{"id":4046,"date":"2023-08-29T14:41:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-29T19:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/?p=4046"},"modified":"2023-09-02T09:17:54","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T14:17:54","slug":"the-almagest-manuscripts-cambridge-ms-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/2023\/08\/the-almagest-manuscripts-cambridge-ms-32\/","title":{"rendered":"The Almagest Manuscripts \u2013 Cambridge MS 32"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I completed the addition of another manuscript of the\u00a0Almagest\u00a0<\/em>to my collection<\/a>. This is the Cambridge MS 32 manuscript<\/a>. And it’s very interesting.<\/p>\n

This manuscript doesn’t have a lot of information on it. It’s one I stumbled across when doing some other research and was not included in Peters & Knobel’s work.<\/p>\n

The Cambridge website itself gives precious little information. The manuscript itself is a composite, written by at least two hands, most likely in the early $16^{th}$ century. However, no information is given on the lineage of this manuscript, but we’ll shed some light on this here shortly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While the larger text may be a compilation, the star catalog itself isn’t. It’s clearly written by a single hand. Compared with other manuscripts, it’s fairly well written; there are few errors that are corrected and the handwriting is generally quite legible. The rows do drift a bit, but this is quite common.<\/p>\n

As usual, the scribe makes use of abbreviations for the constellation names<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. There is some variation on how many letters are included in the abbreviation, but here are some common examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
English<\/strong><\/td>\nGreek<\/strong><\/td>\nAbbreviation<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Aries<\/td>\nKrios<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Taurus<\/td>\nTavros<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Gemini<\/td>\nDidimoi<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cancer<\/td>\nKarkinos<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Leo<\/td>\nLeon<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Virgo<\/td>\nParthenos<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Libra<\/td>\nZygos<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Scorpio<\/td>\nSkorpios<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sagittarius<\/td>\nTokostis<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Capricorn<\/td>\nAigokeros<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Aquarius<\/td>\nYdrohoos<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pisces<\/td>\nIhteis<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

When I first started reviewing this manuscript, I was immediately struck by a very obvious issue: The zodiac sign and longitude don’t match up to the values we’ve seen previously, but the latitudes and magnitudes do.<\/p>\n

It took me a bit of puzzling about it, but I quickly realized why: The scribe has adjusted the longitudes to account for axial precession. Each value has been incremented by $+17;00\u00ba$. Thus, when adding this catalog to the collection, I have adjusted the values the other way by the same amount to bring it back in line with the\u00a0Almagest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When entering these manuscripts into my catalog, I’ve been using a bit of color coding. None means it’s in agreement with Toomer. Yellow means it’s a known variant. Red means it’s unique.<\/p>\n

When I find an unusual variant, I often compare it to other sources; both ones I’ve collected as well as ones I’ve yet to explore as reported in Peters & Knobel. With this manuscript, I kept noting that the rarest variants tended to come from another manuscript: The Venice Codex $312$.<\/p>\n

While I haven’t found a copy of this one online yet, Peters & Knobel do give an important piece of information about it:<\/p>\n

The longitudes of the catalogue are those of Ptolemy increased by $17\u00ba$.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Immediately, we can see that this manuscript is likely to be transcribed from the Venice Codex $312$!<\/p>\n

I should note that the addition of $17\u00ba$ is, in and of itself interesting, but I’ll save commentary on that topic for a review of that manuscript.<\/p>\n

The Cambridge manuscript also shares many other errors with the Paris Codex $2389$ which suggests that the scribe for this manuscript may have been relying on multiple sources.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I completed the addition of another manuscript of the\u00a0Almagest\u00a0to my collection. This is the Cambridge MS 32 manuscript. And it’s very interesting. This manuscript doesn’t have a lot of information on it. It’s one I stumbled across when doing some other research and was not included in Peters & Knobel’s work. The Cambridge … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Almagest Manuscripts \u2013 Cambridge MS 32”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[24],"tags":[25,14,65],"class_list":["post-4046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-almagest","tag-almagest","tag-ptolemy","tag-star-catalog"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9ZpvC-13g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4046"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4079,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions\/4079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonvoisey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}