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Paper 2: Peregrination and Reflection: cards as “Hempen Birds”.From the last half of the fourteenth century, three words of foreign origin begin to appear in European documents referring to cards, or forms of card-use. Two are seemingly from the Hamitic-Semitic language group, appearing as naib, naiby and variants of those forms. Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and related languages all have a form of the word *nb - which refers to a person or thing from which one takes direction. A third term - naipes - resembles these, and is the standard term used for cards in Spain (and elsewhere in Europe), but this word derives from slightly different origins. Naipes appears to descend, more or less directly, from the language of the western (Punic) Phoenicians. It offers a suggestion of the enduring soul (nps), in association with the extraordinarily durable fabric of hemp-cloth or fibre. The Phoenician word for hempen cloth was mappa, which over time developed into a form napa, having been earlier adopted by classical Rome to mean both hempen cloth and small books - presumably made of hemp-linen, by which means mappa passed into medieval Latin and dialects of French, then to diverge and give the nappa which meant clothlets, or leaflets of cloth, and thus the English napkin and (possibly by this later pattern of descent) the Spanish naipes.In its reference to hemp, the Spanish term shows closest connection to Chinese and Persian words for cards. The Chinese call them ‘hempen birds’ while a Persian term, Ganjifah, combines two different words for hemp – one the Aramaic or Syriac: Kanfai [1] – the other the North African Ganja or, less probably, Persian grgainj[2]. Ganja, however, does not mean ‘hemp’ so much as those two small leaflets which spring up after a hemp-leaf is plucked. Until the 1940s, this word denoted a particular grade of medicinal cannabis. A direct link between forms of card-use in fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe, and the 'Moorish' regions of Spain and North Africa is attested: we hear of a 'joc Moresche' or 'quartres Moresche' at that time.It may be well to note here that the more easterly regions just mentioned are linked by ancient trade routes with the south-western Mediterranean, the region known in classical times as the 'Phoenician basin'. In North Africa, as along the silk-linen road which passed overland to China, hemp was widely introduced in ancient times. It occurs naturally only in India. Two of these routes pass through regions in which Aramaic and Syriac were once the common language, while a third, southern, route passes through to the Red Sea, India and beyond. All three ways were being regularly traveled by Jewish merchants of the south-west in the tenth Christian century. Al-Maqdidi describes them as Jewish traders' routes in 985-6 a.dOne [route they took] was by sea to Antioch, across northern Syria to the Euphrates, down the rivers to Ul-Ubullah, and then by sea. .. This route connects the south-western Mediterranean to the Greek-Christian world of Antioch and Syrian Edessa, to Muslim Persia, Hindu India and China. In pre-Islamic times, the Christian city of Edessa commanded the Syrian gateways, while the caravan routes to the inland – to Persia, India and Arabia - passed also through ‘Magian’ Harran.[3] The silk road (which al-Maqdidi does not describe, but Ibn Khuradadhbih, his contemporary does,) passes north from Edessa. The chief items of eastbound trade were linen and glass; the reverse trade was mainly in silk and spices.The southerly route was mostly a sea -oute and passed via Egypt and the Red Sea, to the east. Al Maqdidi writes of it:… another route was to land in Egypt at al-Farama [ancient Pelusinium], cross the isthmus of Suez with pack animals, sail from al-Qulzum to al-Jar and Juddah [Jeddah], then on to India and China [4] One finds card-use eventually in all the major centres and termini of these roads: in Spain as in China, in Persia and India and (eventually) in Muslim Egypt. What is curious is that the forms of pack, and specific games, seem never to have migrated along with the idea of a card-pack.In the days before the Roman destruction of Carthage, and even later, it had been possible to sail directly to India from the Mediterranean, through a channel known as the Gates of Janus. That channel was closed, according to some, by a late Roman emperor. Others attribute the closure to an early Muslim ruler, but while the loss of the direct sea-lane was certainly a hindrance to later generations of sea-traders and pirates, the route itself was not entirely closed. And as late as the fifteenth century, one finds that the clan of master mariners called 'mu'allim kanana' are describing themselves with words which smack of the pirate, and recall their connection to the piratical Barbary men of the North African coast. Mu'allim Kanaka is a term evoking the image of a blooded hawk, going out and circling at the master's bidding, bringing back with him his gathered treasure. The phrase had come to denote men expert in navigation by the stars, and it is the nature of this skill which identified the eastern with the western Barbary men. In the fifteenth century, one such eastern 'Moor' and navigator, Ibn Majid, wrote a book on his art and lore. We will have reason to speak of him again.In North Africa and in Damascus - another hub of the caravan trade - as in Sicily, paper was already being made in the tenth century. The first and last were former centres of Phoenician civilization.From Quintillian - writing in the first Christian century - we learn that the Romans had their term mappa (meaning both hempen cloth and for a form of small book), from the Phoenician, and Quintillian was in a position to know. He was a Spaniard by birth, educated in Rome and trained as an orator, expert in etymologies, and he lived at a time (as Strabo informs us) when Phoenician still remained a living language in parts of Spain, the whole of Turdetania (Andalusia) having once been Phoenician territory.[5] Note added (2006):The first paper factory established under Muslim rule in Spain was established in 1150 ad in Alicante province, using hemp cultivated around the city of Xativa. Others factories followed, in Toledo and Valencia, Christian Europe having its first paper mill in that established in Italy in 1276. The Spanish term naipes, therefore, may be the earliest and most accurate term for the small paper ‘sheetlets’ we call cards, earlier even than the words taken into Italian or French, since it derives either directly from the Phoenician, or from Phoenician via classical Latin adoption of mappa. In medieval Europe, the Spanish naipes, like the Persian term for a card-game: Ganjifah, seems to associate cards or their forms of use with the material of hemp, the quintessential fibre and fabric of the mariner.In 1303, Venetians created a mill for making marine rope and cord, at first taking their hemp from Bologna, then developing their own resources from cultivations around Padua.[6] It is worth noting, here, how these early hemp plantations occur in proximity to medieval Italy’s most important centres of medicine, trade in medicines, and card-making. Other suggestions are found among our earliest allusions to card-use in the west, which again suggest an original connection to physic and its teaching. See our later paper, “ Medicine by rote: Hayl, Ibn Botlan, Tawaddud and others in the history of western card-use“Nothing else was used, by choice, for marine rope and cordage: from the days of the ocean-going Phoenicians themselves until the introduction of artificial fibres in the middle of the twentieth century. Hemp fibre has the peculiar character of actually improving in strength and flexibility when subjected to wind, weather, rain and salt water, while to those who know the trick of it, hemp will produce a linen far finer than that made from flax. It was the byssus of classical times, and was very early known along the spice road, being perhaps the type of linen chiefly traded along it. As early as the eighth century b.c., Herodotus described how Scythian nomads made hempen linen, and he speaks of the Thacian Getae as making garments which “unless someone is very expert, [he] would certainly judge .. to be [flax-] linen.” Hesychius adds that Thracian women made hempen-linen sheets, while excavations in the Altai have more recently recovered many examples of fine hemp-linen fabric from tombs of the Scythian Sacae.It was probably of that linen that Romans’ little books – also mappa – were made. We may assume them travellers notebooks, or books made for children, since their primary quality was that of surviving rough treatment. And to this day, of course, cloth books are made for children, usually as a way to introduce the rudiments of literacy.Paper made from hempen-rag is just as durable, and as late as the eighteenth century, when James Cook sailed to explore the southern seas, the captain’s log-book was normally of paper made from hemp-linen rag. Well-cared for, such books will endure for centuries, surviving even exposure to the sea and elements longer than any other. It was perhaps of hemp-linen that the 60,000 books were made, which are said to have been destroyed by the invading Arab armies in Spain during the days of Gebert (9th c). We nay take three inferences from these facts: first that Europe’s earliest cards were probably of hempen linen, or paper made from hempen-rag; secondly, that in many cases fifteenth century Italian usage, which gives ‘naibis’[7] for cards, conflates the earlier terms ‘nayb/naibyy’ with naipes, effectively changing the sense from ‘pointer-figures’ (naibyy) to ‘hempen figures’(naipes). The two ideas, however, are not widely different since they connect in different ways to that central idea of the object or person from which/whom one receives ‘pointers’ or directions. Through the Romans’ use of mappa, via Provençal or old French, we find by the thirteenth century that mappa is beingused interchangeably with carte to mean a map as an inscribed ‘sheet’. Thus OF/MF ‘mapa’ or ‘mappe’ meaning a chart or world-map, with medieval Latin giving us a diminutive form: mappa mundi (‘little sheet’ of the world). Early French also contains that dissimilated form: nappe, yielding the derivative napery in Old French, and thus the English napkin, and perhaps the later line of development for the Spanish naipes.[8] Other uses for the Old French, or Provencal nappe referred, for reasons that are self-evident, to the sort of matter included on medieval maps, or again (in England) to the earth-measuring disciplines of geometry and geology. The Norman and Provencal connections here are particularly noteworthy, for not only do we hear of a ‘papyrus-pieces’ or ‘paper-pieces’ exercise being conducted in Norman Sicily in the twelfth century, but at the same period, of an architect in Norman England who refers often, as he works, to his small and ‘beautiful letters’ carried in his waist-pouch. In fifteenth century Italy, almost a century after cards begin to be mentioned more frequently in western documents, we find the phrase used ‘naibis o carticelle’ as a generic description for cards. This phrase was perhaps an habitual pairing of synonymns (‘naipes’/mappae) or used to distinguish variant forms of cards, games or packs.[9] But one of these terms, at least, must derive from the idea of the card-pack as segments of a groundplan or “map” equivalent to single inscribed page: Lat: carte/mappa.PeregrinatoThe connotation of hemp was always with the needs of the peripatetic: the seaman, nomad, scholar or military camp. We have already noted how classical Latin uses mappa to describe both hempen cloth and a particular type of small book, which latter invention we may again owe to the notably adventurous Phoenicians, from whom we also have the origin of our alphabet. Our usual word for the Bible, like many European terms for books and libraries comes from the name of a Phoenician city, Byblos. While hemp grows naturally only in India, it is found widely distributed along the paths of the old east-west traders: in North Africa, along the linen-silk Roads, in parts of Russia and Transoxania, and again by the Black Sea. The Chinese word for cards ‘hempen birds,’ like that of the eastern mariners called mu’allim kanaka, evokes the idea of the seasonal circuit and those who travel it. There is reason to think that among such people, whose life was one of constant peregrination, the fabric of heaven itself was imagined as hempen cloth. Diosorides, for example, records another term for hemp as the ‘star’ plant (Gk: asterion), and numerous legends and customs on the old hemp-roads associate the sections of the celestial cover with those of the individual – his cloak or shirt of the immortal fabric. The cover of heaven, and it innumerable stars, becomes immortalized and symbolised a patchwork garment. How old the custom is we do not know, but the Byzantine saccos, like the shirt of the warrior princes of the Turks, speaks to this same notion.And having come at last to the Islamic period, we may now consider the imagery of the hempen ‘sheet’ in relation to Muslim Islam. Mamluk cardsWhen the Samanid clan rose to power in Transoxania, they rose as an arm of Islam, opposed to the as-yet unconverted Turks. Famed as horsemen, the Samanids retained their memory of relation to the Scythian Sacae on the one side and the Archemenid Persians on the other. For a time, the Muslim Samanids ruled Persia. A Turkish author of the tenth-century later tells us of the system by which tribute-slaves (mamluks) of the Samanids were trained through seven annual stages of constant military service. At the commencement of each year the slave managed to survive, he was given higher rank and particular equipment and insignia to demonstrate it. Those awarded for the seventh grade and year, the final year of exclusively military duty, are of particular interest to us. The items were: * a tent - the size of a marquee - with a central pole and sixteen others;* a silver star to attach to his black hat and* a Ganja cloak.All these bear significance, speaking to the occasion, the nature of the slave’s service and triumph, and that idea of the celestial ‘cover’ and its divisions. The tent with its central pole and seventeen others invokes that idea – also found in Biblical literature – that the heavens were a tent, pinned to the circuit of the world by 17 stars and upheld by a central, invisible pillar of air. It is an image as old as Egypt. The remaining items, in the same way, bore meaning perfectly intelligible to all communities of the near east, including those of the Asian steppes. The objects speak of heaven’s protection and the transitory military life, of eternal service according to the rota, and personal ascendancy; of the right to direct others and an obligation of complete submission, of the number ‘7’ itself and much more. They again identify the personal cover of the cloak with the material of the celestial, and the terrestrial ‘cover’ which word in Islam signified divine protection.Precisely the same themes connect immediately with the western card-pack, its structure, imagery, emblems, terms and possibly even its original material. It is not that we suppose card-use came to Europe first from Samanid Transoxania, (not even through the spread of Manichean Christianity along the old trade-roads), but rather that the entire region, and the Samanid period, fall within the wide sweep of those whose proverbs, stories, poetry, art and religious imagery all echo practical observation of the heavens and the earth, and where the native peoples used hempen fibre as their finest and most durable material, even while using stars and winds as guides to time, season and direction. In ancient and classical literature, the image of the constellations as associated fires of the military or nomadic camp are commonplace, as is that by which the stars are seen as lighted ships on the sea. In this way, the roads of heaven become a mirror for those of earth and sea, the stars’ servitude and duty reflecting the similarly endless circling of men below.Thus the Persian Attar, as he introduces a pilgrimage-tale known as the Conclave of the Birds, begins with a pean to the reflection and peregrination of heavens and earth:To the Heavens He has given dominion,and to the Earth dependence;to the Heavens he has given movement, and to the Earth uniform repose.He raised the firmament above the earth as a tent, without [physical] pillars to uphold it.….In the beginning he gilded the stars, so that at night the heavens might play tric-trac.[10] With diverse properties he endowed the net of the body, and he has put dust on the tail of the bird of the soul. [The root for ‘soul’ is nps]He made Ocean liquid as a sign of bondage ….The first written reference to cards as “slave cards” (slave = mamluk) or perhaps originally ‘kingdom cards’ (kingdom = mamlik) occurs in the work of a western historian of card-play, commenting on a group of cards preserved in the Turkish museum called the topkapi serai, a former harem which also contains a copy of a ninth-century world-map, the ‘Map of the Caliph Ma’mun’, under whom was written the first geographic work of early Islam, Ibn Khurradadhbih’s Book of Routes and Kingdoms ( al-Maslik wa 'l-Mamlik).[11]The epithet ‘mamluk’ applied to these cards might embody local popular legend, of the sort repeated by museum guides, but the western author who first mentioned it does not refer to his source, if any. Mamluk simply means slave, and in the Muslim environment carried a specific implication that the person so termed came from an alien people, was not of Muslim birth, and did not have Arabic as their original tongue. If ‘mamluk’ were an original epithet for the cards, or even ‘mamlik’ it is one perfectly in accord with other indications about the origins and nature of our earliest cards – namely that the idea of card-use is older than Islam, and that it was associated with a habit of describing heaven and earth in parallel, aided education and was brought into the survey of Muslim culture through the practices of subject peoples. One can generally assume that a mamluk will not be Arabian, for the Muslim conquest of Arabia was early and thorough - although a Jewish community is said to have remained within Mecca for some centuries after the advent of Muslim rule. Otherwise, it was in Egypt, Persia, (including Samanid Persia) and Turkey, that the Muslim rulers were wont to require a number of children to be included in the annual tribute. These children were the mamluks, taken chiefly from Africa or from Armenia, from Slavs and Greek or Syrian Christians who now lived within the borders of Islam, in areas which had earlier been part of the Roman or Byzantine domain. (Qur’anic injunction prohibited the enslavement of any born Muslim). By the tenth century, Islam included most of the silk road to the north, and Sicily, North Africa and the greater part of Spain to the west. The ‘mamluk’ might come from any of these regions and indigenous peoples.In Egypt, the mamluk sector of the military grew both numerous and powerful, until about the twelfth century it became the country’s ruling elite. But we have heard of the Samanid mamluk’s seven military grades and insignia from two centuries earlier, and in relation to Transoxania, with its ancient tradition of hempen linen. Rather than weary the reader further with our own explanation of how those mamluk insignia reflect the material and content of our western card-packs, we may turn to two eastern writers. The first is a mariner of the eastern sea-routes, a master of sidereal navigation named Ibn Majid, who writes in the fifteenth century of the conventional correlation between the star and the idea of triumph, and suggests a reason why the astronomical cards of the tarot should have come to be called ‘triumphs’ in fifteenth century Italy:A star is called najm [=a triumph] because it rises for a period of time; in the speech of the Arabs[12] injam means rising; they say to someone who is victorious, “Thou art najum [=a culminating star]” which is triumphing “… rising over your enemy, gaining mastery over him etc”.[13]From the twentieth century we have proof that such an ancient equation was and is among the indigenous Berber tribes, nomads of ‘Moorish’ North Africa: A person may bless another by saying to him (in Berber[14] or in Arabic) …’Make God make your star rise’ and he may curse him by saying. “may God make your star fall’[15]Calculation of the stars is thus at once a calculation of personal, or of national fortunes, which habit we can trace at least to the days of ancient Babylon. For this reason, and by reference to traditions far more ancient than the Muslim or Christian faiths, the star of the mamluk’s seventh grade indicated his personal ‘triumph’ and that of Islam which he served. But it also indicated permanent and devoted service, traveling the endless ways assigned him by a higher power, for such were ancillary virtues of the star in either the literal or metaphorical sense. Augustine of North Africa insisted on this quality of service for the stars, three centuries before Mohammad’s birth, thus enunciating what would be the standard test of Roman Christian orthodoxy, against the influence of Manichean Christianity, infiltrating from the regions of the old silk road and Persia:Now we, as opposed to the Manichees, place no man under the rule of the stars; the star which appeared at Christ’s nativity was not a Lord … but a servant who pointed the way..’For this the stars were created, to indicate direction and times for men below. So said the Hebrews and Homer, and the later Greeks, and the Romans, Christians and Muslims, each in their way. ‘The cover of heaven’ was that of the stars, and so the star and cloak of hemp signified at once heaven’s blessing, the practical ways of the nomad, and the cloak of the cavalryman on constant bivouac, as well that of the mariner. All made their way by reference to the parallel paths of heaven and earth, and perceived the divisions of the heavenly, earthly and personal ‘cover’ in identical terms. So Majid speaks of the reflective road, and the divisions of the ship, and those 17 stars which named the points of the navigator’s compass of stars:“we have the better knowledge of the sea and its sciences and the wisdom of the stars in the high roads of the sea, and the knowledge of the division of the ship in length and breadth… And we have the star compass..” The point is, that our card-packs embody precisely these divisions, and the original 17 Atouts, found in the Charles VI set, represent the religious and folk-character, as well as the astronomical identity of the 17 stars of that compass.Careful adherence to the Augustinian ideal of the ‘servant-star’ is to be seen on some among the Visconti-Sforza Atouts. Like the figures of the Charles VI set, these are not merely astronomical pictures, but detailed mnemonic ‘figura’ or rebuses intended to assist the viewer in memorising, and then recalling ( and elaborating upon), the nature and inherent virtu of the subject star.To take directions from the pattern of that celestial cover was a practical as well as a symbolic act. One finds this understanding crystallized in the story of Alexander and his partitioned cloak, a story which - curiously enough - again has relevance to the thought behind our card-packs and their structure. In medieval Islam, the legends of Alexander were as ubiquitous as in medieval Christendom, or India, but the tale of his military cloak and its divisions comes from sober Plutarch. Plutarch relates how, after many failed attempts to establish the foundations of the projected harbour lighthouse for his new port city of Alexandria, Alexander ‘the horned’ had a dream in which an aged hermit told him to lay down his military cloak and then, by its divisions, establish the Pharos’ foundations. The story seems to make no sense until one recalls the style of the later Islamic military shirt of hempen-linen, and the usual mythic associations: the cloak of night, the hempen cloth, and the context of this dream, for this story represents a meeting of the Greek and Egyptian traditions, a connection between the ways of the military camp and those of the navigator’s world. The way of the military was the way of the sun in Egypt, while the way of the mariner was literally as well as figuratively that of the moon - as we shall see further. Both ways – of the sun and of the mariner’s moon - have their numerical patterns clearly reflected in our card-packs, in the 52-card deck and the tarot respectively.The image of the moon in the east is that of the quintessential Na’ib, endlessly journeying as pilgrim and peregrine at the direction of one still higher, an image so ancient and so pervasive in the near east that the moon and the na’ib (= Lat: gubernator) are all but inseparable ideas. The stations of the lunar path become the resting places of the pilgrim and of the teacher. As illustration, one might cite Hafiz, the treasured poet of Persia, who brings these images brilliantly together when he writes: The green sea of heaven, the hull of the new moon, are both swamped by the generosity of our Hájí (pilgrim-governor) Qavám[16]Since the art of laying out lines of travel, by land or sea, by the stars, is precisely the same art as that which informs the architect and surveyor’s skills, so the story of Alexander’s aligning the Pharos by the ‘divisions of the cloak’ is to be understood as a metaphor for sideral surveying. This science of aligning directions on earth by reference to the heavens is arguably the oldest true science of humankind. From before the dawn of recorded history, it is seen as the common skill of the naked-eye mariner, the earthly navigator, the builder and the geometer. We have structures almost as old as man’s ability to make fire which give evidence of this skill, which remained as necessary as ever from those times until our present decades, when the development of global positioning via satellites finally assigned it a lesser place in the usual curriculum of the surveyor.What our card-packs represent in their structure and earliest imagery is precisely the pattern and content of these divisions of the celestial and terrestrial mappe. It is present not only in an association between the fabric of heaven and that of the hempen sheet, as mappe, nor simply that association between the star and the idea of the triumph which we have noted. The link between the single map of heaven and earth, and the matter of the western card-pack is more direct than any of these, for the western packs actually embody the essential factors of that ancient navigational and surveying grid.The divisions of the mappe.The basic grid used in sidereal navigation and surveying is formed thus:The horizontal line (axis) is provided by the lunar path, or more exactly by the series of 27 or 28 asterisms which allow the description of that path in as many stages. 28 parts was usual in the near east, but a system of 27, used in India, is more ancient and was routinely used in Islam for formal and technical calculations.Crossing that line, the grid’s vertical axis (as it were) is formed - not by reference to a central meridian - but by reference to a ribbon of stars winding about the earth from the hidden southern Pole to the North star, the mariner’s “stella maris.” The number of stars from that winding ribbon utilised might be any number, but was as a rule the same 17 which were most important in navigation, and which name the points of the eastern mariner’s sidereal Compass rose. These were the stars associated with each of the ancient trading nations, and are the meaning implied by the mamluk’s “17 tent-poles” - an allusion to the entire circuit of heaven's cover.Enough of these grid-stars could be seen, at any latitude and any time of year, to enable the mariner or the surveyor to determine position and line of direction by triangulation against the encompassing horizon. And since place is also time, the same system could determine the calendar, day and date, for those who had spent years in learning the ways of heaven and earth. The entire range of the celestial-terrestrial mirror and its uses was represented in the object of the astrolabe.The 27/28 divisions of the lunar path are known as the moon’s resting places, or the lunar stations (Ar: manzil). The same series was used, long before the rise of Islam, as a pattern for memory and thus the rote of basic education, as well assisting in the practical calculations of navigation and surveying. We find the lunar stations and their stars used as the basis for ancient memorized calendars in Arabia and Socotra to this day, and the sme series served as a general foundation for (predominantly memory-based) education over all the millennia before printed books became common.The practice of associating the sequence of manzil with the sequence of alphabetic letters is attested from the early centuries of Muslim rule, but is demonstrably more ancient. Moran first suggested that the original form of the alphabet, the Phoenician, developed from a method of notation for the series of lunar asterisms.The chief difficulty with this argument is that the number of Phoenician letters was only 22, but by reference to Egyptian practices in mensuration, this is not as great a difficulty as it seems, and Moran probably has the right of it.From that foundation of the astronomical-alphanumeric sequence, additional layers or levels of learning could be added, building the tower of learning ever higher, in a way vividly pictured in western manuscripts and even in Islamic architecture. One sees in Burckhadt's essay concerning Ibn Arabi's celestial meditations a fine example of the method in diagram form.In the late Roman period, Augustine already seems to have known the custom of using the celestial sequences as a basis for association and memoryfor, writing some centuries before the rise of Islam, he already begins a passage about his memories this way:When I go to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, in which are innumerable images..Now, the Romans also called constellations ‘fields’ or ‘camps’ – campus stellae, “spacious palaces” is a very fair rendition of what is implied by the Arabic term for the manzil (lunar mansions). We do not know the earlier, indigenous term for the latter in North Africa.Since our 52 card pack, and our tarot, speak to the solar and lunar divisions respectively, it is hardly surprising to find them being inked in Spain with the notion of the hempen sheet (mappa), nor that in Europe generally cards should originally be associated with mnemonic methods which depend on formal division of the world. An early commentator speaks of the 'ludus cartarum' (exercise of sheet-divisions) as a means by which all the stages of the world may be figured and described. How the pattern of the segmented map could be used in practice to aid exercises of memory and learning has been considered in the first essay of the present series.A form of the ancient navigational/temporal grid apparently reached Europe quite early, from Egyptian – or at least eastern – Christianity. Gregory of Tours adapts it, in the sixth Christian century, to his own more limited knowledge of the heavens and his particular needs. The older Egyptian system, like Gregory’s, used the pattern of the heavens to provide that of the monk’s roster of night-watches. The stars themselves are called 'ministers' liturgi. It needs hardly be added that a major centre of Egyptian monastic life was in the older sea port of Canopus, and that the same Egyptian monks served as mariners, providing Byzantium with its naval arm as, in earlier times, the Phoenicians had served Egypt and Rome.In his work, De cursu stellarum (ca 576), Gregory speaks of the stars’ rising in the east and setting in the west as the seventh wonder of the natural world, and has some idea of the compass of stars, for he says that “some of these [marker stars] appear in the middle of heaven, some close to the south; they do not make a straight path but are turned in a circuit, and some are seen all year round, while some have definite months in which they appear”. He is not speaking here of the path of the moon, nor yet of the sun, but of that winding circuit of the compass stars.Nonetheless, when we consider the rest of his text, it is clear that Gregory is repeating matter that he has not perfectly understood. To make the system work for his latitude and those “ecliptic preconceptions”[17] so dominant in western Europe, Gregory had to adjust – in fact to manipulate - the names and identities of the ancient marker stars. Most of the original stars were then still visible in Egypt, but so far north as Gregory, they were permanently below the horizon. So Gregory moves the great Crux of the south, identifying it with the ‘cross’ to be seen in Cygnus and so forth. But, at the same time, we can see from monastic illustrations from the tenth century and later, that the identity and proverbial character of the right stars was known to some.Western monasticism is well known to have been transplanted into the west from Egypt, either by direct emigration or by adoption. North Africa was once a major centre of Christian culture, and some of the earliest monastic enclaves – particularly in Ireland – have a character which raises questions about how close a link is to be seen between the culture of Punic North Africa and that of early Christianity in the far west. However, the connection of western monastic culture and Egyptian Christianity, and eastern Christianity more generally, was maintained for many centuries, and it requires no great leap of the imagination to see Gregory’s sung periods of the night watches as echoing those of Egypt’s mariner monks. To this day, the habit remains in the eastern seas, of singing the periods of the night with 'pilot poems' which recall and memorise the indicators of the lower and upper “high roads of the sea”. Gregory the Great, in his commentary on the most star-filled book of the Bible, the Book of Job, offers an extended metaphor of the life of the monk as mariner.Gregory of Tours' aim, of course, was not to divide the world, but simply to mark and calculate time. For this, his combination of visible stars with set recitation-periods for the Psalms was more than adequate. It is the imagery of the other manuscripts, which accurately identify the major stars of the celestial highroad and of the compoass which originally formed the basis for the imagery of our Atouts in the tarot.AS to how or why western card-packs should refer to these things: that is, the material of hemp, the ‘leaflets’ of sheetlets of the book, the pattern of the navigational grid and so forth, we have a clear and elegant answer in the words of the slave woman Tawaddud, whose story includes reference to cards, and is contained within a twelfth century collection of traditional Egyptian market-place tales, entitled the Alf Layla wa Layla.Having demonstrated an astonishing depth and range of learning in every subject of the medieval curriculum, together with perfect memory for detail and wondrous fluency of speech, Tawaddud pauses at one stage, and explains the reason for her skill to the astonished Caliph:“Know” she says, “that the Almanac makers have certain signs and tokens, and commoners have learned somewhat by practice with them.”These ‘signs and tokens’ - more than the dubious reference to Kanjifah in the Tale - suggest the original nature and origins of our packs. Sheets from an almanac of the older sort, which included far more than star-tables, as we discuss in more detail in a later paper.Having now considered themes surrounding hemp and the naib in relation to cards, and how the mappa and the map are related to these, both in their subject-matter and their formal divisions, we can at last turn to the object in which all the same elements were to be found together, from long before the advent of Christianity or Islam: the handbook of the Almanac. see: "The matter of the Almanac: Tawaddud and the card-pack, east and west” Notes: [1] The form seems to show that cards were taken on from a Syriac or Aramaic speaking people. These, we may suppose, were the peoples of the inland caravan routes, and/or the Christian Nestorians of Syria and Persia who may have had them from more ancient peoples. Muslim scholars held that Syriac was the primal or ante-diluvian language, parent of both Arabic and Hebrew, and the language of all people from Adam until after the Exodus. That view is found, for example, in the Categories of Nations and this - by the way - is the meaning of Dante’s reference to stars never before seen except by the “primal people” He is referring to the Syriac-speaking Chaldeans, which name the Nestorians used of themselves, and Rome for any ancient Christian community who accepted Rome’s authority. The Nestorians retained Syriac as the language of culture and liturgy until long after the Muslim conquest, and from them the early Muslim rulers of Persia gained most of their ancient and classical learning. [2] From the still older Sumerian term: gan-zi-gun-na. [3] Needham credits Harran with having been central to trade with China even in the pre-Islamic period. Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, Vol.IV, Pt.3 p.561; p. 573. [4] Hourani, George F., Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean before the coming of the Portuguese, Princeton University Press expanded edition 1995 pp.78-9. [5] Strabo 1:3,2; 3:2,13-14. [6] Postscript note. (2006). These details from a web page: ‘rexresearch’. [7] Postscript note (2006). I am indebted for the reference to late fifteenth century Italian sermons to correspondence with Ross Campbell on the TarotL website, which has allowed this additional remark. [8] I am indebted for all the western etymological information to Partridge, Origins, which has doubtless already been investigated before. [9] See [Postscript] note 3 above. [10] A form of backgammon which uses pegs as well as counters. In the Thousand and One Nights, it is termed a ‘Frankish’ game. [11] .M.J. de Goeje (ed), Ibn Khurradadhbih’s Book of Routes and Kingdoms: al-Maslik wa 'l-Mamlik, Leiden, 1889. The title “Book of Routes (or Roads, or Ways) and Kingdoms’ was reused by a number of Islamic geographers. [12] Majid was an eastern Moor. [13] A less orthodox version of this belief, reported of Moorish north Africa occurs in Westermarck, Edward, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, London: Macmilln, 1926 (2 vols) see Vol.1 p.129, the passage beginning ‘every man on earth has his star’… [14] vide Augustine, who was wont to consult the Berbers around Carthage on root meanings for Biblical Hebrew words and who reports that these tribes described themselves as ‘Kenani’ or ‘Canaanites’. [15] Westermarck, op,cit. p.129. On beliefs about the Pleiades in Morocco, ibid. pp.130-131. [16] Ghazal 5 [17] Needham speaks of the “ecliptic preconceptions of the west” and he is plainly justified in doing so..