AAlmost exactly a year ago, Federica Gigante was preparing a lecture and searching the Internet for a portrait of the 17th-century Italian nobleman and collector Ludovico Moscardo when a completely different image caught her eye.
The historian’s gaze soon fell on a photo of a metal disc with a ring on top, kept in the same Verona museum as Moscardo’s photo.
Gigante immediately knew she was looking at an astrolabe – an instrument used to chart the stars and tell the time – and an extraordinary one at that. But she would have no idea just how rare and special it was until three months later she traveled to the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi Erizzo and watched the light shine through one of the museum’s windows to illuminate the instrument’s brass features.
“I saw it was much older than they realized,” she said. “But at the time I had no idea it had Hebrew on it. It wasn’t until we took it into a side room and I began to analyze it—I happened to be sitting by a window and the rake light was coming in—that I began to see these scratches. They were very strange because they were not the scratches you would expect from use. I thought maybe I was just a little too tired, but more kept coming out.”
Gigante, a research fellow at Cambridge University’s history faculty and a former curator of Islamic scientific instruments at Oxford University’s History of Science Museum, stumbled upon a remarkable astrolabe that had passed through Muslim, Jewish and Christian hands. SpainNorth Africa and Italy in the 10 centuries since it was built in Andalusia.
Its engravings, first in Arabic script, then in Hebrew, tell the story of how knowledge was created, shared and developed by Islamic and Jewish scholars living and working side by side in al-Andalus, the Muslim-controlled area of the Iberian peninsula.
Islamic art is Gigante’s forte, but she knew enough of the Hebrew alphabet to see that someone had translated the original Arabic names of the astrological signs on the constellation into Hebrew. Then she noticed that one of the instrument’s plates was marked Toledo on one side and Córdoba on the other.
The star positions on the instrument matched those on astrolabes made in the 1060s and 1070s, while another of his plates was engraved with latitudes in North Africa, suggesting that whoever owned the device at the time was, lived in the region or traveled there frequently. .
“It’s a bit like adding an app to a smartphone or running an update,” the historian said.
The exact chronology of the Verona astrolabe’s travels is difficult to establish, but Gigante thinks it was made in Andalusia and taken to North Africa – probably Morocco – before coming into the possession of a Jewish owner.
“There is an additional dedication or signature to the object, which reads, ‘For Isaac, the work of Jonah,'” she said. “They are both Jewish names, so it is very likely that the astrolabe came into Jewish possession by that time. But it is interesting that it is written in Arabic. Although it was probably in the hands of some Jews, Arabic was the lingua franca and was used by Jews as much as Muslims and Christians.”
One of the sets of Hebrew inscriptions is neatly and deeply carved, she added. “While there is a set of scratches that look like I took my keys and did it myself. These are two very different hands and two different phases, which shows how long this object must have been part of a community.”
According to Gigante, the Hebrew additions indicate that the astrolabe eventually left Spain or North Africa and began to circulate among the Jewish diaspora. Italywhere Hebrew, rather than Arabic, was used.
The last set of engravings, in western numerals, appear to have been made by an Italian or Latin speaker. Gigante believes the astrolabe eventually became part of Moscardo’s collection and then, through marriage, passed to the Miniscalchi family, who founded the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi Erizzo to preserve the collections in 1990.
Gigante, which has just published an article on the Verona astrolabe in the magazine Nunciussaid finding the device was a perfect meeting between her passion for scientific instruments and her research into how Islamic artifacts, technology and decoration traveled to Europe.
“[The discovery] has never happened before and it probably won’t happen again,” she said. “We know this in the 11th century SpainJews and Muslims and Christians worked together, especially in the scientific media, and that many Jewish scientists were sponsored and protected by Muslim rulers with no concern for their religion.
“It’s not the first time this instrument has told us this. This is all known, but what I find extraordinary is that this is a very tangible, physical evidence of that history.”
