Abstract
This book is one of the most recent products of 30 years of fruitful research on the science of the stars in Arabic al-Andalus and the Maghreb by Julio Samsó and his students. It offers an edition and commentary on a substantial work on astrological weather forecasting (astrometeorology) written by an early fifteenth-century Andalusi astrologer, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Baqqār. The introduction discusses the sources cited by al-Baqqār, the contents of the Kitāb al-amṭār, and the single manuscript of the work. The Arabic edition, of nearly 100 pages, is preceded by a detailed paragraph-by-paragraph summary and commentary, which makes a word-for-word translation unnecessary.
Most astrologers writing in Arabic, from the late eighth century onwards, wrote about forecasting the weather from the observation of the planets and the fixed stars – one of the least disputed branches of astrology. Al-Baqqār belongs to this tradition, since he uses the Meteorologica of Aristotle, and a whole slew of astrological texts, ranging from the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy (together with the commentaries of al-Battānī and Ibn Riḍwān) and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Centiloquium (with the commentary of Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf) to the works of the Persian and Arabic astrologers ‘Umar ibn Farrukhān al-Tabarī, Sahl ibn Bishr, Abū Maʿshar, Ibn Hibintā, and ʿAlī ibn Abī-l-Rijāl. But there are also features distinctive of al-Andalus: the use of Ammonius (the source of al-Zarqālu the Toledan’s Almanac) and of Ibn al-Khayyāṭ (d. 1055–1056) who was the court astrologer of the Andalusī Umayyad Caliph, Sulayman al-Musta’īn, and especially the employment of astrological techniques found in The Book of the Crosses, a possibly pre-Arabic Spanish text which is also found in a Castilian translation from Arabic of the mid-thirteenth century (Libro de las cruzes). Most of the works al-Baqqār draws on were already known to Ṣāʿid al-Andalūsi, the astronomer and cataloguer of sciences in eleventh-century Toledo, but there are also parallels with the Sephardi Jewish theologian and astrologer, Abraham Ibn Ezra (twelfth century).
Among the doctrines distinctive of astrometeorology are the 27 or 28 lunar mansions (the constellations through which the Moon passes on its sidereal monthly orbit), which are usually classified according to whether they are dry, moderate, wet, or very wet. In al-Baqqār, however, the significative factor is the occurrence of eclipses in the mansions, from which derive specific predictions, not all concerning weather (e.g. “A fire in the land of Babylon/Baghdad,” “People suffer many stomach pains”); eclipses in the 12 signs of the zodiac are also significant. Similarly, following tradition, weather forecasting and prices of commodities are linked.
The first part of the text deals with events of the year based on the position of the superior planets, whose principal source is The Book of the Crosses. The second part describes the effects of Saturn in the four triplicities and 12 zodiacal signs, which is based on the verses of the Lāmiyya (an astrological poem in which all verses end with the letter “l”) of Ibn al-Khayyāṭ. It also includes a miscellaneous collection of astrological factors which affect the weather, including projections of rays (planetary aspects), decans (divisions of the zodiac signs into three), terms or ḥudūd (varying divisions of the signs among the five planets), and conjunctions of Saturn and Mars, Jupiter and Venus, Saturn and Jupiter, and Venus and the Moon. In addition to weather, there are discussion of tides and the calculation of the critical days distinctive of medicine. The third part opens with the predictions of the changes in weather within each year, each month, and each week. There follow the astrological “lots” of wind, rain, and days (lots are points on the ecliptic measured from distances of planets from each other or from another astrological feature), the phases of the Moon, the “opening of the doors” (another astrological feature, distinctive of weather forecasting), mostly taken from ʿAlī ibn Abī-l-Rijāl, and information on the rising and falling of prices of commodities, partly taken from Abū Maʿshar’s Kitāb al-nukat and including many different foodstuffs, animals, clothes, timber, and ornaments.
Altogether, this book is a welcome addition to an understudied topic (astrological weather forecasting). It describes, with authority and copious references to sources, the astrological doctrines that are included (aside from predicting the lengths of eclipses, there is little mathematical astronomy here). An index would have been helpful.