Dr. S. Figee was a Dutch scientific officer stationed at Batavia in the closing years of the nineteenth century, who assisted Snouck Hurgronje with the technical elucidation of the Achehnese astronomical system. He is named in The Achehnese alongside Dr. J. P. van der Stok as one of the two experts to whom Snouck was “greatly indebted … for the help they have frequently been so good as to give me in elucidating my data as regards the Achehnese astronomical system”.
The problem on which Figee’s assistance was sought concerned the system of keunongs — the conjunctions of the moon with the constellation of the Scorpion (Arabic Kalak) by which the Achehnese regulate their seasons. Snouck’s chapter on the Achehno-Mohammedan divisions of time opens with a table of “certain data with regard to these keunongs and the intervals that separate them from the night of the new moon, borrowed not from Achehnese sources, but from particulars kindly supplied by Dr. S. Figee at Batavia”. Figee’s calculations were based on the supposition that Antares, the brightest star of the Scorpion, was that specially selected for observation, so that the coincidence of that star with the moon would be regarded as the keunong. Snouck notes that the Achehnese do not in fact confine themselves to a single star, but speak of keunong whenever the moon appears anywhere within the Scorpion, and sometimes even employ the expression when Moon and Scorpion have already diverged, “so that on an average 13.363 keunongs occur in the course of the solar year, or in other words, most solar years contain 13, some 14 keunongs”.
The collaboration is a good example of the way in which the great descriptive ethnography of The Achehnese rested on a foundation of expert scientific calculation supplied by the colonial scientific services in Batavia. Without Figee’s tabulated dates and intervals, Snouck’s analysis of the keunong system would have lacked the chronological precision that gives it its enduring value for students of Islamic folk-astronomy.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Dr. S. Figee was a Dutch scientific officer stationed at Batavia in the closing years of the nineteenth century, who assisted Snouck Hurgronje with the technical elucidation of the Achehnese astronomical system. He is named in The Achehnese alongside Dr. J. P. van der Stok as one of the two experts to whom Snouck was “greatly indebted … for the help they have frequently been so good as to give me in elucidating my data as regards the Achehnese astronomical system”.
The problem on which Figee’s assistance was sought concerned the system of keunongs — the conjunctions of the moon with the constellation of the Scorpion (Arabic Kalak) by which the Achehnese regulate their seasons. Snouck’s chapter on the Achehno-Mohammedan divisions of time opens with a table of “certain data with regard to these keunongs and the intervals that separate them from the night of the new moon, borrowed not from Achehnese sources, but from particulars kindly supplied by Dr. S. Figee at Batavia”. Figee’s calculations were based on the supposition that Antares, the brightest star of the Scorpion, was that specially selected for observation, so that the coincidence of that star with the moon would be regarded as the keunong. Snouck notes that the Achehnese do not in fact confine themselves to a single star, but speak of keunong whenever the moon appears anywhere within the Scorpion, and sometimes even employ the expression when Moon and Scorpion have already diverged, “so that on an average 13.363 keunongs occur in the course of the solar year, or in other words, most solar years contain 13, some 14 keunongs”.
The collaboration is a good example of the way in which the great descriptive ethnography of The Achehnese rested on a foundation of expert scientific calculation supplied by the colonial scientific services in Batavia. Without Figee’s tabulated dates and intervals, Snouck’s analysis of the keunong system would have lacked the chronological precision that gives it its enduring value for students of Islamic folk-astronomy.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.