Al Thalimain: The Second of the Two Ostriches

This is the second star of the pair called Al Thalimain, the two ostriches, in Aquila. The two entries are not a duplication: the Arabic name is grammatically dual and was always understood to cover both members, and the catalogues list them separately because they stand several degrees apart in ecliptic longitude. Modern identifications usually associate the pair with Lambda and Iota Aquilae, southwest of Altair, though the older lists are not always consistent about which star takes which designation. No single Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for either, and the tradition attaches no distinct meaning to them; their interest lies in preserving a fragment of the pre-Islamic Arabian sky within a catalogue otherwise built out of the Greek figures.

That the catalogues preserve both halves of a grammatically dual Arabic name as two separate numbered entries, rather than merging them, is itself informative: it shows the compilers working from formal transliteration rather than from any real fluency in Arabic, since a reader who understood the dual form would have known immediately that al-zalimayn names a pair and requires no duplication to record both stars. Lambda and Iota Aquilae, the stars usually meant here, are both modest, unremarkable points of light whose only real claim on attention is their place within the older Arabian ostrich figure rather than any physical distinction of their own.