Barcelona Astrolabe

The Barcelona astrolabe is the oldest surviving astrolabe bearing Carolingian, Latin script characters to have survived in Christian Western Europe, made of brass and measuring about fifteen point two centimeters across. Scholars date it to around the year 980 and believe it was manufactured in Barcelona, in the region of Catalonia, attributing its creation to Sunifred Llobet, an archdeacon of the period, on the strength of evidence including a description of an astrolabe in the Ripoll manuscript. Unlike most astrolabes produced in this period, which typically carry Arabic inscriptions reflecting an Islamic origin, every inscription on this instrument uses Latin characters, and the words ROMA and FRANCIA engraved on it alongside coordinates reading forty one thirty correspond precisely to the latitude of Barcelona, together pointing to manufacture by and for a Christian, Latin reading owner. The instrument is now held at the Musee de lInstitut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which received it as a bequest from the researcher Marcel Destombes in 1983, and a replica is displayed at the Academy of Sciences in Barcelona.