No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

This is a paper of David A. King, great expert on astrolabes.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


The astrolabe depicted has 21 star-pointers with the name of the stars derived from its Arabic name. In more than half of them a curious symbol 9 is used for an hard letter C, even though the engraver has not done the same with the names of Zodiac signs.
 In pages 44-47 of the document, David A. King explains that the 9-like number is used as abbreviation in Latin, but on this astrolabe the 9 is used as a letter of the alphabet, what seems "to constitute the first and perhaps only evidence of this particular phenomenon".
  King relates it with medieval Spanish epigraphy, but two colleagues of his that he quotes think that it's a whim of the engraver.
  I think that the engraver wanted to imitate inside the name of the star the shape of the star-pointer.

It is the second time that I see a glyph of the VMS (9) related with the star-pointers of the astrolabes. The first one was the glyph EVA-m without (i), the same as EVA-g without ©