According to Sotheby's, the astrolabe was part of the royal collection of Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur. After his death, it passed to his wife Maharani Gayatri Devi, and later to a private collection during her lifetime, according to Sotheby's.
According to BBC News - Science, astrolabes are metallic disks used historically to tell time, map stars, and determine the direction of Mecca. According to BBC News - Science, Dr Federica Gigante of the Oxford Centre for History of Science described astrolabes as a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional universe, comparing them to modern-day smartphones. She said they could calculate time of sunset, sunrise, height of a building, depth of a well, and even predict the future or cast horoscopes. According to BBC News - Science, astrolabes were first developed in ancient Greece in the 2nd Century BCE and spread to the Islamic world by the 8th Century.
perhaps the largest in existence
According to Sotheby's, the astrolabe was made in the early 17th Century in Lahore, now in Pakistan. It was created by two brothers, Qa'im Muhammad and Muhammad Muqim, for a Mughal nobleman, according to Sotheby's. The brothers were part of the Lahore School, one of the most renowned centres of astrolabe production, Sotheby's said. Only two astrolabes are known to have been jointly made by the brothers; the other is kept in a museum in Iraq, according to Sotheby's. The astrolabe was commissioned by Aqa Afzal, a nobleman who administered Lahore during this period, according to the auction house.
According to BBC News - Science, Benedict Carter, head of the department of Islamic and Indian Art at Sotheby's, described the astrolabe as weighing 8.2 kg, measuring nearly 30 cm in diameter and standing about 46 cm tall - almost four times the size of a typical 17th-century Indian astrolabe. According to the auction house, the astrolabe contains 94 cities with longitudes and latitudes, 38 star pointers, five precision-calibrated plates, and degree divisions down to a third of a degree.
They are essentially a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional universe. I compare them to modern-day smartphones because you can do so many things with them,
The estimated auction price has not been disclosed, and the identity of the current seller remains private. It is unclear why the astrolabe has never been exhibited.
You can calculate the time of sunset, sunrise, the height of a building, the depth of a well, distance and even use them to predict the future. Along with an almanac they were once used to cast horoscopes.
It weighs 8.2kg, measures nearly 30cm in diameter and stands about 46cm tall - almost four times the size of a typical astrolabe from 17th Century India,