The Arabs, and particularly the nomad Arabs. To prove this we have only to cast a glance at the names in the first two classes.
The inhabitants of the northern part of the Arabian peninsula, the so-called “desert” and “stony” Arabia, for the most part, lead a nomadic kind of life.
The country is a treeless and waterless plain covered with naked rocks and sand-drifted hills, on which lie scattered single oases watered by springs and glorified with a luxuriant vegetation. On these the Arabs camp with their herds, and do not leave them until the provender is consumed, or until more powerful tribes force them to depart. They call themselves Bedâvi (Bedouins), that is, Scenitæ, Nomads, as they were called by the Greeks. These nomads, cut off from all intercourse with the world around them, who have never been subjugated by a foreign power, have preserved their character and their customs unchanged for several thousand years. Their most important occupation is cattle-breeding. Besides this, they follow the chase, or war upon their enemies, regarding as such all those not belonging to their race or who are not under their protection. They dwell in tents. Several families are under a Schech and several Schechs generally under an Emîr, who rules over the whole tribe.
The majority of these nomadic Arabs were Sabians, or Star-worshipers, before the adoption of Islam. History has preserved for us the names of several tribes who paid divine honors to single planets, or conspicuous fixed stars. No wonder that they should have fallen into such idolatry! The dust raised by the desert wind, which, as a rule, only blows during the day, and the heat of the sun compel them to pasture their herds and to undertake their hostile expeditions during the night. Leisure and necessity bid them gain information by directing their gaze at the starry sky, which is presented to them in a splendor of which we in our northern regions can scarcely form any idea. Since, therefore, the aborigines must have noticed at an early period that the nearly regular succession of changes in their climate took place in conformity with the annually recurring phenomena of the fixed stars, they ascribed to the latter a divine power. Thus originated the worship of the stars; and this once established, no other motives were needed to induce them to devote their constant attention to the starry skies. One result of this was that they applied proper names to the most conspicuous stars and groups of stars which were borrowed partly from the animal world around them, partly from their simple household effects, partly from various qualities and circumstances which they noticed in the stars. One tribe selected one name; another, another; and so it came to pass that one star, or group of stars, frequently bears more than one name. When, on the other hand, stars no less bright bear no names at all, the probable reason is that only fragments of the astronomical nomenclature of the Arab nomads have come down to us.
After this terminology had been transmitted by oral tradition, and especially by folk-songs, for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in its original condition, it was combined into an entirely heterogeneous mass—that variegated mixture which we find in the works of Kazwini, Ulug Bekh, and others.
When the Arabs in their fanatic zeal for the spread of Mohammed’s doctrines had conquered a great part of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and established in the heart of the ancient world a mighty empire, they adopted from the Greeks, with whom they had now come in contact, their astronomy among other sciences, and with it the Greek constellations and their method of distinguishing the stars according to their position in the figures.[15]
Their astronomers now generally discriminated between the two classes of names in attributing the one to the Arabs, the other to the astronomers.
Abdelrahman Sufi, in the preface to his work on the constellations, says there are two kinds of heavens to become acquainted with—that of the astronomers and that of the Arabs. In the work itself he first describes the constellations used by the astronomers, i. e., the Greek ones, and then the old constellations of the Arabs. Kazwini in every case mentions a genuine Arabic star-name when he speaks of the Arabic, which is the case with almost every constellation.
Our early astronomers had very false notions of this relation of the nomadic heavens of the ancient Arabs to the mythological one of the Greeks adopted by their descendants. Schickard, in his Astroscopium, says: “Instead of the Dragon the Arabs depict two wolves and five dromedaries.” He means the two jackals and the family of camels which the nomads represented under the five stars on the head of the Dragon. The Arab astronomers drew the Greek dragon on their charts and globes just as we do. They only looked on the old jackals and camels as names for some of its stars. In Golius and Hyde we find a more correct view of the case.