>>Thank you for joining me in the History
of Science Collections of the University of
Oklahoma Libraries. Let's see what stories
await us from the vault that will throw light
on medieval Islamic science.
This is the oldest Islamic manuscript in the
History of Science Collections. We think it
may date to about 1100. Does it look like
it was dug up somewhere? The manuscript is
written by hand on paper. It is beautiful.
The only problem is that we don't know what
it is. Several scholars have examined it,
yet it remains something of a mystery. It
is some sort of collection of Persian stories
about animals, perhaps like Aesop's fables.
So we are looking for scholars to help us
solve this mystery.
Here is another manuscript that is something
of a mystery. It, too, is written on paper.
The secret of making paper was obtained from
Chinese prisoners of war in the 8th century.
Since paper was much cheaper than papyrus
or parchment, manuscripts could be made available
at relatively affordable costs. For example,
you might sell a donkey instead of about 30
sheep. By the 11th century, a technical work
like Ptolemy's Almagest could be expected
to lie within the reach of determined scholars.
This manuscript is clearly an introduction
to astronomy, but we're not sure who wrote
it. Many years ago, a scholar described it
as the work of al-Gabali, who flourished around
1000. This scholar dated it to the 1400s,
or 15th century, and called it the earliest
of three known manuscripts by al-Gabali. However,
we now suspect that it is not by al-Gabali,
so it needs more attention. A student is now
working to digitize both of these manuscripts.
With the assistance of the OU Libraries Digitization
Laboratory, perhaps together we will solve
these mysteries soon.
Jabir Ibn Hayyan, later known as Geber in
Latin, was an alchemist at the court of Caliph
Harun al-Rashid, who flourished around 800.
This edition of Geber was printed in 1529.
Many of the works which circulated under his
name originated in the 10th century near Baghdad.
Others, like the Summa Perfectionis, probably
originated in Latin Europe.
Jabir's alchemy was both a spiritual discipline
and an empirical science. He developed new
laboratory apparatus, improved standard techniques
such as distillation and crystallization,
and pioneered chemical preparations of various
kinds, including acetic acid, tartaric acid,
sulfur, and mercury. Medieval alchemy was
a demanding spiritual, experimental, and theoretical
tradition, which provided ideas, techniques,
and motivation for the widespread pursuit
and development of chemistry. For example,
both Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were familiar
with Geber.
Dozens of Jabir's works became intermixed
with writings by a Latin Pseudo-Geber, who
flourished around 1250. This edition was published
in 1541. It contains several works by both
Jabir and Pseudo-Geber as listed on the title
page. These works were avidly studied by later
chemists. The Collections' copy of this rare
edition is heavily annotated. This early reader
may have lived around 1644. These annotations
have not yet been studied, but on this page
one can read about both bismuth and quicksilver.
This copy, like our manuscripts, awaits its
first researcher.
Muhammad al-Baghdadi, who flourished around
1000, wrote several treatises in mathematics.
This one, printed in 1570, explains a method
for dividing surfaces.
This edition was printed by the famous Renaissance
mathematician Federico Commandino. The manuscript
for this text was brought to Commandino by
the Elizabethan mathematician John Dee.
This is the great treatise on medicine by
Ibn Sina, known in Latin as Avicenna, who
flourished around 1000. Ibn Sina's Canon of
Medicine became a standard medical text in
European universities. Near the bottom of
the frontispiece in the center, the vignette
ranks Ibn Sina as one of the four greatest
physicians: Galen, Hippocrates, Ibn Sina,
and Aetius. Ibn Sina's Canon was printed in
Venice in 1608.
20 years earlier, in 1588, the same printer
issued the first collected edition of the
Hippocratic Corpus. The frontispiece is the
same, an early modern version of clip art,
except for the area for information about
the title and contents. But the central vignette
at the bottom that ranks Ibn Sina along with
Hippocrates among the four greatest physicians
remains.
This work on geography is by Idrisi, who flourished
around 1150 in Sicily.
Idrisi, a renowned geographer, recounted voyages
to Iceland and to the Sargasso Sea. This work
is in Arabic, but it's not a manuscript. It
was printed with moveable type in 1592. Printing
Arabic with moveable type is something of
a technological feat. But this book was not
printed in Baghdad or Cairo. Because of the
widespread European interest in works of Islamic
science even as late as the generation of
Kepler and Galileo, the Medici set up a press
to print Arabic works in Rome. This work by
Idrisi is therefore one of the first books
printed in Europe in Arabic.
And here we have Abu Ma'shar's Introduction
To Astrology. As a practical manual, it proved
very influential-- many editions were read
by Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Pierre d'Ailly,
and Pico. The History of Science Collections
holds 3 copies of Abu Ma'shar printed in 1489,
all different. Abu Ma'shar was one of the
most prolific writers on astrology during
the Middle Ages, and this work was the most
frequently quoted astrological text in the
West. This first edition was printed by Erhard
Ratdolt, an important early printer of books
in science and mathematics. This copy is bound
in a much older, discarded sheet of vellum,
recycled in 1489 to make the binding of this
book. And here I have it open to the page
describing the constellations of the zodiac.
The astronomer Al-Farghani flourished around
850, and worked in Baghdad and Cairo. His
introduction to astronomy, shown here, was
studied by Dante. Al-Farghani also calculated
the diameter of the Earth, and wrote a treatise
on the astrolabe.
In this work, Al-Farghani explained how solid
spheres might carry the planets around eccentric
circles in a physical manner that was consistent
with Ptolemaic astronomy.
This medieval introduction to astronomy is
a sequel to a treatise on the formation of
the heavens and the Earth. It's not in Arabic,
is it? This was written by a Jewish mathematician
and astronomer in Barcelona, also known as
Savasorda, who is credited with the earliest
solution of the quadratic equation. In this
beautiful edition, Abraham bar Hiyya wrote
in Hebrew. His Hebrew text appears beside
a Latin translation.
This work shows us that by "Islamic science"
we are referring to science in a cosmopolitan
culture that was shaped by the Islamic faith.
Arabic language was predominant, but most
people were not of Arab ethnicity. And the
authors of these scientific texts might have
been of any kind of Middle Eastern extraction:
Persian, African, Jewish, or European.
The historian of Islamic science A. I. Sabra
explains: "It was through the vehicle of Arabic
that a non-Arab scholar in eleventh-century
Nishapur or fifteenth-century Samarqand had
access to the results arrived at in ninth
or tenth century Baghdad, and an astronomer
working in fourteenth-century Damascus became
acquainted with writings produced in eleventh-century
Cairo, twelfth-century Spain, or thirteenth-century
Maragha.... With the decline of Abbasid power
and the eventual breakup of the Abbasid empire,
centers of learning multiplied across the
Islamic world following the proliferation
of dynastic rules that vied with one another
for cultural and intellectual eminence as
well as for political power."
Unfortunately, two stereotypes have profoundly
shaped modern perspectives of Islamic science.
First is the alleged lack of originality.
Pierre Duhem, an early 20th century French
physicist, was also a pioneer historian of
science who's written these volumes on medieval
science. Yet a century ago, Duhem wrote: "There
is no Arabic science. The wise men of Mohammedanism
were always the more or less faithful disciples
of the Greeks, but were themselves destitute
of all originality."
The second stereotype is that Islamic science
flowered briefly during the Middle Ages, but
was not long sustained. In this view, the
chief question about Islamic science is the
problem of its decline. But to frame the discussion
around the so-called "problem" of its decline
presupposes that it did in fact rapidly decline,
before the end of the Middle Ages, rather
than being much longer-lived. Yet scholars
now believe that vigorous original scientific
activity in the Islamic world extended up
through the early modern period, and even
into the 18th century, although we do not
yet know enough to describe it. These later
Islamic manuscripts remain largely unstudied
and unexamined. In geology, for example, I
have seen clear examples of European writers
in dialogue on the history of the Earth with
their Islamic Mediterranean neighbors in the
17th and 18th centuries. So these two stereotypes—the
lack of scientific originality, and the assumption
of a brief duration and rapid decline—profoundly
shape modern perspectives of Islamic science.
Let's answer these two misconceptions by turning
to the first printed edition of Ptolemy's
Almagest, published in 1496 by Regiomontanus.
Regiomontanus was the first European astronomer
to fully master Islamic astronomy. Far from
merely translating Ptolemy's Almagest, Regiomontanus's
edition was a major contribution to Renaissance
astronomy. It contained new techniques, methods,
observations, and critical reflections. This
was state of the art in astronomy when Copernicus
was a young man, and Copernicus studied it
carefully.
Noel Swerdlow has argued that the diagram
on this page of Regiomontanus provided the
major step in the transformation to a Sun-centered
model. Here Regiomontanus proved that eccentric
models could be used for all of the planets
instead of epicycle models, except for retrograde
motion. This proof was denied by Ptolemy himself,
but it included by Regiomontanus in this edition
of the Almagest. Copernicus then took the
next step by putting the Sun in the center.
In this photograph, Jamil Ragep, is holding
the Oklahoma copy of Regiomontanus open to
the same diagram. Ragep has recently shown
that the 15th-century Islamic astronomer Ali
Qushji, a generation before Regiomontanus,
used an identical diagram to make the same
proof. If we say that Regiomontanus paved
the way for Copernicus, we can say the same
for Ali Qushji.
In other words, if we were to ask Noel Swerdlow
or Jamil Ragep to explain the mathematics,
they would show how Ali Qushji and Regiomontanus
were making it easy for the next person to
get the idea of transposing the positions
of the Earth and Sun. Copernicus picked up
where Ali Qushji and Regiomontanus left off.
Indeed, in the manuscript Ali Qushji himself
went on to comment that, "A moving Earth is
impossible to disprove." Contrary to Pierre
Duhem, I would call that original!
Let's go back and take another look at Regiomontanus.
On this page Regiomontanus exclaimed, "Sed
mirum est....," What a marvel! At the end
of Book 5, Section 22, Regiomontanus is here
calling attention to the astonishing fact
that Ptolemy's lunar model required the Moon
occasionally to appear four times its usual
size. This impossible wonder arrested the
attention of Copernicus. To correct for this
anomaly, Copernicus used a crank mechanism.
It is one of Copernicus's most significant
technical advances over Regiomontanus, who
could only emphasize the problem. But how
did Copernicus come up with a crank mechanism
that could solve this problem pointed out
here by Regiomontanus?
The answer is from Nasr al-din al-Tusi. Al-Tusi
flourished around 1250. He worked in Baghdad
and in the observatory of Maragha, in modern-day
northwest Iran. This is Al-Tusi's edition
of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, published
by the Medici Press in Rome in 1594. Again,
it is printed in moveable type, just like
Idrisi. The existence of this printed edition
is proof of the great interest by European
scientists in the Renaissance in the texts
of Al-Tusi and other Islamic scientists. So
this is Al-Tusi's explanation of Euclid.
But on this page, Al-Tusi works out the geometry
of one circle moving within a larger circle
to produce a so-called "crank mechanism."
Al-Tusi employed a crank mechanism like this
to solve the problem of the motion of the
Moon pointed out 300 years later by Regiomontanus.
In the De Revolutionibus of Copernicus, published
in 1543, Copernicus also used Al-Tusi's crank
mechanism for his model of the Moon's motions.
Regiomontanus hadn't heard of it in 1496;
somehow by 1543 Copernicus had. I'd call the
crank mechanism of Al-Tusi, employed by Copernicus,
original.
The historian of Islamic science George Saliba
comments: "One still has to find a name for
the production of the Tusi Couple, that was
first encountered in an Arabic text, written
by a man who spoke Persian at home, and who
used that theorem, like many other astronomers
who followed him and were all working in the
'Arabic/Islamic' world, in order to reform
classical Greek astronomy, and then have his
theorem in turn be translated into Byzantine
Greek toward the beginning of the fourteenth
century, only to be used later by Copernicus
and others in Latin texts of Renaissance Europe.
What name could one possibly dream up for
that kind of science, and whose science was
it anyway?"
Ibn al-Haytham, known in the Latin West as
Alhazen, made significant contributions to
both astronomy and optics. In astronomy, Ibn
al-Haytham founded a tradition of Islamic
astronomical investigation that sought to
bring together Ptolemaic geometrical models
with plausible physical mechanisms. This tradition
led through Al-Tusi to Copernicus.
In optics, Ibn al-Haytham founded a tradition
of mathematical optics that provided a basis
for the later investigations of Kepler and
Galileo. This copy is the famous Risner edition
of Alhazen's Optics.
The frontispiece displays a variety of optical
phenomena: from reflection and refraction,
to the bridge that shows perspective, and
the optics of the rainbow, to the scene of
burning mirrors used to defend the city of
Sicily by Archimedes. This experimental treatise
in optics built upon the foundation laid by
Ptolemy and provided a basis for later investigations
by Witelo, Kepler and others, until the invention
of the telescope in the early 17th century.
Historians used to speak of a "scientific
revolution," in a way which supposed that
the story of science belonged to the heritage
of early modern Europe. But consider the Selenographia
by Johann Hevelius, published in the middle
of the Scientific Revolution, less than 40
years after Galileo's first telescopic discovery
of mountains on the Moon. This book fulfilled
Galileo's lunar land run, the race to map
its surface. This is the first true lunar
atlas. Dozens of fine engravings detail the
surface of the Moon as it appeared each clear
night over a period of five years. From the
varying shadows cast by topographical features
along the changing shadow line, Hevelius constructed
a composite map of the Moon. It's accurate
enough to plot the Apollo lunar landings.
Yet on the frontispiece, Hevelius himself
celebrates not the triumph of the European
scientific revolution, but the heritage of
Islamic science. On the left is Ibn al-Haytham,
the leading medieval Islamic astronomer and
optical theorist. On the right, holding the
telescope, is Galileo. Who would have guessed
that one of the most impressive works of the
scientific revolution portrays Galileo in
Islamic dress as a tribute to the tradition
of medieval Islamic science? This frontispiece
of Hevelius reminds us that the growth of
Western science cannot be understood apart
from rich and sustained interactions between
multiple cultures. It is impossible to separate
the European scientific revolution from the
achievements of medieval Islamic culture and
other civilizations which came before.
Science is a story. What stories do you want
to hear and tell about Islamic science?
