The seven bright stars of the Great Bear are a funeral in the Arabic sky. The four stars of the bowl are the bier, nash, carrying a body; the three of the handle are the banat nash, the daughters, walking behind it. The mourners follow the bier, and the whole procession circles the pole and never sets.
Nothing about this reading is derived from the Greek. It is pre-Islamic, it belongs to the indigenous Arabian star lore that the anwa system also comes from, and it survived alongside the Ptolemaic astronomy that Arabic scholarship later absorbed and transmitted. Arabic astronomical writing frequently gives both: the translated Greek figure, al-dubb al-akbar, the greater bear, and the older native one.
The middle daughter is accompanied. Mizar has a faint companion, Alcor, called Suha in Arabic, and seeing it was a traditional test of eyesight, referred to proverbially. The pair is separable by a good naked eye under a dark sky and not by a poor one.
The star names in any modern catalogue are the tell. Mizar, Alcor, Alioth, Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez and Alkaid are all Arabic, and Alkaid is qa'id banat nash, the leader of the daughters of the bier. The names of the mourners outlived the funeral.