Seven Incised Marks on the Keystone of the Puerta de la Justicia, Alhambra: A Statistical Match to Cassiopeia, the Kaff al-Thurayyā
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Seven incised circular marks are cut on the carved marble keystone panel of the Puerta de la Justicia, the principal gate of the Alhambra, built by Yūsuf I in 1348. The arrangement is not random. Fitted to the stars of Cassiopeia as they stood in 1348, with only position, rotation and uniform scale allowed, the seven marks agree with the sky at a Procrustes distance of 0.1500. A Monte Carlo test matched to the search space, with the correspondence rule and the alignment freedom replayed inside every draw , places that agreement beyond chance at p ≈ 3 × 10⁻⁵ over 100,000 trials. Reflection is not required, and the assignment used here ranks first of all 5,040 possible assignments of marks to stars. What it may have been meant to say. The marks are cut on a panel that itself carries a carved hand, and in the Arabic anwāʾ tradition the asterism in question is al-Kaff al-Khaḍīb, the henna-dyed hand of al- Thurayyā. This report suggests that the composite —the hand and the marks read together — represents the Kaff al- Thurayyā, a celestial configuration carrying apotropaic force in Andalusi usage, and that its placement at the principal gate possibly marks the threshold it was meant to guard. Two lines of support are offered for that reading. First, a royal inscription composed by Ibn Zomrak in the Hall of the Two Sisters, within the same palace complex as the gate, names the guarding khams al- Thurayyā (Figure 3). Second, an unbroken poetic tradition running from Dhū al-Rumma in the early eighth century to Ibn Zomrak in the fourteenth treats the celestial hand as a living image rather than a bare star name. This is a preliminary report, deposited to establish the date of the finding. Several questions identified below remain open and are stated as such.
Author: Almedhychy, Ali
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222885778
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