Tag: Arabic texts

A fake media story about “discovery” of lost works by Apollonius of Perge

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Six days ago, the “TürkiyeToday” website published a story revealing that lost works by the ancient mathematician, Apollonius of Perge, had been found in an Arabic manuscript in Leiden by Prof. Jan Pieter Hogendijk.  The story has since reached other outlets, including the Jerusalem Post.

This story would be very exciting, if it was true.  But after some investigation, I find that it’s complete nonsense.  The “lost works” have been known for centuries.

Let’s start with the story as it appears online now:

Lost works of ancient mathematician Apollonius of Anatolia found in rare Arabic manuscript

By Koray Erdogan Feb 5, 2025

Scientists have uncovered two lost books by Apollonius, the renowned mathematician from Anatolia, in an Arabic manuscript housed at the Leiden University Libraries in the Netherlands. This extraordinary find sheds new light on the preservation and transmission of ancient Anatolian knowledge during the Islamic Golden Age.

Apollonius (262 B.C.–190 B.C.) (Apollonius of Perge) is celebrated for his groundbreaking work in geometry, particularly in his book The Conics of Apollonius. This work, which introduces the concepts of hyperbolas, ellipses, and parabolas, was one of the most influential in ancient Anatolian mathematics. However, only four of the original eight books of “The Conics” were available to European scholars during the Renaissance.

The missing books—five and seven—are now found preserved in an 11th-century Arabic manuscript, a translation that had been lost to history.

The manuscripts, which were acquired by Dutch orientalist and mathematician Jacob Golius during his travels to the Middle East in the 17th century, form part of a vast collection of nearly 200 manuscripts that he brought back to Leiden University.

Golius’s acquisition of these texts not only enriched Western scientific scholarship but also played a crucial role in the rediscovery of lost ancient works.

The newly revealed Arabic translation of Apollonius’s lost books is accompanied by detailed illustrations and exquisite Arabic calligraphy. The Dutch mathematician and historian of science, Jan Pieter Hogendijk, emphasized the importance of these manuscripts as symbols of the intellectual achievements of Islamic scientists, noting their precision and artistic quality. “These manuscripts are a testament to the mental discipline and focus of their creators,” Hogendijk stated.

The story the rest of the story is padding, although it refers to a recent volume published in Leiden, “Prophets, Poets and Scholars” as if it was the source.

In fact the news story does not make sense.  Apollonius of Perge did indeed write a textbook on geometry called the “Conics”, in 8 books.  Only the first four books are preserved in Greek.  Books 5 to 7 are indeed preserved only in an Arabic translation.

But this Arabic translation has been known for centuries.  None other than Edmund Halley, of Halley’s Comet, published an edition of the Arabic text of these books with Latin translation.  A modern edition and English translation appeared in 1990 by Gerald Toomer:

Apollonius of Perga; Toomer, Gerald J. (1990). Conics, books V to VII: the Arabic translation of the lost Greek original in the version of the Banū Mūsā. Series: Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Vol. 9. New York: Springer (1990). DOI:10.1007/978-1-4613-8985-9. ISBN 978-1-4613-8987-3.

In the preface to the Toomer volume, indeed, on p.viii, we read:

I wish to acknowledge a particular debt of gratitude to my former colleague, J.P. Hogendijk. He read the whole book in draft form, corrected a number of errors, made several suggestions for improvement, and offered some original contributions, which I have gladly incorporated. I need hardly say that all remaining imperfections are solely my responsibility.

Today I have communicated with Prof. Hogendijk.  I learn that he was unaware of the news reports, despite some of them claiming to have an email interview with him.  The Prophets, Poets and Scholars publication from Leiden does indeed exist, and he has a paper in it.  This he lists on his home page here as item 89.  Here’s the bibliographical detail.  But he kindly sent me a copy of the paper, and this makes no such claims.

Jan P. Hogendijk, Jacobus Golius and his Arabic manuscripts on the exact sciences, pp. 114-123 in Arnoud Vrolijk, Kasper van Ommen, Karin Scheper and Tijmen Baarda, eds., Prophets, Poets and Scholars: The Collections of the Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University , Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024. ISBN 9789087284077 (print); 9789400604520 (ePDF), https://doi.org//10.24415/9789087284077

So… the news story is pure rubbish.  One feels for Prof. Hogendijk, to whom all this nonsense is being attributed.

    *    *    *    *

Ancient Greek mathematical texts are today a field of limited interest, perhaps.  In 17th century Europe, on the other hand, they were of real interest to contemporary mathematicians, trying to solve the same problems.

But reading the preface of the 1990 Toomer book reveals some quite fascinating details of the process whereby the text actually came to light.  Here are some abbreviated extracts from p. xxi onwards.

Since it was known from Apollonius’ introduction to Book I of the Conics that they were originally in eight books, there was considerable interest in 17th-century Europe in recovering the missing Books V-VIII. As we have seen (p. xviii) Books V-VII were extant in Arabic, both in the original translation made by Thabit for the Banu Musa, and in various reworkings. The study of Arabic was beginning to expand in Europe in the later 16th century, and underwent a real flowering in the 17th. Furthermore a manuscript of one of the Arabic versions of the Conics had reached Italy in 1578, and others came to northern Europe from 1629 on. Yet nothing of significance for the later books3 was published until 1661, and no translation of the version closest to Apollonius’ original, that of the Banu Musa, appeared until 1710…..

Among the oriental manuscripts which were given in 1578 by Ignatius Ni’matallah (“Neama”, “Nehama”), Patriarch of Antioch, to Cardinal Ferdinando dei Medici, later Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and founder of the Medicean printing-press in Rome, the first Arabic press, was a compendium of the Conics by Abu’l-Fath Mahmud al-Isfahani. Its importance was recognized by the man in charge of the press, Giambattista Raimondi, who intended to publish an edition, but had still not done so when he died in 1614. At that date there is some talk in the correspondence of Galileo about publishing the work, but then interest lapsed until 1645…

In the meantime two other Arabic manuscripts of the Conics had been brought to Europe. In 1629 Jacobus Golius returned to Leiden from a prolonged visit to the east, bringing back a large number of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and other languages. Among them was the splendid codex of Apollonius’ Conics, in the version commissioned by the Banu Musa, which is now in the Bodleian Library ..[ms. “O”] .. This was given to him by his countryman David Leleu de Wilhem “for the public good.” Knowledge of the existence of this manuscript (or rather of the apograph which had been made from it of Books V-VII) was rapidly disseminated by the catalogue of the manuscripts deposited by Golius in the Leiden library which the enterprising Gassendi had printed at Paris in 1630. Golius promised to publish the recovered books, and seemed ideally qualified to do so, since he was both an accomplished Arabist and a competent mathematician (shortly after his return from the east he was appointed to the Professorships of Arabic and Mathematics at Leiden).

However, not only did he fail to publish the lost Apollonius himself, but he manreuvred adrOitly and successfully to prevent anyone else doing it for the rest of his life lhe died in 1667), jealously guarding access to his manuscript and the partial copies of it which existed at Leiden, and actively deterring others who were inclined to try their hand, for instance by claiming that he alone could read the difficult script of the manuscript (which is in fact extremely legible). In the years 1644-1646 he was apprehensive that the English mathematician John Pell would anticipate him by publishing Books V-VII from the manuscript of Ravius (on which see below), but seems to have dissuaded him by pretending that he was about to produce his own version. Golius might be excused for not publishing the Apollonius himself on the grounds that he was not idle during these years, being engaged on, amongst other things, his great Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Leiden, 1653). But his dog-in-the-manger attitude towards the efforts of others to get access to the work, or to publish alternative versions, caused increasing frustration and disgust throughout Europe and among his own countrymen, which can be traced through the decades of the 1630’s and 1640’s in the Mersenne correspondence. …

When Golius died in 1667 his valuable collection of manuscripts, including the Apollonius (see p. xxii) went not to the University of Leiden, but to his personal heirs. Negotiations between them and Cambridge University for the sale of the manuscripts as a lot fell through, and they remained, inaccessible, in the hands of the heirs for nearly 30 years. However, Golius was no longer in a position to restrict access to the partial copies of the Conics which he had handed over to the Leiden library, …

In 1696 Golius’ heirs finally decided to auction his manuscripts. Bernard persuaded Narcissus Marsh (then Archbishop of Dublin), a great patron of scholarship and interested in orientalia, to give him carte blanche to buy at the auction. Although ilt he traveled to Leiden for the sale in October 1696, and bought for Marsh a large number of interesting mss., including the famous Apollonius. But he never recovered from the effects of the winter voyage, dying at Oxford shortly after his return, on Jan. 12, 1697, aged 58, with most of his ambitious plans, including his edition of the Conics, uncompleted. However, the manuscript was now where it would be made available to the man who was to do the most for Apollonius in modern times, Edmond Halley.

Halley’s great edition of Apollonius’ Conics was published at Oxford in 1710. It was the editio princeps of the Greek text, and is until the present publication the only translation of Books V-VII based on the original Arabic version (that supervised by the Banu Musa): all later translations of these books derive from Halley’s Latin version. …

The manuscript of Golius is now in the Bodleian, where it is MS Marsh 667, and is online!  It was written in 1070AD in Azerbaijan, but was in Aleppo by 1627, where it was acquired by Leleu de Wilhelm, for Golius, as indicated by a note in the volume.

While the news story is nonsense, let us hope that it draws attention to the possibilities of real discoveries, waiting to be found in Arabic translation.  Maybe someone will be inspired to work more on these collections!  That would be a nice outcome.

Share

Making Arabic Literature Accessible – Joep Lameer

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was delighted to hear that somebody had sorted out Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, and produced an English translation.  This was a Herculean job, and the man who did it was Dutch scholar Joep Lameer.  I was even more delighted to hear that he is at work on translating Sezgin’s Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, and has produced four volumes already.  I find that he is doing a whole raft of useful things, using a rare combination of skills and dedication, particularly with reference to Islamic philosophy.

I was curious to know how somebody ends up doing all this.  In response to my enquiry, Dr Lameer very kindly sent me an outline of himself and his work, which I reproduce here.

PhD Arabic Leiden 1992; I lived and worked in Holland, France, Iran, and, since 2007, again Holland, mostly outside academia but publishing books and articles nonetheless. My focus is the history of Islamic philosophy and logic, mostly epistemology. I work with Arabic and Persian sources.

My translation of Brockelmann’s Geschichte der Arabische Litteratur (History of the Arabic Written Tradition. 6 vols, 2016-2019)  turned out to be a success, so Brill Publishers decided to publish Fuat Sezgin’s 17-volume Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums in English translation as well (The Arabic Writing Tradition, an Historical Survey). So far, three volumes have been published.   I spend most of my time on this. Nevertheless, I am also working with young Iranian scholars on two text editions: the Physics of Abu l-‘Abbas Lawkari’s Bayan al-haqq (a philosophical encyclopaedia by a second-generation student of Avicenna). This is an Arabic text; the other is a 25-page Shi’a creed by Nasir al-Din Tusi, Fusul dar usul, which we shall publish in Persian (original), two ancient Arabic translations, and an English translation by me. Besides, I am working on an inventory of all the manuscripts of Abu Nasr Farabi’s works on logic with a scholar from Germany. If I had more time I would do more, especially on the term tasdiq in epistemology (I’m sure you know Cantwell-Smith’s “Faith as tasdiq”).[1]

That is about it. Oh, I almost forgot: I recently also oversaw the second, completed edition of C.A. Storey’s Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey in 5 volumes and one Index volume. And I also just submitted an article on extant Persian – Arabic and Arabic – Persian translations of philosophical texts in the libraries of Iran. It will be part of a future volume in a series on philosophy in the Islamic world by Ulrich Rudolph and Peter Adamson.

I think this is a simply remarkable body of work, using skills that most of us can only dream of.  Well done!

Share
  1. [1]W. Cantwell-Smith, “Faith as Taṣdīq”, In: Parviz Morewedge, Islamic Philosophical Theology, State University of NY (1979), p. 96-119.↩

Fundamental Reference Works for the Study of Arabic Literature

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Arabic literature is a closed book to most of us, and it is hard to know where to start, where to find out what exists. People refer to “the Hadith”, but where would you find this?

In fact there is an incredibly useful summary of the reference works to use, which I came across a couple of days ago, on p.xiii-xiv of P.Y. Skreslet & R. Skreslet, The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation, (2006).  The book itself looks excellent, and I have just ordered a copy.  The Google Books Preview is here, but I cannot say how much is visible at any moment.  So here is that basic overview of where to start.

This does not cover Arabic Christian Literature, for which G. Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur (5 vols) remains the key source.

Those who share a bibliographer’s concern for the analysis of a given literature should be aware of a few of the indispensable sources in Islamic studies dealing with this discipline.

One of the great bibliographers of all time lived in the city of Baghdad in the tenth century of the Common Era (all dates in this volume are stated according to the Western calendar). He was Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-Nadim (d. ca. 990), son of a prominent bookseller, probably attached to the court or to the libraries of noble citizens as a savant or consultant. Al-Nadim created the first comprehensive bibliography of Arabic literature, meticulously classified according to his own complex system, which was based upon the enumeration of the sciences by the early Islamic philosophers. He called it Fihrist al-‘ulum or Index of the Sciences; it is also known by the title Kitab al-fihrist al-nadim, or Book of the Index of al-Nadim (an-nah-DEEM). The work is divided into ten major classes by subject area, within which authors are listed chronologically; a bio-bibliographical entry for each author provides as much as was known of his full name and genealogy, information and anecdotes about his life, and a listing of all of his extant works. Al-Nadim emphasizes that he is personally acquainted with the vast majority of these works and reports information received from others with attribution. Although regrettably many of the works al-Nadim mentions have not survived, the Fihrist is still an invaluable source for the first three-and-a-half centuries of Islamic learning.

There is a Wikipedia article for this here.  An English translation of the Fihrist was prepared by Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of Al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, Columbia University Press (1970).

Specialists in Islamic literature must make the effort to become conversant with Carl Brockelmann’s classic of Orientalist scholarship, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.2 It is partly a narrative history, but chiefly an encyclopedia of entries on individual Arab writers and their work. Vol. 1 is organized chronologically, then by type/genre of literature (or subject matter), then geographically; vol. 2 organizes first by chronology, then geography, then genre or subject. Indexes for authors, titles, and the European editors of texts are found in the third supplemental volume (after the entries on the modern era up to 1939). Even those who read German easily find Brockelmann’s work challenging to use, thanks to his difficult systems of abbreviation and transliteration, the lack of cross-references, the relationship between the supplements and the original volumes, and the proliferation of addenda and corrigenda.

There are seven volumes of Brockelmann;  vol. 1 (1898); vol. 2 (1902); Supplement vol. 1; vol. 2; vol. 3; and a second edition of the first two volumes, referring to the supplements, in two volumes.  It is indeed impenetrable.  An English translation of the whole thing, cleaned up, expanded and generally made usable, was made by Joep Lameer, History of the Arabic Written Tradition, Brill (2016), in 2 volumes with 4 volumes of supplements.

In the early 1960s Fuat Sezgin, a brilliant Turkish scholar resident in Germany, began to update and revise Brockelmann’s work to incorporate many newly discovered materials and manuscripts. Sezgin ended up writing an enormous and entirely new work, dealing especially with the sciences (mathematics, astronomy, geography/cartography, medicine, chemistry, etc.) and is considered the leading authority on that literature. His nine-volume work, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, was published in 1967-1984, with an index volume in 1995; vols. 10-12 followed in 2000? Of these, vol. 1 is the source for information about the traditional disciplines of Islamic religion: Qur’anic studies, hadith, law, theology, and mysticism (vol. 2 is Poesie). There is a scholarly precis or introduction to each area, then encyclopedia entries on the individual authors; vol. 1 is organized by genre/subject first, then chronology, then geography or theological/legal school of thought. Sezgin’s work is in German, but there are very clear tables of contents and indexes in every volume, and standard editorial conventions are used throughout.

There are 17 volumes in all; vols. 1-9 available from Brill, and vols. 10-17 from the author.  Thankfully Joep Lameer is in the process of translating all this into English also, and volumes 1-3 have appeared from Brill (see here), and volume 4 is in progress.  There is an amusing yet brilliant guide to Sezgin’s work by Richard Heffron here.

Anyone doing research in Islamic culture and religion must learn to use the somewhat cumbersome but indispensable Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960-2004) and its valuable index volumes. For twentieth-century information, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World is a must (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). And for literary figures in particular, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, edited by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998), is a very convenient source for ready reference, providing concise but informative entries on scholars and writers throughout the centuries. These entries include brief biographical accounts, principal works and their significance, original-language text editions, and some secondary reading. There are also topical articles on literary genres, technical terms, historical movements, and developments, produced by an array of respected contributors.

These works are available in the usual places.

Other useful reference sources are mentioned in the chapter endnotes of this volume and in our bibliography.4

Among these they mention in the latter Margaret Anderson, Arabic Materials in English Translation: A Bibliography of Works from the Pre-Islamic Period to 1977 (1980), about which Google says:

This bibliography, of over 1600 items, represents for the most part English language translations of original Arabic works. A few of the translations listed here, most notably of those of writings by Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, are not originally Arabic, but are translations made of Arabic editions….The aim of the compilation is two-fold: first, to provide both students and the general public with an interest in the Arab world (but with little or no facility in the Arabic language), as full a listing of translated Arabic materials as possible; and also to provide for those doing research in such fields as history and history of science, political science, comparative religion, comparative literature, and law, and touching on the Arab world only occasionally, with a partial substitute for the original materials whose language they have had no previous need to master.

This must be useful also.  The authors modestly do not list their own book, but of course it too looks essential to me.

Share

An English translation of Brockelmann’s “Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur”!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

If you want to know what texts exist in Arabic, then the classic resource is Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, published in seven volumes, in a terrible, disorganised, highly abbreviated format, starting in the 19th century.  This is essentially unreadable, even if you have good German. The first 2 volumes are the original edition; there are 3 volumes of supplements; and then 2 volumes of a revised edition which refers to both the original and the supplements.  It is a monster work of scholarship, but quite unusable.  Paula Skreslet wrote:

Specialists in Islamic literature must make the effort to become conversant with Carl Brockelmann’s classic of Orientalist scholarship, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. It is partly a narrative history, but chiefly an encyclopedia of entries on individual Arab writers and their work. Vol. 1 is organized chronologically, then by type/genre of literature (or subject matter), then geographically; vol. 2 organizes first by chronology, then geography, then genre or subject. Indexes for authors, titles, and the European editors of texts arc found in the third supplemental volume (after the entries on the modern era up to 1939). Even those who read German easily find Brockelmann’s work challenging to use, thanks to his difficult systems of abbreviation and transliteration, the lack of cross-references, the relationship between the supplements and the original volumes, and the proliferation of addenda and corrigenda.[1]

I commented on some of its failings back in 2011.  I have since learned that this was not the fault of the author, but of an unscrupulous publisher who forced all this upon him.  But it was obvious that something better was needed, and in English.

What I had not known until last night was that Dutch translator Joep Lameer has done just that.  He’s translated the lot into English, reorganised it, de-abbreviated the text, and generally cleaned it up and brought it up to date.  This is no small task, as I discovered when I attempted to do this for the various literary lives of Mohammed. What a hero!

His translation is titled, “History of the Arabic Written Tradition”, and is available from Brill here, for about $50 a volume.  That’s cheap for most of their works, although still a lot for independent scholars; but if you’re working with Arabic at all, the book is an essential reference and you will just have to take the hit.

Share
  1. [1]Paula Youngman Skreslet, Rebecca Skreslet, The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation, (2006), p.xiii-xiv.  Preview.↩

A complete Ibn Abi Usaibia “History of Medicine” now online in Arabic and English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Something that passed me by, and which I only became aware of today, is that in 2020 a modern scholarly text and translation appeared of Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Medicine, from Brill. The author – often known in online forums as IAU – wrote in the 13th century, so it’s basically a bunch of anecdotes about past and present famous physicians.  It’s very readable, and quite fun.  Indeed I uploaded a public domain translation long ago.  But it has never previously been published in English.  Indeed no complete English translation has existed.  But… no longer.

The book is E. Savage-Smith, S. Swain, G.J. van Gelder eds., A Literary History of Medicine, Leiden: Brill (2020), ISBN: 978-90-04-41031-2, in 5 volumes.  The price is massive.  I’ve not seen the book.  Indeed I only heard about it by accident.  Thankfully nobody asked me to review it.  But thankfully it is accessible online, embedded in a online viewer at the Brill site at: https://scholarlyeditions.brill.com/lhom/.  The viewer is indeed a bit baffling to use, but get’s easier as you work with it.  You can plunge straight into the English translation here, where the title is “Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah, The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians.”  Footnotes are like Wikipedia, and pop-up when you click on them.

The Arabic text is also there, as is prefatory material and “essays” – the sort of stuff about manuscripts etc that we find in any modern edition – which is rather good stuff.  The book is divided online into four chunks:

Read the “table of contents” section first, to get an idea of what’s where.  Oddly this is not hyperlinked to the contents.  Nor was I able to find the sections 4-11 of the “Extra” anywhere online.  The “downloads” – including a PDF? – appear to be only available to people with a subscription.  But… a PDF should be made available.

All these sorts of awkwardnesses arise from the difficulties in the general transition in our time to open access, and are not the fault of Brill as such.

According to the website, the team behind this monster was:

The edition is the result of a joint University of Oxford/University of Warwick project, led by Emilie Savage-Smith, Simon Swain, and Geert Jan van Gelder. The team also included Franak Hilloowala, Alasdair Watson, Dan Burt, N. Peter Joosse, Bruce Inksetter, and Ignacio Sánchez.

Well done chaps.

The site states:

Generously funded by the Wellcome Trust, this is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Which is how it should be.  Well done, everyone.

I no longer recall how I came to be interested in Ibn Abi Usaibia.  But back in 2011 I became aware of an unpublished translation of this work by Lothar Kopf.  It had been made in the late 60s for the US government, and the typescript was then filed and forgotten at the National Library of Medicine.   But the translation was public domain, and nobody was doing anything, so I made the time and put it online here, with the hope that it would spur interest.

Unfortunately the Kopf translation was incomplete, it turned out.  I have always hoped that somebody would be motivated to go and do the thing properly.  And now they have!

It would be daft to end without giving a story from Ibn Abi Usaibia, who is an interesting and amusing writer, ideal to dip into.  This one, chosen at random, came from here [10.1.7]  I have paragraphed it for readability online, and removed the footnotes.  The translator was Alasdair Watson.  The story belongs to the time of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, who died in 861 AD.

During the time of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, Muḥammad and Aḥmad, the sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir, used to plot against all those who had a reputation for advanced learning. They had already caused Sind ibn ʿAlī to be sent to Baghdad after having estranged him from al-Mutawakkil, and had plotted against al-Kindī so that al-Mutawakkil had had him flogged. They had also sent people to al-Kindī’s house to confiscate all his books and had placed them in a repository which was given the name ‘Kindiyyah’.

They had been able to do this because of al-Mutawakkil’s passion for automata. The Caliph approached them concerning the excavation of the canal known as the Jaʿfarī canal. The Banū Mūsā delegated the project to Aḥmad ibn Kathīr al-Farghānī who had built the new Nilometer in Egypt. Al-Farghānī’s knowledge, however, was greater than his good fortune since he could never complete a work and he made an error in the mouth of the canal causing it to be dug deeper than the rest of it so that a supply of water which filled the mouth would not fill the rest of the canal.

Muḥammad and Aḥmad, the two Banū Mūsā protected him, but al-Mutawakkil demanded that they be brought before him and had Sind ibn ʿAlī summoned from Baghdad. When Muḥammad and Aḥmad realized that Sind ibn ʿAlī had come they felt sure they were doomed and feared for their lives. Al-Mutawakkil summoned Sind and said to him, ‘Those two miscreants have left no foul words unsaid to me concerning you, and they have squandered a great deal of my money on this canal. Go there and examine it and inform me whether it has a defect, for I have promised myself that if what I have been told is true, I will crucify them on its banks.’

All of this was seen and heard by Muḥammad and Aḥmad. As Sind left with the two Banū Mūsā, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā said to him, ‘O Abū l-Ṭayyib, the power of the freeman dispels his grudges. We resort to you for the sake of our lives which are our most valuable possessions. We do not deny that we have done wrong, but confession effaces the commission, so save us as you see fit.’

‘I swear by God,’ Sind replied, ‘you well know my enmity and aversion for al-Kindī, but what is right is right. Do you think it was good what you did to him by taking away his books? I swear I will not speak in your favour until you return his books to him.’ Thereupon, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā had al-Kindī’s books returned to him and obtained his signature that this had been done. When a note from al-Kindī arrived confirming that he had received them to the last, Sind said, ‘I am obliged to you both for returning the man’s books to him. Accordingly I will inform you of something that has escaped your notice: the fault in the canal will remain hidden for four months due to the rising of the Tigris. Now the Astrologers (ḥussāb) agree that the Commander of the Faithful will not live that long. I will tell him immediately that there was no error in the canal on your part so as to save your lives, and if the Astrologers are correct, the three of us will have escaped. But if they are wrong, and he lives longer until the Tigris subsides and the water disperses, then all three of us are doomed.’

Muḥammad and Aḥmad were grateful and mightily relieved to hear these words. Sind ibn ʿAlī then went to see al-Mutawakkil and said to him, ‘They did not err.’ The Tigris indeed rose, the water flowed into the canal, and the matter was concealed. Al-Mutawakkil was killed two months later, and Muḥammad and Aḥmad were saved after having greatly feared what might befall them.

Most of these names will be unfamiliar to most people; but it hardly matters, and anyway Brill provide footnotes.  What a rich picture we get of life at the court of the Abbasids!  This sort of stuff should not be only for Arabic speakers.

This is frankly a treasure.  I’ve long wished that someone would grab hold of this fascinating book and do the necessary scholarly work.  Now, at last, they have.

Share

Everything you ever wanted to know about Menelaus of Alexandria but were afraid to ask

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just come across an ancient author who is completely unfamiliar to me.  His name was Menelaus, and he was a mathematical writer, and one of his books even survives today, his Spherics, although only just.

Let’s see what ancient sources say about him.

In the Almagest (or Syntaxis) VII.3, Ptolemy tells us that he was in Rome and making astronomical observations in the first year of Trajan; that is, in 98 AD.  Here are the two passages from that chapter of book 7.  Page numbers are from the Toomer translation.[1]

(p.336): [Thirdly] the geometer Menelaus says that the following observation was made [by him] in Rome. In the first year of Trajan, Mechir 15-16, when the tenth hour [of night] was completed. Spica had been occulted by the moon (for it could not be seen), but towards the end of the eleventh hour it was seen in advance of the moon’s centre, equidistant from the [two] horns by an amount less than the moon’s diameter.

(p.338): Similarly, Menelaus, who observed in Rome, says that in the first year of Trajan, Mechir 18/19, towards the end of the eleventh hour, the southern horn of the moon appeared on a straight line with the middle and the southernmost of the stars in the forehead of Scorpius, and its centre was to the rear of that straight line, and was the same distance from the middle star as the middle star was from the southernmost; it appeared to have occulted the northernmost of the stars in the forehead, since [this star] was nowhere to be seen.

Mechir is the Egyptian 6th month, by the way, which I am told is Feb. 8th – March 9th in our calendar.

Menelaus appears in the Moralia of Plutarch, in De facie in orbe lunae (On the face in the moon), chapter 17.[2]  This is a dialogue, most likely a Greek-style symposium, between various well-connected people.  A man who may be Plutarch’s brother is speaking:

“Yes, by Heaven,” said Lucius, “there was talk of this too”; and, looking at Menelaus the mathematician as he spoke, he said: “In your presence, my dear Menelaus, I am ashamed to confute a mathematical proposition, the foundation, as it were, on which rests the subject of catoptrics. Yet it must be said that the proposition, ‘all reflection occurs at equal angles,’ is neither self-evident nor an admitted fact….

Menelaus does not reply, nor speak.  I picture him as perhaps being busy with the food tray.

In Proclus’ Commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements, we find this under Proposition 25:[3]

But the proofs that others have produced for the same proposition we shall recount briefly, and first the proof discovered and set forth by Menelaus of Alexandria.

This indicates that Menelaus came from Alexandria, like so many other mathematical philosophers.  There is also something in Pappus, Mathematical Collection.[4]  In book 4 he says:[5]

Some of these curves have been found worthy of a deeper study, and one has even been labelled the “paradoxical curve” by Menelaus.

In book 6:[6]

In his Spherics, Menelaus calls such a figure a “trilateral”.

and[7]

He says nothing about the setting of these arcs, because the reasoning of the demonstration falls back on the distinctions relative to their rising, and a work, on which we will later put forward some considerations, has already been written on this subject by Menelaus of Alexandria.

No such “considerations” appear in the text of Pappus as it has reached us, however.  But Pappus confirms that Menelaus is from Alexandria, and indicates knowledge of a lost work by Menelaus.

There is a little more information about Menelaus’ books from Arabic sources, much later.  By the 10th century scholars in Baghdad were translating as much of Greek technical literature as they could find.

Four works are listed in al-Nadim’s Fihrist or Catalogue, which has an entry on Menelaus.[8]  It reads:

Menelaus

He lived before the time of Ptolemy, who mentioned him in the book Almagest. Among his books there were:

Forms of Spherics [Menelai Alexandria sphaericorum], Knowledge of Quantity in Distinguishing Mixed Bodies [De cognitione quantatis discretae corporum permixtorum]—He wrote it for Emperor Domitian.[9] The Elements of Geometry [Elementa geometriae], which Thabit ibn Qurrah rendered in three sections; Triangles [De triangulis], a small part of which appeared in Arabic.

Rather later is al-Qifti who writes:[10]

Menelaus is among the guides of the geometers of his time, before the time of Ptolemy, the astronomical observer who mentions him in his book the Almagest. He was at the forefront for the benefit of his domain in the city of Alexandria – some said Memphis. His books were once translated into Syriac, then into Arabic. Among his writings is a book On the Knowledge of the Quantity of Specification of Mixed Bodies, dedicated to the King Ṭūmāṭiyānūs.

The Elements of Geometry translated by Thabit ibn Qurrah is known to other Arabic writers.  Al-Sijzī had a copy, and al-Biruni quotes from it.[11]  It is a lost book, however.

The only work of Menelaus to survive is his Spherics.  The original Greek text is lost.  Only a few quotations survive, which were mainly collected by A.A. Bjørnbo.[12]

However a number of translations were made into Arabic, from which the text became known in the west.  The Arabic tradition is complicated and is the subject of study at the moment.  One reason for the complexity is that Menelaus did not give complete proofs of his propositions, but rather outlines of how they might be proven.  Consequently the book was invariably expanded and “rectified” by translators or editors in Arabic, in order to make the book actually useful.  The result is that a number of versions exist, and the relationship between them is unclear.  Krause in the 1930’s edited and translated into German the edition by Abu Naṣr Manṣūr[13], and Rani Hermiz translated it into English[14].  I understand that a revision of this was printed in Hyderabad.[15].  A portion of a very early translation, differing from all the others, plus the edition of al-Māhānī/al-Harawī, has recently been edited and translated into English by Rashed and Papadopoulos.[16]

A Hebrew translation made from Arabic exists.  There are 8 manuscripts of this.  Two of them attribute the translation into Arabic to Hunain ibn Ishaq, the famous translator; the other six attribute it to Ishaq ibn Hunain, his son.  But the actual text of the Hebrew translation is based on more than one of the Arabic editions, not on whatever Hunain ibn Ishaq may have produced.[17]

There is also a medieval Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona, but this also is based on a mix of Arabic editions.

The Arabic version was translated for the first time into Latin by Francois Maurolyc, and printed at Messina in 1558, in a work containing also Latin versions of the Spherics of Theodore and the treatise “Of the movement of the sphere” by Autolycus.[18]  This was reprinted at Paris in 1644 in a work by Fr Mersenne, and then with the 2nd edition of the Greek text of Theodosius by Hunt, at Oxford in 1707.  The English astronomer Halley, the discoverer of Halley’s Comet, produced two Latin editions of the work at Oxford.  These were based upon the Hebrew and the Arabic versions, both of which were accessible in manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[19]

That’s all I have on Menelaus, perhaps a famous man in his own day and now hardly known.  Only his Spherics has survived.

Let us hope that perhaps a copy of the Elements of Geometry lingers somewhere, in some unexplored eastern library.  It was a “religious library” in Meshed in Iran that proved to contain an Arabic version of Galen’s On my own books, so discoveries may yet be made.

It is interesting to reflect that, when Menelaus was taking his observations in the capital of the world, and chatting with Plutarch, the apostle John was still alive.[20]  Doubtless neither Menelaus nor his important friends had ever heard of John.  But it was John who changed the world.  It’s a reminder to us, not to take the valuations of our world at face-value.

Share
  1. [1]G. J. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Duckworth, 1984.↩
  2. [2]The Loeb translation is online at Lacus Curtius here.  Beware: chapter 18 appears before chapter 17.↩
  3. [3]Proclus: A commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements, tr. Glenn R. Morrow, 1970, p.269.↩
  4. [4]Paul ver Eecke, “Pappus d’Alexandrie: La collection mathematique”, Paris, 1933.↩
  5. [5]p.208.↩
  6. [6]Proposition 1, p.371.↩
  7. [7]Proposition 56, p.459.↩
  8. [8]Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of Al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 1970, 2 vols. Chapter 7, p.638.↩
  9. [9]Lit. “King Ṭūmāṭiyānūs”, so R&P, ch. 1, p.11.↩
  10. [10]Quoted from R&P, p.12, rather than directly.↩
  11. [11]See R&P for details.↩
  12. [12]A.A. Bjørnbo, Studien über Menelaos’ Sphärik (Leipzig, 1902): pp.22-25.  Online at Archive.org here.  A few more were located in the scholia to the Almagest : F. Acerbi, “Traces of Menelaus’ Sphaerica in Greek Scholia to the Almagest,” SCIAMVS 16 (2015): p.91-124; online at academia.edu here.↩
  13. [13]M. Krause, Die Sphärik von Menelaos aus Alexandrien in der Verbesserung von Abū Naṣr Manṣūr b. ‘Alī b. ‘Irāq, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1936.↩
  14. [14]Rani Hermiz, “English Translation of the Sphaerica of Menelaus”, California State University San Marcos, MA diss., 2015.  Online here.↩
  15. [15]Naṣr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Kitāb Mānālāwus, Taḥrīr, Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1940↩
  16. [16]Roshdi Rashed, Athanase Papadopoulos, Menelaus’ ‘Spherics’: Early Translation and al-Māhānī/al-Harawī’s Version. Scientia Graeco-Arabica 21.   Berlin; Boston:  De Gruyter, 2017.  Pp. xiv, 873.  ISBN 9783110568233. There is a Google Books preview here. I am indebted to the Bryn Mawr review of this by Nathan Sidoli of Waseda University for much of the above.  The review is here.↩
  17. [17]So R&P.↩
  18. [18]Theodosii Sphaericorum elementorum libri. III. ex traditione Maurolyci Messanensis. Online here.↩
  19. [19]Menelai Sphaericorum libri III, ed. Ed. Halleius, Oxonii 1758; and Menelai Sphaericorum lib. III, quos olim collatis mss. hebraicis et arabicis typis exprimandos curavit Ed. Halleius, praefationem addidit G. Costard.  Oxonii, 1758.  Online at Google Books here.↩
  20. [20]Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, book 2.↩

Sayings of Luqman – translated by Anthony Alcock

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The sage Luqman appears in the Koran, but also in other sources, as the author of collections of wisdom.  Anthony Alcock has translated one of these collections from Arabic, which is very good news.  The content itself is highly readable, and it is very useful to have.  Here it is:

Thank you, Dr. A!

Share

Al-Maqrizi on the pyramids

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jason Colavito has done something great, and something sensible.  He has translated all the passages in al-Maqrizi’s al-Khitat which relate to the pyramids of Egypt and placed them online:

Ancient astronaut proponent Giorgio Tsoukalos claims that the fourteenth century Al-Khitat of Al-Maqrizi (1364-1442 CE) contains evidence that ancient astronauts assisted human beings in the construction of Egypt’s pyramids. This book, the most significant collection of medieval Arabian and Coptic pyramid lore ever assembled, has never been translated into English, so I have translated the passages dealing with pyramids to make this text accessible to interested readers. The following contains all of the significant references to the pyramids in the volume, though some minor allusions have been omitted.

He adds, quite properly:

I do not speak Arabic, so I am translating from the French edition published in 1895 and 1900. I cannot claim to be a professional translator, so before citing any material below, be sure to consult the original Arabic version.

The fact is, however, that this enterprise will still make these passages far more accessible.  It is rather a point against the “ancient astronauts” people that they have not made such a translation. 

It doesn’t seem to be possible to add comments, or I would have asked where he found the French edition.  I suspect it is online somewhere, and it would be nice to know where.  The book itself should plainly be translated into English in its entirety.

(Via Paleobabble)

UPDATE: From Wikipedia I get the following:

The most important is the Mawaiz wa al-‘i’tibar bi dhikr al-khitat wa al-‘athar (2 vols., Bulaq, 1854), translated into French by Urbain Bouriant as Description topographique et historique de l’Égypte (Paris, 1895–1900; compare A. R. Guest, “A List of Writers, Books and other Authorities mentioned by El Maqrizi in his Khitat,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1902, pp. 103–125).

Volume 1 is on Google books here.

The whole book in two volumes is at Gallica.bnf.fr here.

Share

Arabic biographies of Mohammed – Brockelmann’s bibliography

Posted on by Roger Pearse

More than a month ago I obtained paper copies of Brockelmann’s great but flawed reference volumes on Arabic literature.  Seeing only a page or two on the Arabic biographers of Mohammed, I was moved to try to scan these, and then turn them into English. 

Well, it’s been one heck of a fight!  The abbreviations were incomprehensible, and the material so densely packed that even Brockelmann himself got confused about his number sequences (I have seen two cases so far where his numeration of works by an author gets out of sync), and his text was evidently unreadable to his typesetters as well.  Worse yet, there is no obvious way to merge the data in the “supplement” with the main text. 

But I did it.  And the material is now online, here.  Enjoy, if you can!

It’s not quite finished.  That’s because I simply couldn’t understand some parts of it.  My German is weak, and my knowledge of Arabic literature and the bibliography for it is non-existent.  But I did what I could.

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have volume 1 of Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (2nd ed. 1941) on order via my library.  But a correspondent sent me an interesting word document yesterday.  He’d downloaded volume 1 of the 1898 first edition, run it through some OCR, and then run the output through Google Translate.  The .doc file contained the result, which was really rather interesting, and by no means useless.

Last night I also downloaded the PDF, and I ran Finereader 10 against it during the night.  The results were not too bad, although I gather that quotations may not be handled that well.  The PDF resolution is not that great, unfortunately.  Footnotes tended to be handled rather badly.  I started correcting the OCR of the main text, but had to go away unexpectedly, which prevented further progress.  But I will do more next week, if Adam’s curse permits.

While I was hunting for PDF’s of Brockelmann, I found another interesting item, Nicholson’s 1907 book, A literary history of the Arabs.  This looked interesting enough that I ordered a version on paper from Amazon.  We have to ignore the early chapters, dedicated to pre-islamic material — at least, that isn’t what I want to read about — but it gets quite interesting from the Ummayad period on.  Something I can scribble on is what I need.

I’m still cursing Brill for the price they place on Brockelmann’s second edition.  A thousand dollars, for heaven’s sake, for a thousand page paperback!?! 

Let’s see what kind of a grasp of Arabic literature I can get.

Share