纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 062希伯来星盘（5）（在线收听）

"The inscriptions are all in Hebrew, you can see the finely engraved Hebrew letters quite clearly. But what's so intriguing about the piece is that not all the words are Hebrew. Some of them have Arabic origins and some are medieval Spanish. So just to give you an example, beside a star in the constellation that we call Aquila - the eagle - we can see written in Hebrew 'nesher me'offel' - 'the flying eagle'. But other star names are given in their Arabic form. So Aldebaran in Taurus has its Arabic name, 'al-dabaran', written in Hebrew letters. And when you read out the Hebrew letters for the names of the months, they give you the medieval Spanish names, like October, November, December. So what you have here is the knowledge of the classical Greek astronomers who charted the heavens, combined with the contributions of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars - and all of that in the palm of your hand!"

The Spain in which this astrolabe was made was the only place in Christian-ruled Europe where there were significant populations of Muslims, and it was also home to an extensive Jewish population. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, the mixing in medieval Spain of the people of three religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - was one of Spanish society's most distinctive elements. Of course, there was no such place as Spain yet, in the fourteenth century it was still a patchwork of states. The biggest was Castile, which shared a border with the last independent Muslim state in the peninsula, the kingdom of Granada. Throughout Christian Spain there were large numbers of Jewish and Muslim people, all three groups living together but keeping their separate traditions in what might be described as an early example of multi-culturalism. This coexistence, extremely rare in European history, is often referred to by the Spanish term 'convivencia'. Here's the distinguished historian of Spain, Sir John Elliott: