a series of tables of which the titles as here given have been translated from the above manuscript. PREFACE. Preface to the Tables and Knowledge of the Stars. First Part. 1. Explanation of eras, months, and their subdivisions. 2. Determination of the era of the Arabs called the Hegira. 3. Determination of the era of the Greeks (Seleucidae). 4. Determination of the Persian era (Yezdegird). j. The concordance of eras. 6. On the era Meliki (Gelalaean). 7. The era of the Khatai'ens (Chinese) and the Oigours (Oriental Turks).
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