Recently Found Astrolabe May Disappear Again

April 11, 2008

A late 14th-century astrolabe--found in 2005--may vanish into private hands if the British Museum can't raise £350,000. That's the amount an investor paid at an auction for this mathematical and astronomical tool.

Now, however, this astrolabe has been deemed to be of cultural significance by the United Kingdom’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest. The granting of an export license to the new owner has been delayed until June so that the British Museum has a chance to match the sale price and keep the item in public hands.

The quadrant was found in excavations on the site of an old inn outside the city walls of Canterbury in Kent. It had lain there for more than 600 years. According to article in Nature.com (April 2, 2008), the brass astrolabe quadrant could have been used, for example, to tell the time from the position of the sun, calculate heights, and work out the date of Easter. Most surviving astrolabes are larger and more complex and can do astrological calculations.

The new quadrant is a simple, everyday item--the kind a merchant would have carried at the time Geoffrey Chaucer wrote A Treatise on the Astrolabe, which became the standard reference text for several centuries.

For more on the astrolabe, see the "Math in the News" piece "Chaucer's Astrolabe Remains Lost in Time" (June 20, 2007).

Source: Nature.com