Sundial

This sundial is fragmentary; a little more than half of it is intact. The crack appears on the left, a short distance from the meridian line. The inscriptions are engraved in an elegant floral Kufic script. The cardinal points are delimited on the sundial and a gnomon (vertical rod), which has since disappeared, was once fixed in the orifice along the north-south line. The length of the rod is indicated by the radius of the circle to the right of the meridian. The strain put on the orifice by the gnomon has displaced its centre away from the meridian. If the perpendicular segment on the right edge of the sundial was extended, it would pass by this orifice. This segment delimits the direction east-west. The word ‘East’ (al-mashriq) is still visible on the piece. The lines that indicate where the shadow falls during the summer solstice, the equinoxes and the winter solstice carry no inscription. The lines that mark the hours are engraved with the words âjir al-ûla (‘end of the first hour’), âjir al-tâniya (‘end of the second hour’), etc. The curve close to the left edge of the sundial indicates the time of prayer, al-zuhr (prayer at midday). The name Ahmed ibn al-Saffâr, which refers to a well-known astronomer active in Córdoba around the year 1000, is engraved on the right angle of the instrument.

This piece is the oldest preserved signed and dated sundial. It belongs to that group of classical, horizontal sundials inherited from Greek and Roman Antiquity. This type of sundial was later transformed by the Muslims who added new elements such as the addition of lines related to their hours of prayer. The earliest among those fitted with gnomons date from the 8th century but the first dated Islamic sundials existed before 1010. To this day, eight sundials have been recovered from al-Andalus. Overall, they reveal certain technical flaws which, when compared with those from other regions of the Muslim world, are attributed to what is assumed to be inferior construction. Astrolabes, on the other hand, were more precise.

Ahmed ibn al-Saffâr (died: 1034/1035) is a well-known astronomer, acquainted with Ptolemy’s Geographia and a disciple of Maslam ‘from Madrid’ (the principal residence of the latter, who died in 1007, being Córdoba). With the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, the great school of Maslama was dispersed and his disciple found refuge in Mujâhid’s court, sovereign ruler of the Taifa of Denia.

We can cite a number of contemporary sundials with many points in common with this one, such as the sundial found in Madinat al-Zahra, the palatial city of the Umayyad caliphs[1], and the one, which is complete, preserved in the Museo de la Alhambra in Granada[2].

[2] Granada, Museo de la Alhambra, inv. 3059. Cf. Les Andalousies. De Damas à Cordoue, 2000, p. 245, n° 249.