Instruments · a Light

One sentence in one book is all we know of her

An astrolabe is the sky rendered in brass. Turn its rotating grid against an engraved plate for your latitude and it will give you the time from the height of the sun, the hour of sunrise, the direction to look for a star, and the hours for prayer. More than a thousand survive from the Muslim world, and the oldest dated ones are from the tenth century. In his catalogue of books written around 987, Ibn al-Nadim lists instrument makers and names among them Mariam, daughter of al-Ijli the astrolabist, who worked at the court of Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo. That is the whole record. No instrument of hers is known. An asteroid discovered in 1990 was later named for her.

Mariam al-Ijliya · Aleppo, 10th century