Discussion of the Konstellations

[Koen G]

Even if it's a copy, it's an original (in the sense of being creative) copy. Suppose it turns out that those breaks in the water stream are, in fact, space holders for the undrawn constellations along the ecliptic—that's a very original way to represent information.

Original - yes. But how can I say this, it's not easy to explain. I think for one to understand the composition, familiarity with certain customs are required, and those customs seem to be pre-medieval ones. Though in the field of astronomy this is very tricky to determine, since much more so than in comparable fields, we have plenty of evidence that authentic ancient sources were still present in the middle ages. At the moment it seems more likely to me that Q13 (not necessarily the other sections) is a descendant of an original early composition rather than a 15th century composition made from early exemplars. 

Dots on the ecliptic is an excellent example. If we compare this to the Mainz Globe - an authentic ancient source and one of my favorites - we see that there are in fact dots on the three lines of the ecliptic. Look:



Look at the Bull for example. There's a set of dots on his body and two on his horns. Now these stars marked in constellations were almost always somewhat wrong (or completely random in some cases) so I don't think a particular configuration of dots is supposed to represent a particular constellation. My point is that people were used to seeing groups of dots on the ecliptic. And to think of a constellation image as equivalent to a group of dots.