Lost Star Catalog of Hipparchus

Sun! Moon! Trigonometry, Equinoxes! HOBBY LOBBY!

The positions of the constellation figures shown on the Farnese Atlas point to a date of 125 b.c., matching that of a long-lost star catalog by ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus.

New evidence for ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus’ lost Star Catalogue only found on the Farnese Atlas¹ has come to light thanks to multispectral imaging of a palimpsest manuscript and subsequent decipherment and interpretation.

Hipparchus

Hipparchus (c. 190 – c. 120 BC) was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes.

Hipparchus is considered the greatest ancient astronomical observer and, by some, the greatest overall astronomer of antiquity. He was the first whose quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon survive.

Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex

St Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula

Scholars have been searching for that catalog for centuries. Now, thanks to a technique called multispectral imaging, they have found what seems to be the first known Greek remnants of Hipparchus' star catalog.² It was hidden beneath Christian texts on medieval parchment, at the library of St Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt according to a new paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy by Gysembergh & Zingg.

Multispectral imaging revealed hidden original text from St. Catherine's Monastery over the top of faint tracings on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus palimpsest.³

This new evidence is the most authoritative to date and allows major progress in the reconstruction of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue. In particular, it confirms that the Star Catalogue was originally composed in equatorial coordinates. It also confirms that Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue was not based solely on data from Hipparchus’ Catalogue. Finally, the available numerical evidence is consistent with an accuracy within 1° of the real stellar coordinates, which would make Hipparchus’ Catalogue significantly more accurate than his successor Claudius Ptolemy’s.⁴

The codex was kept at Westminster College in Cambridge until 2010, when Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, purchased it from Sotheby's. It's now part of the Green Collection on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, although a few folios are stored elsewhere.

1. Burnham, Robert. “In 2005 Hipparchus's sky catalog found” Astronomy (January 13, 2005). A famous statue preserves a pictorial record of the sky as Hipparchus cataloged it. The statue, a Roman copy from around a.d. 150 of a Greek original, is known as the Farnese Atlas. Located in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy, it depicts the mythological figure of Atlas kneeling as he holds a celestial globe on his shoulders. The globe, 26 inches (65 centimeters) in diameter, shows 41 Greek constellation figures in raised relief, plus lines marking the celestial equator, the meridians of the solstices and equinoxes, and the ecliptic and tropics.

2. Ouellette, Jennifer (2022) “Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex Multispectral imaging revealed hidden original text on Codex Climaci Rescriptus.” Ars Technica (October 20, 2022).

3. Ibid.

4. Gysembergh, V., J. Williams, P., & Zingg, E. (2022). New evidence for Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue revealed by multispectral imaging. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 53(4), 383–393. New evidence for Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue revealed by multispectral imaging - Victor Gysembergh, Peter J. Williams, Emanuel Zingg, 2022 (sagepub.com)

Victor Gysembergh is a CNRS research professor at the Centre Léon Robin (Sorbonne Université). He is currently working on an edition of the fragments of Eudoxus of Cnidus, as well as on editions of Claudius Ptolemy’s treatise On the Analemma and his recently discovered treatise on the Meteoroscope. Peter J. Williams is Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, and is a biblical philologist who has been leading the research team investigating the Aramaic and Greek underwriting of Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Emanuel Zingg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Léon Robin (Sorbonne Université) in Paris. He is currently working on editions of Ptolemy’s treatise On the Analemma and his recently discovered treatise on the Meteoroscope.