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An Arabic ephemeris for the year 954/955 CE in the Strasbourg papyrus collection
Johannes Thomann | University of Zurich, Switzerland

The Strasbourg papyrus collection forms a part of the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire (Strasbourg) and is one of the prominent collections of its kind. It hosts 5200 documents on papyrus. In a survey of Arabic documents on astronomy in the collection, I found a papyrus horoscope and could date it to the year 896 CE (edited by J. Thomann, in: Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, Genève 2012, pp. 747–750). Another document, a fragment of an early Almanach, probably from the 10th century CE will be published in the furture. In the present paper, an unpublished fragment of an ephemeris will be analysed. It contains parts of the chrononolgical section, and the positions of the sun and the moon on the recto. The days of the months in the Persian, Syriac, Coptic and Arabic calendars are presented together with the day of the week. These data allow for a sure identification of the year of the ephemeris, namely the Persian Year 323 (954/955 CE). On the verso, positions of Venus, Mercury and the lunar node for the following month are preserved, together with the height of the sun at noon and the length of the day. Obviousely, the original layout was different from the layout of other early Arabic ephemerides, which displayed the data of a month on a bifolium. In the present document, the data of a month were displayed on a single page. On the right margin of the recto, names of months and feasts are to be found. On the left margin of the verso, retrogradation and standstill of planets are indicated. The positions of the sun are more than five degrees less than the precise values and indicate that outdated astronomical tables were used for calculation. A simlar case with a comparable deviation of solar positions is an ephemeris for the year 931/932 CE in the Vienna Papyrus Collection (forthcoming publication by J. Thomann in: From Nubia to Syria: Documents from the Medieval Muslim World, Leiden 2013). As it seems, more advanced astronomical tables, produced in the East, were not available in Egypt before the time of the Fatimids.