No other object in the night sky has collected names the way the Pleiades has. Hesiod, in the oldest surviving Greek farming poem, tells his reader to begin the harvest when the daughters of Atlas rise before dawn and to plough when they set, and versions of that same habit, using the cluster as the hinge of the working year, recur on every inhabited continent. In Greece they were the Seven Sisters fleeing Orion, who still pursues them across the winter sky.
In India the cluster is Krittika, the six nurses of the war god Karttikeya, and it stood first in the older ordering of the lunar mansions. In Arabia it is Al-Thurayya, the centre of the anwa reckoning by which the rain seasons were counted. In Japan it is Subaru, the gathered ones, a name now carried on a car badge that shows the cluster itself.
Across Polynesia it is Matariki, whose midwinter dawn rising opens the Maori year, an event New Zealand has kept as a public holiday since 2022. The atlas holds several of these readings as entries in their own right, in their own registers, and this entry does not replace them. It is the object they share: a single knot of young stars in the shoulder of Taurus, faint enough that it rewards a dark sky, distinctive enough that no tradition that watched the heavens ever failed to notice it or to hang a season on it.