The Almanac of Collapsing Records

Ptolemy's Rival Measures the Sky — Maragheh, 1264

The meridian wall of the new observatory on the hill above Maragheh, in the mountains of Azerbaijan

the autumn of 1264 — a clear cold night on the hill above Maragheh, where a great observatory has been built with its own library and workshops, and astronomers gathered from Persia, Syria, Anatolia and China work the instruments through the dark to build a new set of tables

They handed you a lamp and you became part of the instrument. This breach reads the COPYIST ON THE HILL at Maragheh: a new observatory built with its own library and its own workshops, its instruments enormous and fixed in stone, its astronomers drawn from half the known world to correct numbers that had stood unquestioned for a thousand years. The witness is read only at the wall and the lamp: the politics of the empire that paid for the hill held far in the background, never staged, the moment itself all patience and arithmetic. The fragment is the subject's own: the night someone put a task in your hands and you held it steady because the work would fail without you — and the memory beneath it of a time you were made necessary by someone who trusted you to stay still.

From the record

an observatory was founded at Maragheh in 1259 under the patronage of the Ilkhanid ruler Hulagu, on a hill above the town, with a library and workshops attached
its instruments included a mural quadrant built into a wall aligned to the meridian, used to measure the altitude of stars and the sun as they crossed due south
astronomers and craftsmen came to work there from Persia, Syria, Anatolia and China, and observations were carried out over some twelve years
the resulting star catalogue and planetary tables, the Zij-i Ilkhani, were completed at Maragheh and copied and carried east into China and west across the Islamic world into Europe
the work at Maragheh produced new planetary models intended to correct the geometry inherited from Ptolemy's Almagest
the observatory's library was reported to hold many thousands of volumes gathered from across the conquered lands

The era door

a low door of plank and iron studs set in a rough stone courtyard wall, the wood dry and split, the ring handle cold in the hand

MARAGHEH — AUTUMN 1264

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037