Long before telescopes, the desert Arabs measured the year by the Moon. Each night it moves about 13° eastward against the stars, and in ~27 nights it circles the whole sky — passing through 28 way-stations, the منازل القمر manāzil al-qamar, "the mansions of the Moon".
Each mansion is a small star-group the Moon "lodges" in for a night. Together they form a calendar and a weather-almanac: the anwāʾ system tied the dawn rising or setting of each mansion to a season of rain, heat, wind or harvest — a farmer's and herder's sky, read without a single instrument.
This is the third of the great lunar-mansion systems, alongside the Chinese 28 宿 (xiù) and the Indian 27 nakshatras — and they share most of their marker stars, because they all watch the same Moon on the same path. But the Arabic sky left a mark the others didn't: when this astronomy passed into medieval Europe, its star names came with it. Aldebaran, Altair, Deneb, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Fomalhaut, Vega, Algol — the everyday names of the brightest stars are Arabic, worn smooth by a thousand years of use.
The belt of mansions, grouped into four quarters of the ecliptic. Tap a quarter to light up its mansions on the map and table.
← swipe the strip sideways →
| Quarter | Manzil | Western stars | Stars |
|---|
Pick a mansion to see its stars — with its meaning, its anwāʾ lore, and the Chinese mansion & Indian nakshatra it shares.
The Moon keeps 28 stations; the Sun keeps 12 signs. Arabic astronomy carried these twelve بروج (burūj), sidereally reckoned, into medieval Europe — the zodiac we still use. The mansions are the finer ruler laid over the same circle.
The 28-mansion roster follows the classical Arabic sources (Ibn Qutayba's Kitāb al-Anwāʾ; al-Ṣūfī's Book of the Fixed Stars) with star identifications after Kunitzsch & Smart, A Dictionary of Modern Star Names; positions are Hipparcos J2000, the same coordinates used by The Chinese Sky and The Indian Sky for shared stars. A few boundary mansions vary between sources. Live view: The Arabic Sky Tonight.