Voynich Stars

[Diane]

Your alternate suggestion, surviving artifacts like carvings that were recovered later, is more or less what happened when the Aratea manuscripts were made in the 9thC. They looked to surviving art from antiquity to illustrate Aratus' text.

This is a possibility, though I am thinking more of an uninterrupted line scenario. Though not until Seti's time. Like I said, when I show such early examples it's just to illustrate that they belong to a tradition and would have been part of the artists' vocabulary. I usually try to find at least one example from 300 BCE onwards, which is when we start getting a mixture between Greco-Roman and Egyptian cultures.

Koen,
As I expect you may know, if others don't, the usual rule of thumb in treating archaeological artefacts and imagery dating to about the third or fourth century AD, is that the Egyptian star has five points (it is actually a result of the Egyptian language, relating the number five to the idea of the hand, and pre-dynastic art shows that the stars were imagined as grasping hands).  The Syrian star is usually six-pointed, and that rule of thumb is valid to at least the seventh century - even later in Harran.  The seven- and eight- pointed formal 'star' is typically Mesopotamian.  I doubt if it is true of the Voynich stars, but in the original culture the eight-pointed star had a particular significance...

That, and various other details in the fold-out, not leas that enormously important image of the bearded sun, is why I attribute the origin of that section to the late Achaemenid-early Hellenistic period, though like every other it retains traces of subsequent history and travels.

I really liked the look of work begun by .. was it Darren or Marco... correlating the imagery to Alfonso's star-maps.  Not sure why the author stopped.  It looked very promising.

I would suggest that anyone interested in the subject be aware that many of the 'Arab' star-names are not the indigenous ones, but late (9th-10thC) renderings into Arabic of the Latin descriptive terms, with some few of the older indigenous ones (such as Thurayya for the Pleiades), and others again which come from Syriac - such as "al-Gabbar" for Orion.  The "al-" is an Arabizing element, but Gabbar itself was Syriac.

Hope that's not too OT.