A Star of Venus, and Honour

Almach is given the nature of Venus in the tradition, read for honour, eminence and artistic or musical gifts, again a delineation carried by Robson out of the earlier compilers rather than an explicit Ptolemaic assignment. The Arabic name comes from al-anaq al-ard, a small predatory animal of the desert, one of several beasts whose names were attached to stars in this region of the sky. As with the other Andromeda stars, the reliable content is the astronomy; the personality reading is a modern inheritance stated with more confidence than its sources warrant.

Al-anaq al-ard, the animal in Almach's Arabic name, is usually identified as a caracal or similar small desert cat, one of several predator names, alongside wolves, foxes and lynxes, that pre-Islamic Arabian star-lore scattered across this part of the sky before the Ptolemaic figures of Andromeda and Perseus were mapped onto the same stars. The predatory-animal sense behind Almach's Arabic name sits within the same regional habit of naming stars for desert creatures that also produced the ostrich-names of Al Thalimain in Aquila, a naming convention largely independent of the Greek figures later mapped onto the same stretch of sky.