Arbitrary Constellations
Writing the Imagination in Medieval Persian Natal Astrology
Check out this preview of a Licit Magic Working Paper by Kayvan Tahmasebian (forthcoming 1 December 2021)!
Only translation and pseudepigrapha could connect the ancient Egyptian sky maps to the poetic imagination of Muslim translators in the book of medieval natal astrology extant today as Tanklūshā in Arabic and Persian manuscripts in Saint Petersburg, Leiden, Tehran, and Mashhad. The book is attributed to a Tanklūshā al-Bābilī al-Qūfānī (Tanklūshā from Babylon from Qufan). Different sources cite the author’s name in a variety of other forms such as Tinkalūs, Tinkalūsh, and Tinkalūshā who Claude Saumaise (also known as Claudius Salmasius) in 1648 speculated and Franz Boll in 1903 confirmed was the same person as Teucer of Babylon, the Egyptian astrologer possibly of the first century CE who was cited by the major astrologers Antiochus of Athens, Rhetorius, and Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī.
In al-Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 990) introduces a Tinkalūs al-Bābilī and a Ṭinqarūs al-Bābilī in two separate entries as one of the seven sages who were appointed by Żaḥḥāk in charge of the seven houses he had built in the name of the seven stars. Ibn al-Nadīm introduces the former as the author of the book Kitāb al-Wujūh wa al- Ḥudūd and the latter as the author of Kitāb al-Mawālid ʿala al-Wujūh wa al-Ḥudūd. Teucer the Babylonian’s work is extant in excerpts that Boll published along with other newly discovered works of Vettius Valens, Antiochus of Athens, and a chapter of Abū Maʿshar’s Al-Mudkhal al-Kabīr in 1903. These long-forgotten excerpts, for Boll, testified to an alternative representation of the sky and its constellation, which was called Sphaera Barbarica by the Greek to emphasise the non-Greek, non-Ptolemaic origins of the Egyptian and Babylonian description of the heavens. In Sphaera (1903), Boll elaborated on how the barbarian map of the sky relied on a constellation system of paranatellonta (παρανατέλλοντα), meaning “stars rising alongside,” and used technically in reference to constellations that rise simultaneously with zodiacal signs.
The books that bear their author’s name as their title are books that write up their authors. Such is the story of Tanklūshā the Babylonian’s book in Arabic and Persian. Tanklūshā the Babylonian existed among medieval Muslim scholars, such as Abū Maʿshar (787–886), Ibn Hibintā (fl. 950), al-Qifṭī (ca. 1172–1248), and Naṣīr al-Din al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274), only as a name cited with a few unverifiable excerpts attributed to his book. It was a Nabataean agriculturalist and toxicologist, Ibn Waḥshiyyah (d. ca. 930), the author of an influential Arabic treatise on the Nabataean Agriculture (Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya), who claimed to have translated Kitāb-i Tankalūshā al-Bābilī al-Qūfānī fī Ṣuwar-i Daraj al-Falak wa ma Tadullu ʿalayhi min Aḥwāli l-Mawlūdīn from Nabataean language into Arabic. In the Leiden manuscript of this book, ʿAbd al-Malik Zayyāt is identified as the one to whom Ibn Waḥshiyyah dictated his translation. Philological scholarship proves Ibn Waḥshiyyah’s work to be a pseudo-translation without no relation to the original Teucer’s work, which was translated presumably in Sassanian era from Greek into Pahlavi and reached Muslim astrologers in an Aramaic translation, all non-extant except for a few Arabic citations in Abū Maʿshar’s al-Mudkhal al-Kabīr or the Pahlavi anthology Bazidaj. To add to the crisis of authorship around the book Tanklūshā, scholars have expressed doubt as to the historical existence of the Nabataean author of Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya on agriculture and Kitāb al-Sumūm wa al-Taryāqāt on toxicology, born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq and dead around 930, Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī Ibn Waḥshiyyah. Some of these theories assume Ibn Zayyāt the copyist to be the one who forged either Ibn Waḥshiyyah’s writings or Ibn Waḥshiyyah himself. Real or unreal, Ibn Waḥshiyyah’s Book of Tanklūshā the Babylonian was a pseudo-translation from a non-existent original text, most likely produced out of imaginary reconstructions, which was translated into Persian by an anonymous translator, on an unknown date in the medieval past at the order of an unnamed king. In Persian, the work is known as Tarjuma-yi Ṣuwar-i Daraj (Translation of the Figures of Degrees) or Tang-i Lūshā. The latter variation on the name Tankilūshā originates in an etymological reading of the word as meaning “The Book of Lūshā,” with Tang (meaning “the book”) added to “Lūshā,” which was believed to be the author’s name. Khāqānī alludes to this variation in his well-known Christian Qasida.
Tanklūshā is structured as a manual of natal astrology. Following an introductory note on the nature and use of talismans, the twelve zodiacal signs (ṣurat), each in thirty degrees, are listed. Each degree is reported in a double paragraph comprising firstly of a description of the co-rising constellations on the sky, one on the right and the other on the left, and second, a precept on the character or fate the person who is born on that degree would acquire. The described heavenly images provide a rich source of medieval iconography in Arabic and Persian. Also, the manual’s double structure in which a depicted imaginary constellation gives rise to an interpretation provides a valuable example of contingent hermeneutics in Islamic literatures along with other examples such as dream writing (khāb-namā) and bibliomancy (fāl-nāma).
Whereas an extant Teukrotext maps each of the twelve zodiacal signs only in three decans, thereby generating maximum thirty-six images, Tanklūshā offers a far wider variety with 360 images depicted. Compare the representation of Aries in three decans in the following translation of a Teukrotext (quoted below from Lucia Bellizia, “The paranatellonta in Ancient Greek Astrological Literature”):
“Aries — with its first decan there arise Athena and the Tail of the Whale and the third part of the Triangle and the Cynocephalus bearing torches and the head of the Cat of the Dodecahōros. With the second decan there arise Andromeda and the central part of the Whale and the Gorgon and Perseus’ Harpe sword and half of the Triangle and the central part of the Cat of Dodecahōros. With the third decan there arise Cassiopeia sitting on the throne and Perseus upside down and the head of the whale and the rest of the Triangle and the tail of the Cat of the Dodecahōros.”
with the first draft of my translation of the first ten degrees of the sign Aries (burj-i ḥamal) in Tanklūshā, I have excluded the fortune-telling precepts pertaining to each degree:
Aries. 1
There arise in this degree:
A codex written in majestic letters in fine red cinnabar with feathers resting between the pages (for bookmarks).
On the right, there rise two servants with pretty faces (and devoted).
On the left, a man, his legs uncovered, beside fresh dates and killed bees.
Aries. 2
There arise in this degree:
Ancient parchments torn apart and folia worn out with a writing no one can read because it is in the language of the people from Samos.
On the right, there rises a bowl with a handle.
On the left, a woman, in her hand a lock of hair she puts in a hair tie.
Aries. 3
There arise in this degree:
A robe — beautiful and rich — in many colours, and a bamboo reed for scabbard.
On the right, there rises an owl next to a crow.
On the left, a bowl full of bran.
Aries. 4
There arise in this degree:
A clay tub full of soil, with a green sprout.
On the right, there rises a man who says the truth and shivers.
On the left, a tray of unskimmed milk.
Aries. 5
There arise in this degree:
An old high priest who conjures many magics.
On the right, there rises a tunaya, that is, fig tree.
On the left, the skinned trunk of a white lamb.
Aries. 6
There arise in this degree:
A woman in pearls and rubies.
On the right, there rises an anvil.
On the left, black nails.
Aries. 7
There arise in this degree:
A bride with big eyes and naked left arm.
On the right, there rises the bride’s husband.
On the left, ornaments of silver and gold-plated copper.
Aries. 8
There arise in this degree:
A red goshawk eating meat.
On the right, there rise iron and a boat.
On the left, iron carpentry tools.
Aries. 9
There arise in this degree:
A bunch of fresh green hellebores in an old basket.
On the right, there arises a handful of pistachios and a palm leaf thrown out by an old woman.
On the left, iron nail tips.
Aries. 10
There arise in this degree:
A child with a cuttlebone in the right hand, and an ink pot in the left hand.
On the right, there arises an iron ring with its own stone.
On the left, the fulcrum of a scale and two fighting roosters.
In Tanklūshā, the dream-like conjunction of arbitrary objects gives rise to medieval versions of a Surrealist aesthetics of the “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.” It is in these arbitrary constellations that sky — named as charkh, gardūn, falak, all meaning “turning,” and representing fate in classical Persian literature — shows its aleatory face in an extremely graphic way. If you are interested in reading a fuller introduction to the Islamic aesthetics of the aleatory and a fuller translation of Tanklūshā, read my forthcoming working paper in Licit Magic (December 2021).
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