Banat Nash

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.

The indigenous Arabian sky is organised around rain. The anwa system divides the year by the heliacal settings of twenty-eight star groups, the manazil al-qamar or lunar mansions, each setting in the west at dawn while its opposite rises, and each associated with an expected weather condition and a period of roughly thirteen days.

The naw itself is that setting, and the rain was said to come with it. Islam had a difficulty with this, since attributing rain to a star is close to attributing it to something other than God, and there is a well known hadith addressing the point directly: to say we have been given rain by such and such a star is one thing, and to say we have been given rain by the mercy of God is another. The system survived as an agricultural almanac with the theology adjusted.

The twenty-eight mansions are the same institution as the Indian nakshatras and the Chinese xiu, and the relationship between the three is a long-running question in the history of astronomy that has not been settled.

Banat Nash belongs to the same indigenous layer as the anwa rather than to the translated Greek layer, and the two coexisted in Arabic writing for centuries. Al-Sufi's Book of the Fixed Stars gives both, figure by figure, which is why so much of the older nomenclature survives at all.