15-04-2016, 06:22 AM
Thanks for the clarification David. These questions and doubts tend to come up regularly, and it seems useful to distinguish between the two aspects:
- the cyle of illustrations is the cycle of zodiac signs.
I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt about that, even though it isn't complete. I'd say, even if we had only three consecutive illustrations of a feline animal, a woman holding something like a stalk and a pair of scales, we could be pretty sure it was a fragment of the zodiac cycle.
- what is this set of illustrations representing
Here, the options are open, in my opinion. Horoscopes were drawn in pretty standard ways, and quite different from this. In calendars, the zodiac images are almost marginal drawings, and there is always the list of days of each month, which we don't see here. You mention celestial longitude, which is a good point. In ancient star catalogues, the longitude was not measured from 0 to 360, but as "sign, number" where sign is one of the twelve zodiac signs, and number a figure between 0 and 30.
That there are 30 items strongly suggests that these are the degrees rather than days of the month.
Now what is being represented for each degree, i.e. what is the meaning of the human figure, the star and the label, remains open.
The fact that Pisces has 29 is not an issue in my opnion. The star and the label are there (in the centre). Only the nymph is missing.
In Gemini there is one with a nymph and a star, but the label is missing. That looks more like an oversight, while the missing nymph in Pisces seems intentional, and to mark the start in one way or another.
I haven't yet given up on my old theory that the stars represent actual stars in the sky, in the sense of paranatellonta, or a star catalogue, but I certainly can't demonstrate it convincingly enough, so it'll have to stay at the level of one of many ideas.
- the cyle of illustrations is the cycle of zodiac signs.
I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt about that, even though it isn't complete. I'd say, even if we had only three consecutive illustrations of a feline animal, a woman holding something like a stalk and a pair of scales, we could be pretty sure it was a fragment of the zodiac cycle.
- what is this set of illustrations representing
Here, the options are open, in my opinion. Horoscopes were drawn in pretty standard ways, and quite different from this. In calendars, the zodiac images are almost marginal drawings, and there is always the list of days of each month, which we don't see here. You mention celestial longitude, which is a good point. In ancient star catalogues, the longitude was not measured from 0 to 360, but as "sign, number" where sign is one of the twelve zodiac signs, and number a figure between 0 and 30.
That there are 30 items strongly suggests that these are the degrees rather than days of the month.
Now what is being represented for each degree, i.e. what is the meaning of the human figure, the star and the label, remains open.
The fact that Pisces has 29 is not an issue in my opnion. The star and the label are there (in the centre). Only the nymph is missing.
In Gemini there is one with a nymph and a star, but the label is missing. That looks more like an oversight, while the missing nymph in Pisces seems intentional, and to mark the start in one way or another.
I haven't yet given up on my old theory that the stars represent actual stars in the sky, in the sense of paranatellonta, or a star catalogue, but I certainly can't demonstrate it convincingly enough, so it'll have to stay at the level of one of many ideas.