The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

But why should we assume that those signs were taken from the original source?   In my version of the COT, they would have been added by the Author, when he commissioned the scribing onto vellum, to specify the approximate correspondence between each "Chinese" 30-degree sector and the closest European Zodiac sign. 

Because, quite simply, I am entertaining the hypothesis that this is a copy of an important section of an important extra-European work and I would expect it to have been copied. It is one thing to say it is a poor copy into a European style, but the more assumptions one has to make divorcing the evidence the manuscript provides from the supposed source, the less one can say they are looking at evidence for a Chinese theory.