Abstract
The Nilometer first appeared in charts on Alexander Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822; Fig. 10.1) with the status of an asterism within Aquarius. Jamieson distinguished it as such with a mixture of capital and minuscule letters in its label whereas all of his otherwise ‘proper’ constellations were labeled strictly with capital letters. The device shown by Jamieson, a type of measuring staff, was composed of some faint stars east of Antinoüs (see Volume 1) and north of the head of Capricornus. These stars were left unformed by Ptolemy, which made them an easy target for astronomers who wished to use them as part of tributes to their royal patrons; failed attempts to incorporate them into constellations include Pomum Imperiale (1688; Chap. 13) and Leo Palatinus (1785; Chap. 7).
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Notes
- 1.
“West of Scorpio” (Young 1903).
- 2.
London: A. Hall & Company (1874). The quotation is from page 14.
- 3.
The Cairo Nilometer was ordered built by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil in ad 861, but is located on the site of an earlier nilometer seen and described by Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Dionysius of Tel Mahre in 830.
- 4.
Indian Antiquities, London: John White (1801), pp. 237–238.
- 5.
Hebrew and Aramaic name for the land of Egypt.
- 6.
“Isaiah xl 12.” (= 40:12); “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?” (NIV).
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Barentine, J.C. (2016). Norma Nilotica. In: Uncharted Constellations. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27619-9_10
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