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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Benetnasch and Alkaid revisited
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Apr 6, 05:54 +1000
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Apr 6, 05:54 +1000
Why do we have so many stars with Arabic names? Astronomy may be the oldest science, but most knowledge gets lost. While the lights of scientific knowledge were burning particularly dim, during the European dark ages, things were rather different in the Arabic world. Islam had quickly established a vast empire of many very different peoples and cultures that were administered with a rare tolerance and humanity. Schools were established in places as far apart as Spain and Samarqand (central Asia) that specialized in astronomy and mathematics and drew students and scholars from afar. Many were Jewish, some were Christian. Their knowledge base was Arabic and Greek and Babylonian, their lasting contribution was bringing it together and expanding upon it. When the European scientific world stirred from a long sleep during the reformation, the legacy of these schools was a principal source of knowledge that, for example, the Portuguese and Spanish drew upon to build up a new science of scientific navigation.
