The Palm of the Chain

Keff al Salsalat is an Arabic descriptive name, from kaff, the palm or flat of the hand, and silsila, a chain: the hand at the chain, marking the point in the figure of Andromeda where the bound princess and the chain that holds her meet. The Greek figure is of Andromeda chained to the rock as an offering to the sea monster, and the Arabic star-names of this constellation divide between two quite different readings of the same stars, since indigenous Arabian tradition saw a large fish or other figures in this region before the Ptolemaic constellations were translated into Arabic. Names built on al-silsila belong to the translated Greek figure. The star lies in the early degrees of the tropical sign of Taurus by the ecliptic longitudes used in the fixed-star tradition, and no Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for it.

The double naming of this stretch of sky, an indigenous Arabian fish or sea-creature figure overlaid by the Ptolemaic princess and her chain once the Greek constellations were translated into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, is not unique to Andromeda; the whole zodiacal band and its borders carried older Bedouin star-lore before the translators got to it, and traces of both layers survive tangled together in the names that reached the Latin West. Such names, precise and largely without interpretive tradition, are the staple of Richard Hinckley Allen's 1899 Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, the standard English reference behind much of this catalogue's nomenclature.