Stars without a Table: Planetary Horocrators from the Cairo Geniza

This essay describes a list of planetary horocrators—that is, the planets ruling each hour of the week—found in an eleventh-century manuscript from the Cairo Genizah. Four different fragments of this manuscript have thus far been identified, and they enable the reconstruction of the list's orig...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Bohak, Gideon (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Publié: 2021
Dans: The Jewish quarterly review
Année: 2021, Volume: 111, Numéro: 3, Pages: 380-388
Sujets non-standardisés:B Divination
B Cairo Genizah
B sortes
B Planets
B Lists
B goralot
B Astrology
B planetary horocrators
B Tables
B Lot-casting
B Judeo-Arabic
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Résumé:This essay describes a list of planetary horocrators—that is, the planets ruling each hour of the week—found in an eleventh-century manuscript from the Cairo Genizah. Four different fragments of this manuscript have thus far been identified, and they enable the reconstruction of the list's original layout. Such a list can easily be tabulated, but the medieval Jewish scribe who produced it preferred to spell it out in its entirety, and in a very disorganized manner. In part, this was because the Jews of medieval Cairo were more used to working with lists than with tables. But given his interest in various methods of divination (his manuscript also included a handbook of goralot, or lot-casting), our scribe may have deemed that the cumbersome and opaque layout of his list might enhance its perceived validity.
ISSN:1553-0604
Contient:Enthalten in: The Jewish quarterly review
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2021.0026