http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/welcome.html hosted at the national library of medicine at the national institute of health. and whoever designed the page should be fired for the terrible and unreadable background. the glossary is quite informative: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/glossary.html from the article:Geomancy A type of fortune-telling or divination whose origins are obscure but that was well established in North Africa, Egypt, and Syria by the 12th century. The term "geomancy" comes from medieval Latin geomantia, first used in Spain in the 12th century as a translation of the Arabic name ‘ilm al-raml ("the science of sand"). The practice is to be distinguished from a Chinese form of prognostication based on landforms, also called "geomancy" in English, that is entirely unrelated to the Islamic art. The Islamic divination is accomplished by forming and then interpreting a design, called a "geomantic tableau", consisting of 16 positions, each of which is occupied by a geomantic "figure". The figures occupying the first four positions are determined by marking 16 horizontal lines of dots on a piece of paper. These horizontal lines of dots are usually referred to as "generating lines", and each row of dots is examined to determine if it is odd or even and is then represented by one or two dots accordingly. Each "figure" is then formed of a vertical column of four marks, each of which is either one or two dots. The first four figures, generated by lines made while the questioner concentrates on the question, are placed side by side in a row from right to left. From these four figures, the remaining twelve positions in the tableau are produced according to set procedures. Various interpretive methods were advocated by geomancers for reading the tableau, often depending on the nature of the question asked. There are only 16 possible geomantic "figures", and not all 16 can appear in a given tableau. These 16 "figures" were often arranged in certain sequences with specified attributes assigned to each (temperaments, planetary associations, etc.), and a sequence the 16 possible figures was known as a taskin. See E. Savage-Smith and M.B. Smith, Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth-Century Divinatory Device (Malibu,CA: UCLA Near Eastern Center, 1980); and E. Savage-Smith, "Geomancy", in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. J.L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 53-55.
