Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia (Paperback)

This book surveys how humans across Eurasia depicted their knowledge of the heavens over a period of nearly 4,000 years. Frequently focusing on enigmatic objects, the authors present a wide variety of objects – through text and pictures – from tombs, churches, temples, caves, museums, libraries and even a bathroom. Analyzing and contextualizing the objects and their astral imageries, the authors narrate what the producers and users of these images knew about the heavens and how they shaped their relationships to them through the objects presented. Among the images treated in the chapters we find planetary and celestial deities (Egypt, Rome, India, Japan), the seven-day-week (Rome, Tibet, Japan), constellations and zodiacal signs (Mesopotamia, the Islamic world, Europe), the Sun and the Moon (Sasanian Iran, northern China, Islamic Iraq), scholars, muses and globes (ancient Greece), power and politics (Rome, Italy), and a dancing goat (Iran).

Rana Brentjes is a photo designer with an MA in contemporary Art History; she is currently a doctoral candidate in contemporary German history. She has curated art exhibitions in Berlin and Brandenburg, written on Palestinian cinematography and co-edited the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (2022). She is the digital content curator of the research group 'Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens' in Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science with a focus on translations, maps, institutions, travellers, the sciences and the arts in Islamicate societies (8th–17th centuries), and medieval and early modern Christian Europe. Her recent publications include a volume on astral imagery in Eurasia co-edited with Dagmar Schäfer (NTM, 2020). In 2021 she received the Kenneth O. May Prize for the history of mathematics and in 2022 the Annemarie Schimmel Prize for Islamic Studies.

Stamatina Mastorakou is a historian of science working on the history of astral knowledge. She completed her PhD onHellenistic astronomy at Imperial College, London and has worked and taught in London, New York and Zurich. She is currently leading the research group 'Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens' in Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her recent publications include Aratus and the Popularization of Hellenistic Astronomy (Brill, 2020).