(11-11-2026, 11:13 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Beards and horns are not reliable ways to distinguish goats from sheep.
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Just like both animals on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., since they are browsing at a bush.
See here, I disagree. Beards and horns are absolutely reliable ways to distinguish the two within manuscripts. The examples of bearded aries I am showing are very rare relative to the entire set of examples. But other reliable ways exist, like neck shape, tail shape, and climbing rocky slopes and eating trees.
In my opinion, the left animal in Barb.lat.157 is quite obviously a sheep and was meant to be a sheep. It has a sheeps tail, sheeps build, sheep neck, and a ram's horns and the lack of a beard. It fits right in with the vast majority of ram depictions across centuries of manuscript examples, but does not fit in with common goat depictions at all. It isn't actively climbing at a tree either, but even if it was, they drew a sheep doing something a sheep doesn't do.
On the other hand, the right animal is quite obviously a goat. It has a short stubby goats tail, a thin goat build, a long thin neck, a common goat horn shape, and a beard. It fits right in with the vast majority of goat depictions, and fits in with the vast majority of goatfish capricorns (the goat half).
It is for this reason that I believe that VMS aries is a depiction of a goat, even if meant as aries. Only 1 aspect of the goat is missing: the beard. The rest is straight up standard goat imagery. Many manuscripts have capricorns that are basically a slightly altered aries and vice versa, similar to the "scorpio is cancer with a wiggly thin tail" situation elsewhere.