Alfonso X's Lapidario: Stones, Stars and Colours

[Diane]

Julian,
There is an older habit (I won't go into the intricacies of debate over who began it) whereby the stars were referred to in threes.  We think (but don't really know) that the system was applied only to the figures envisaged along the sun's path. Since it is older than the 12-figure Roman zodiac, it wouldn't originally have applied to them, exactly. (The older lion occupied about a third of the ecliptic among the Arabs before they adopted the Greco-Latin names and forms)[1]

However there was the 'leader' star and his two assistants, or followers.  The 'leader' was the one who imparted the human soul.  So the individual soul was believed to have descended from that star-group (asterism or constellation) and to return to it at the time of death.

The origin of the system would appear to be Egyptian and may explain the triples you see on the tablet recovered from Grand, which is a universalist idea of the heavens, uniting Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman forms.

(Julian, I've been talking about these tabulae and why they are relevant for more than half a decade now  - and recently others have begun to mention them too -  so you might have seen the image somewhere already).

The point, really, is that it appears to me to be a Chaldean - and possibly Harranian - artefact. It dates to well before the rise of Islam, but we have a 5thC diatribe in which the Harranians' "table of devils" as a means of prognostication is inveighed against. And they were also noted for having a collection of gods' statues (more than a hundred but not sure how many) each of a different 'gemstone'.  And when the Muslims came, the Harranians claimed Aratus' and Pythagoras' works among their works of holy writ.. but their annual pilgrimage was to Egypt and two of its pyramids.  Just the appropriate fusion for this tabula.

Which means (take a breath) if any of the Lapidario is truly from a Chaldaean tradition, these may be the sets of three.
Hope that's not tmi.

[1] - I'm not talking about the Babylonian "36 stars" as per van der Waerden.  But that is another possibility. One star at each of the three levels rather than as a cluster.