ARB 2101 Lecture 5: Arabic science

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Arabic Language and Culture
• Course: ARB 2101
• Professor: Georges Abou- Hsab

Document Summary

The sky was and still is the domain of both the mysterious and the predictable, the very far away to be known and the always present to be ignored. It is the place where the most sacred and the most scientific meet. Difficult to know the first time and place where the constellations were imagined as pictures in the sky; the human study of the stars is too old to enable us to trace its debuts. Prehistoric people surely noticed the patterns of the movements in the sky and linked them to the patterns of seasons on earth; the first calendars are as well too old to be traced. However, the names of constellations are already present in homer s iliad (viii c. The egyptians had always to deal with their most important natural phenomenon: the yearly flooding of the nile. Predicting the time of the next flood was a question of survival.