ATLAS, king of Mauritania, a great astronomer, contemporary with Moses. From his taking observations of the stars from a mountain, the poets feigned him to have been turned into a mountain, and to sustain the heavens on his shoulders. Being an excellent astronomer, and the first who taught the doctrine of the sphere, they tell us that his daughters were turned into stars; seven of them forming the Pleiades, and other seven the Hyades.