With twenty small stars, as if they—and he in the sky if he could speak—/Were camels that he led riding widespread, riding camels about to scatter,/Both connected and dispersed…
-Abu al-Harīth Ghaylān, aka Dhū al-Rumma, He of the Worn Out Rope (696-735 CE), describing the asterism Al-Thurayā, known in the West as the Pleiades
Only six of the more than one thousand stars in the so-called Seven Sisters are visible to the naked eye, but the Arabs, being accustomed to seeing camels graze in the distance, saw twenty, and as Mas’ūd, when early one morning I asked if he had seen my camel, answered, I saw him couched far in the west just as Al-Thurayā was setting.