Museum of the Bible/Keith T. Knox/Emanuel Zingg
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is often called the “father of astronomy”. He is credited with discovering the Earth’s precession (how it wobbles on its axis) and calculating the motions of the Sun and Moon, among other accomplishments. Hipparchus was also thought to have compiled a catalog of stars—perhaps the first known attempt to map the night sky to date—between 162 and 127 BCE, based on references in historical texts.
Scholars have been searching for this catalog for centuries. Now, using a technique called multispectral imaging, they’ve found what appears to be the earliest known Greek remains from Hipparchus’ catalog of stars. It was hidden under Christian texts on medieval scrolls, according to a new article published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Multispectral imaging is a method that takes visible blue, green, and red images and combines them with an infrared image and an X-ray image of an object. This can reveal tiny traces of pigment, as well as drawings or writing hidden under various layers of paint or ink. For example, researchers have already used this technique to reveal hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments that were thought to be blank. And last year, Swiss scientists used multispectral imaging to reconstruct photographic plates created by French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who pioneered color photography and won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts. . The method corrected the color distortions that occurred as a result of Lippmann’s technique.
This article is based on research on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a palimpsest originating from Saint Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It consists of 11 individual manuscripts, with Aramaic texts from the Old and New Testaments and Greek text from the New Testament, among other contents. These texts have been dated respectively to the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries. The codex was kept at Westminster College, Cambridge until 2010, when Steve Green, chairman of Hobby Lobby, purchased it from Sotheby’s. It is now part of the Green Collection on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, although a few folios are stored elsewhere.
![The palimpsest was discovered at Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Part-of-Hipparchus-Lost-Star-Catalog-Found-Hidden-Under-Medieval.jpg)
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It was common practice at the time to scrape clean old parchment for reuse, and that’s what was done with the codex. Initially, scholars assumed that the older writings were more Christian texts. But when Cambridge University Bible scholar Peter Williams asked his summer students to study the pages as part of a special project in 2012, one of them identified a passage Greek of the astronomer Eratosthenes.
This warranted further investigation, so Williams turned to scientists at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California and the University of Rochester in New York to perform multispectral imaging of the codex pages in 2017. The technique revealed nine complete folios relating to astronomy, dating between the 5th and 6th centuries – not only Eratosthenes’ passage on the myths of the origin of the stars, but also a famous poem (Phenomenacirca 3rd century BCE) describing the constellations.
Williams spent much of his time during the pandemic lockdown studying the resulting images, and one day noted what appeared to be the coordinates of the Corona Borealis constellation. He soon contacted science historian Victor Gysembergh of the CNRS in Paris about his discovery. “I was very excited from the start,” Gysembergh told Nature. “It was immediately clear that we had star coordinates.”
Gysembergh and his colleague Emanuel Zingg of Sorbonne University translated the one-page passage as follows:
The boreal corona, located in the northern hemisphere, extends from 9°¼ of the first degree of Scorpio to 10°¼ in the same zodiacal sign (ie in Scorpio). In width, it extends 6°¾ from 49° from the North Pole to 55°¾.
Inside, the star (β CrB) to the west next to the bright (α CrB) leads (i.e. is the first to rise), being at Scorpius 0.5°. The fourth star (ι CrB) east of bright (α CrB) is the last (i.e. to rise) [. . .]10 49° from the North Pole. The southernmost (δ CrB) is the third from the bright (α CrB) towards the East, which is 55°¾ from the North Pole.
But could this passage be attributed to Hipparchus? Although they are cautious about a definitive attribution, the authors cite several pieces of evidence that seem to link the text to the Greek astronomer. For example, some of the data is recorded in an unusual way consistent with Hipparchus’ only other surviving work. And the authors were able to use astronomical maps to determine that the observations recorded in the text were likely made around 129 BCE, when Hipparchus is believed to have been working on his catalog.
So far only Corona Borealis coordinates have been recovered, but researchers believe it is highly likely that Hipparchus mapped the entire night sky at some point, including all visible stars, just like Ptolemy l did later. Almagest treaty. Many scholars believe that Hipparchus’ catalog was one of the sources used by Ptolemy when compiling his treatise.
In fact, Williams et al. found that Hipparchus’ coordinate calculations were actually much more accurate than Ptolemy’s – correct to within a degree. It was an amazing feat, considering the telescope hadn’t been invented yet. They speculate that Hipparchus probably used a sighting tube called a dioptre or armillary sphere to perform his calculations. And they hope other parts of the lost star catalog could still be found in the monastery library as imaging techniques continue to improve.
DOI: Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2022. 10.1038/d41586-022-03296-1 (About DOIs).
List image by Museum of the Bible, 2021/CC BY-SA 4.0
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