Аннотация:The thousand-year-old problem of the origin of the star catalogue included in Ptolemy's "Almagest" is considered. The dilemma whether stellar coordinates were based on Hipparchus' or Ptolemy's observations has arisen long ago, because the 1 degree error in ecliptic longitudes may be explained either by Ptolemy's error in the initial longitudes of the Sun, or by the fact that Ptolemy adopted the original Hipparchus' coordinates and transformed them to a 265-year later epoch using an erroneous constant for precession. In fact, only indirect evidence for the Hipparchan origin of most of the coordinates was available so far, and most specialists considered the issue still to be resolved. We have successfully applied a new approach based on stellar proper motions. The time-dependent mutual distances in the configurations including 8 fast stars yield an epoch of -53 ± 130 B.C., whereas the bulk method based on an analysis of the Almagest minus computed coordinate differences for 40 fastest stars yields an epoch of -90 ± 120 B.C. Standard errors in the ancient ecliptic longitudes and latitudes are found to be σ(λcosβ) = 18' and σβ = 13', respectively. It is concluded that the stellar coordinates in the Almagest catalogue were observed during Hipparchus' lifetime and that Ptolemy's authorship claim can be rejected at a 94% significance level. Ptolemy's assertion that "we observed as many stars as we could sight down to the sixth magnitude" might simply imply that he found each star of the original catalogue to be near its position in the sky given by Hipparchus, and then adopted Hipparchus' coordinates as measured by a more skilled observer.