Die Plejaden in den Vergleichen der arabischen Dichtung.

• Author: Montgomery, James E.

There are many important and striking features of classical Arabic poetry about which the scholar and enthusiast entertains, at best, a faint and all too often muddled impression. Thus it is frequently impossible to distinguish, with exactitude, what is unusual in the treatment of an idea, image or theme from what is commonplace and to discern, with confidence, when the line in question is conventional and when it is imitative and allusive. By means of a series of studies devoted to the lexicographical study of Classical Arabic, Manfred Ullmann has endeavored to place at the disposal of the scholarly public the taxonomical tools needed for a close and comprehensive reading of this strange but frequently uplifting tradition. Together with Paul Kunitzsch, Ullmann in this monograph catalogues and discusses the references to the constellation of the Pleiades as found in Arabic poetry. In the famous introduction to his Kitab al-Shi r wa-l-Shu ara, Ibn Qutayba discusses the contents of his Kitab al-Arab, which deals with the "edifying annals, sound genealogies, the wisdom equal to the wisdom of the philosophers, the scientific knowledge of horses and of the stars, their rising and setting and how to find directions by them, of the winds, which herald rain and which do not, of the (various kinds of) lightning, which are deceptive and which truthful (prognosticators of rain), of the clouds, which are waterless and which carry rain - with all of which the desert Arabs filled their poetry" (Ibn Qutayba, Kitab al-Shir wa-l-Shu ara, ed. M. J. de Goeje [Leiden: Brill, 1904], 6). For the ancients, then, the study of the heavenly firmament was an integral and pedagogical part of the diwan al-arab.

The body of the monograph is an inventory of references to the Pleiades (pp. 35-144), in which the authors present us with 421 instances, transliterated, translated, and provided with a brief apparatus. The first part of the book contains an Introduction (pp. 11-13), discussions of the astronomical and historical dimension (where it is noted that the designation al-thurayya "mit dem die Plejaden bezeichnet werden, gehort zu den alten, allgemein verbreiteten Namen" [p. 15] and that for the early periods we are dealing not with a scientific discipline but with widely disseminated popular knowledge [p. 18]), of lexical and etymological aspects (pp. 23-29), and of the thematic range of the references (pp. 30-34). To the central catalogue is appended an overview...