As in Mesopotamia, Arabs prior to Islam so celebrated the remarkable star cluster known to modern astronomy as the Pleiades that they invoked it antonomastically as “the Star” (al-najm). Known as al-thurayyā in Arabic, this star cluster’s name signified abundance, and it may have been chosen for its number of stars or for the heavy rains that fell when it set in the morning twilight. Taking this single asterism as its subject, this conference talk draws from Arabic source texts from pre-Islam through the early Islamic period to illuminate the breadth and depth of Arabic rhymed prose, poetry and religious verse that the Star inspired. This talk traces the rich multivalency of meaning derived from visual observations of the orientation and position of the Star in the sky at various times of night and seasons of the year, from poetic descriptions of its changing aspect as it crossed the sky to self-contained seasonal mini-calendars that were expressed and memorized through rhymed prose.

As part of the celestial geography of Arabia, this asterism was a cultural text whose invocation within poetry and rhymed prose rendered this cultural material easily transmissible and accessible to anyone with a clear view of the night sky. It was out of this rich cultural milieu that the Star came to be invoked in the Qur’an itself. Over time, this asterism was anthropomorphized as the head of two chains of stars that became its two arms and themselves inspired poetic verse. Beyond its own celestial figure, the fame of the Star engendered names and literary descriptions for other stars that were connected to it, such as the brilliant red star Aldebaran, whose modern name derived from the Arabic al-dabarān, which literally identified it as the Follower of the Star. The results of this exploration illuminate how great the breadth and depth of cultural material even a single asterism can inspire.