This webpage reproduces a section of Star Names Their Lore and Meaning by Richard Hinckley Allen as reprinted in the Dover edition, 1963 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! [image ALT: a blank space] p335 Phoenix, the French Phénix, the German Phönix, and the Italian Fenice, is one of Bayer's new figures, between Eridanus and Grus, south of Fornax and Sculptor, — its α, κ, μ, β, ν, and γ in a line curving toward the south like that of a primitive Boat, by which figure, as Al Zauraḳ, the Arabs knew them. Al Sufi cited another name, — Al Ri᾽āl, the Young Ostriches, — which Hyde wrongly read Al Zibal, perhaps a synonymous title; and Kazwini used Al Sufi's term in describing some stars of Al Nahr, the River, in which our Phoenix was then included by Arabian astronomers. p336 Others changed the figure to that of a Griffin, or Eagle, so that the introduction of a Phoenix into modern astronomy was, in a measure, by adoption rather than by invention. But, whether Bayer knew it or not, his title is an appropriate one, for with various early nations — at all events, in China, Egypt, India, and Persia — this bird has been "an astronomical symbol of cyclic period," some versions of the well-known fable making its life coincident with the Great Year of the ancients beginning at noon of the day when the sun entered among the stars of Aries; and, in Egypt, with the Sothic Period when the sun and Sirius rose together on the 20th of July. Thompson further writes of this: A new Phoenix-period is said to have commenced A.D. 139, in the reign of Antoninus Pius; and a recrudescence of astronomical symbolism associated therewith is manifested on the coins of that Emperor. Coincidently, Ptolemy adopted as the epoch of his catalogue the year 138, the first of Antoninus. With the Egyptians, who knew this bird as Bennu and showed it on their coins, it was an emblem of immortality; indeed it generally has been such in pagan as well as in Christian times. In China the constellation was Ho Neaou, the Fire Bird, showing its derivation there from the Jesuits. Julius Schiller combined it with Grus in his Aaron the High Priest.

Richard Hinckley Allen:
Star Names — Their Lore and Meaning

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.

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