In Arabia they were Al Nujum al Aḣdh, the Stars of Entering, and Al Ribāṭat, the Roadside Inns, although better known as Al Manāzil al Ḳamr, the Mansions, or Resting-Places, of the Moon; manzil, in the singular, signifying the noonday halt of camel and rider in the desert. Readers of Ben Hur will recall this in connection with Balthasar, the Egyptian, at the meeting of the Magi in their search for Him "that is born King of the Jews," after they saw his star in the east, and are come to worship him. They are alluded to in the 10th Sura of the Ḳur’ān, where, referring to the moon, it says that God p9 hath appointed her stations, that ye might know the number of years, and the computation of time; but long before the Prophet the authors of the Chaldaean Creation Legend and of Genesis wrote similarly; while in the 104th Psalm, that noble nature-psalm for Whitsunday, we read: He appointed the moon for seasons.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Topics/astronomy/_Texts/secondary/ALLSTA/home.html

Richard Hinckley Allen:

Star Names — Their Lore and Meaning

AssessmIn England the Venerable Bede, 673‑735, substituted the eleven apostles for eleven of the early signs, as the Corona seu Circulus sanctorum Apostolorum, John the Baptist fitly taking the place of Aquarius to complete the circle. Sir William Drummond, in the 17th century, turned its constellations into a dozen Bible patriarchs; the Reverend G. Townsend made of them the twelve Caesars; and there have been other fanciful changes of this same character. Indeed, the Tree of Life in the Apocalypse has been thought a type of the zodiac, as

bearing twelve manner of fruits, yielding its fruit every month.

Probably every nation on earth has had a solar zodiac in some form, generally one of animals. Even in Rhodesia, the aboriginal Mashona7 Land of South Africa, there has recently been found a stone tablet •thirty-eight inches in diameter, with the circle of the zodiacal signs on the edge; and early Mandaean tradition makes its figures children of their creative spirits Ur and Rūhā.

The introduction of the twelve figures into the walls or pavements of early churches, cathedrals, and public edifices, as well as, sometimes, private houses, is often to be noticed in Europe, and still more frequently in the temples of the East;8 while all visitors to the New York State Building in the World's Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893 will recall the striking octagonal zodiac9 designed by Messrs. McKim, Mead, and White, and laid in brass in the floor of the entrance hall, which, although not astronomically correct, greatly added to the interior effect of that beautiful structure.

The zodiacal constellations being of unequal extent, Hipparchos more scientifically divided the ecliptic circle into twelve equal spaces of 30° each, the twelve signs still in almanac use; but these are not now coincident with the similarly named constellations, having retrograded about 33° on the sphere since their formation.

The constellation north or south of the one of the zodiac that rose or set synchronically with it in Greece was known, in later days, as its paranatellon.

ent

Allen rendered a very valuable service to those of us interested in the nomenclature and historical evolution of the constellations and their stars. His book is a mine (or maybe a minefield!) of varied information not only on its primary subject, but also here and there on ancient myth and religion, folklore, astrology both modern and ancient, the heroic age of modern astronomy, and the occasional bit of botany or zoology.

Inevitably, though, in a work of such magnitude, and one that is now already over a hundred years old, there will be room for fault. The three principal shortcomings of the book are that it is not as systematic as the subject deserves, sometimes a downright jumble of ancient languages and afterthoughts and digressions and backtracking; that the astronomy predates Palomar and the Hubble telescope, radar and quasars, by decades and decades and is best taken lightly, as a window into the late 19c rather than into the stuff of the Universe; and, most seriously, that the sources are condensed, for the most part uncited, and — worst of all — trusted.

Now Allen's Latin and Greek are usually unexceptionable: I will vouch for that — wishing only that he had chosen to cite Firmicus Maternus and Vettius Valens as well as Manilius, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos as well as the Almagest. But my own languages run out at about the same point as his: yet it's obvious even to the casual reader that for Arabic and, a fortiori, such languages as Chinese and Khorasmian, he relies heavily on secondary and tertiary sources; during the course of my transcription, I rather quickly started wondering just how accurate he is in this regard. My suspicions were confirmed: you owe it to yourself to read Gary Thompson's excellent critique, in which we are provided with more up-to‑date and reliable alternatives to Allen's book; his entire site is full of solid and interesting information on the evolution of astronomy and some of its by-ways: you'll be forgiven if you now skip mine altogether.

If, however, you do stick around, at least two further caveats: references to Pliny are suspect, i.e., statements are often ascribed to him which are not his; and you should disregard the fabulously early dates assigned by Allen to Greek temples. The temple of Hera at Olympia, for example, which he assigns to 1445 B.C. (p468), dates to only about 600 B.C.

Table of Contents

The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, link to the corresponding webpages.

Introduction	v
The Solar Zodiac	1
The Lunar Mansions	7

The Constellations	10
Andromeda	31
Antinoüs	40
Antlia Pneumatica	42
Apus	43
Aquarius	45
Aquila	55
Ara	61
Argo Navis	64
Aries	75
Auriga	83
Boötes	92
Caelum	107
Camelopardalis	135
Cancer	107
Canes Venatici	114
Canis Major	117
Canis Minor	131
Capricornus	135
Cassiopeia	142
Centaurus	148
Cepheus	155
Cerberus	159
Cetus	160
Chamaeleon	165
Circinus	166
Columba Noae	166
Coma Berenices	168
Corona Australis	172
Corona Borealis	174
Corvus	179
Crater	182
Crux	184
Custos Messium	191
Cygnus	192
Delphinus	198
Dorado	201
Draco	202
Equuleus	212
Equuleus Pictoris	214
Eridanus	215
Felis	220
Fornax	221
Frederici Honores	221
Gemini	222
Globus Aerostaticus	237
Grus	237
Hercules	238
Horologium	246
Hydra	246
Hydrus	250
Indus	246
Lacerta	251
Leo	252
Leo Minor	263
Lepus	264
Libra	269
Lupus	278
Lynx	279
Lyra	280
Machina Electrica	289
Microscopium	289
Monoceros	289
Mons Maenalus	290
Mons Mensae	291
Musca Australis	291
Musca Borealis	292
Noctua	292
Norma et Regula	293
Nubeculae Magellani	295
Octans	296
Officina Typographica	297
Ophiuchus	297
Orion	303
Pavo	320
Pegasus	321
Perseus	329
Phoenix	335
Pisces	336
Piscis Australis	344
Piscis Volans	347
Psalterium Georgii	347
Pyxis	348
Quadrans	348
Reticulum	348
Robur Carolinum	349
Sagitta	349
Sagittarius	351
Sceptrum Brandenburgicum	360
Scorpio	360
Sculptor	372
Scutum Sobiescianum	373
Serpens	374
Sextans	376
Solarium	377
Tarandus	377
Taurus — The Hyades — The Pleiades	378
Taurus Poniatovii	413
Telescopium	414
Telescopium Herschelii	414
Triangulum	414
Triangulum Minor	417
Triangulum Australe	417
Tucana	417
Turdus	418
Ursa Major	419
Ursa Minor	447
Virgo	460
Vulpecula	473

The Galaxy

474

Technical Details

Edition Used

The 1963 Dover Books reprint, "an unabridged and corrected republication of the first edition of the work first published in by G. E. Stechert in 1899, under the former title: Star-Names and Their Meanings." (The "corrected" gave me pause, until I was assured by Prof. Thompson's review that only minor grammatical corrections are meant.)

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined; and in this particular case, with its minute diacritical-rich transliterations of Arabic and other languages, scanning would have produced a horrible hash requiring more time to set right than just typing it correctly from the git-go.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition seems to have been very well proofread, or at least, taking into consideration the many rather exotic languages called upon, there are very few errors I could recognize or fix. When I could fix them, I did, marking the correction each time with one of these: º. If for some reason I could not fix the error or merely suspected one, it is marked º: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles. Very occasionally, also, I use this blue circle to make some brief comment.

Inconsistencies or errors in punctuation are remarkably few; they have been corrected to the author's usual style, in slightly brighter blue — barely noticeable on the page when it's a comma for example like this one, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">. Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, apparently duplicated citations, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic ‑‑> in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any other mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this linep57): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local links: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. (If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local link there as well.) Finally, on a very occasional basis so far, I've tracked down some of the citations and inserted them, as links, directly into Allen's text but always clearly differentiated from it by [this format]; I may do more.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a color-edited detail of the constellation Aries from the plate entitled Haemisphaerium stellatum boreale antiquum in theHarmonia Macrocosmica, a star atlas first published in Amsterdam in 1660 by Andreas Cellarius; the edition was a success — the plates are splendid — and it was immediately reprinted the following year.

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