Alfonso X's Lapidario: Stones, Stars and Colours

[Diane]

Hi Julian,

Not sure what happened to David Jackson's investigation, but earlier this year I posted for him a summary of things done on the topic, with various links to sources that I hoped he (and now you) might find helpful..

I also said to him ... sorry to bore Marco and Rene, who of course know this already... that:

I found no one  I could cite in 2010 when I began writing up my investigation into the possibility of a  “stones and stars”  aspect to the ‘nymphs in barrels’, and no-one had been able to refer me to any precedent, so I had to begin from scratch.

Post to David is:

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PS - 'Chaldean' was a term distinguishing the star-worshipping people from everyone else, including Arabs.  They weren't Arabs, but correctly people who lived in northern Syria, in Abraham's old home-region.  The Harranians were of that type and are called 'Chaldeans' by neighbouring Christians (who didn't mean it nicely) a couple of centuries before the  Islamic era.  In medieval Christian works, the term either means "good" non-Byzantine Christians who acknowledge Rome, or it means "bad astrologers" or it means non-monotheist star-worshippers, or it can be applied, by the later fifteenth century, to mean just about anything to do with non-Arab eastern astronomy.  A chap in correspondence with the Medici said that he hoped to print "Chaldean books" and at the time he was in Ethiopia, though at some stage went to southern India.

So however it is applied, it always means something to do with knowing the stars and not being Muslim or Latin or Byzantine Orthodox.