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On the 17th of August 1570, a scribe in the kingdom of Bijapur completed an ambitious, highly complex, and sumptuously illustrated work on astrology and astral magic. 1 Housed in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the manuscript is not identified by a title in the text, but takes its name from a note inscribed on the first folio, which describes it as the Nujüm al-eulum ("Stars of the Sciences").2 To date, the Nujüm al-eulum has attracted scholarly attention for the richness and spectacular nature of its illustrations - some four hundred - which depict a dazzling variety of angels, anthropomorphized planets, zodiac signs and degrees, talismans, magical spells, astrological tables and horoscopes, tantric goddesses, horses, elephants, and weapons.3 Following brief notices by art historians such as Stella Kramrisch, Hermann Goetz, Douglas Barrett, and Mark Zebrowski, the author of the Chester Beatty Library catalogue, Linda York Leach, compiled a comprehensive description of the Nujum's miniatures, together with the miniatures of a second, more crudely executed copy of the Nujüm al-eulüm, also housed in the Chester Beatty Library and tentatively dated to 1660-80.4 More recently, Deborah Hutton's insightful and detailed analyses of several of the Nujüm miniatures have opened a window onto the diverse cultural influences circulating at the Bijapur court.5
The brilliance and abundance of the Nujüm' s paintings have tended to overshadow the equally interesting details of the manuscript's text, which has suffered from disproportionate scholarly neglect, even in a field that has been characterized by a lack of sustained scholarly interest in the textual side of such documents. The continuing predominance of Persian chronicles as the main source for the study of the medieval Deccan and the general scholarly indifference to astrology and magic as fields of serious historical inquiry into medieval Indian history have doubtless contributed to obscuring the importance of the Nujüm as a historical document. The recent "discovery" of a third copy of the Nujüm al-eulüm in the library of the Wellcome Institute in London and the digitization of several pages of that library's manuscript may well stimulate wider interest in this fascinating work.6
In this article I will present new evidence for the authorship of the Nujüm al-eulum, which I have discovered through the course of my own study...