Najm al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Misri (fl. Cairo 1325 AD): A treatise on astronomical instrumentation
Najm al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Misri (fl. Cairo 1325 AD): A treatise on astronomical instrumentation

CAIRO OR ALEPPO, 14TH CENTURY

Details
Najm al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Misri (fl. Cairo 1325 AD): A treatise on astronomical instrumentation
Cairo or Aleppo, 14th Century
On the construction of non-standard astrolabes and other unusual instruments, Arabic manuscript on buff paper, 38ff. each folio with a large diagram in red and sepia ink, with varying numbers of lines of clearly legible naskh on red rules, text area outlined in red, opening and closing folios lacking, light staining and smudging, recently rebound and paginated 1-76 in modern Arabic hand in pencil, one additional unpaginated folio with notes, in binding made up of contemporary brown morocco with geometrical tooled decoration, restoration at spine, rather scuffed
Folio 10¼ x 7¾in. (25.7 x 19.5cm.)

Lot Essay

The manuscript is a previously unrecorded copy of an anonymous, highly technical and richly illustrated Arabic treatise on astronomical instrumentation. It is incomplete and comprises just over one half of the original treatise. A virtually complete copy is preserved in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Both stem originally from the same milieu, the hands being similar though distinct and the style and layout of the illustrations is also very similar. It is not possible to establish whether they were copied in Egypt or Syria.

The author is Najm al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Misri, an astronomer who worked in Cairo about the year 1325 (Cairo ENL Survey, no.C16). In 1973 two halves of a unique single manuscript of another work by Najm al-Din were identified in Cairo and Oxford. This manuscript comprising close to 420 folios contains the largest known astronomical table from the Middle Ages, with over 440,000 entries. The table displays the time since rising of the sun or any star as a function of three arguments (instantaneous altitude, meridian altitiude, half arc of visibility) and works for any terrestrial latitude. But in 1982 a manuscript in the Chester Beatty library was identified as a commentary on the use of this table by its compiler for a much more ambitious project, namely, as an aid to the solution of all the standard problems of spherical astronomy for any latitude. This highy ingenious project, a monument in the history of applied astronomy and trigonometry, was until recently thought to be the one and only major work of Najm al-Din al-Misri. The Chester Beatty manuscript also contained a generously illustrated treatise on astronomical instrumentation compiled in Aleppo in around 1325 AD. The present lot is another copy of this work, incomplete, but more richly illustrated. The only personal reference in the treatise is a statement in Chapter 10 that the author invented a certain kind of universal astrolabe in Mecca in the year 723 hijra (1323-4 AD).

Najm al-Din mentions his illustrious predecessors al-Biruni and al-Marrakushi. Abu'l Rayhan al-Biruni worked in Central Asia in the early 11th century and was the leading scientist of medieval Islam. One of his treatises was a comprehensive study of the construction of the astrolabe, including information on unusual varieties of astrolabic retes, invented by some of his predecessors in the 9th and 10th centuries with exotic names referring to the appearance of the ecliptic frame, no longer circular as in the standard astrolabe. Najm al-Din adds not a few yet more exotic varieties. Abu 'Ali al-Marrakushi, a Moroccan resident of Cairo, compiled in circa 1280 a monumental encyclopedic work on instrumentation, mainly restricting his attention to standard instruments but including a summary of al-Biruni's treatment of exotic astrolabe types. al-Marrakushi also treated sundials-horizontal, vertical, inclined to the horizon and cylindrical- and Najm al-Din devised and described numerous new types of considerable technical interest.

The Chester Beatty manuscript
Until recently, Najm al-Din's instrument treatise was known only from a copy in the Chester Beatty library, where it is miscatalogued as a Persian manuscript, after the information given in a spurious colophon (Persian 102/2, ff.27-99; see the description by E. Blochet and M.Minovi in Arberry et.al., Catalogue, no. 102). The first part of the same manuscript contains a set of instructions on the use of Najm al-Din's enormous tables for time-keeping. These have been analysed in detail in a recent publication (Charette, Monumental Medieval Table). At the time of writing that paper, it was taken for granted, on the basis of various publications by David King, that this treatise could be attributed to Ibn al-Sarraj. However, recent investigation of this treatise in the course of a doctoral dissertation by Franois Charette has furnished solid evidence for assigning the authorship to Najm al-Din al-Misri.

The present manuscript
These folios span the first 76 chapters of the treatise on instrumentation with several lacunae. The text provides several better readings than the Chester Beatty copy, and occasionally a whole line omitted in error from the more complete copy. In particular, the illustrations in the present copy are not only more carefully executed, but also complete. There are some two dozen cases where the places for illustrations in the Chester Beatty copy have been left blank; the present copy now provides the illustrations, some of which could not be reconstructed from the accompanying text. Added to the manuscript in its present form is a single page including some undated (17th century) calculations of planetary positions, and miscellaneous notes.


The attribution of the treatise
The author refers in Chapter 1 of the treatise on instrumentation to a table for constructing astrolabic markings. This table has previously been mentioned on folio 26v. of the Chester Beatty manuscript at the end of his commentary on the use of his universal table. The text says twice that this table was determined accoring to "an appendix (fasl) mentioned at the end of the chapters [of the commentary]". Najm al-Din's main tables (without any mention of their compiler) are mentioned several times in the instrument treatise, and they have in fact been used to compile the various smaller tables for instrument construction found in it. At the end of Najm al-Din's commentary to his universal table he refers to various tables which he prepared for constructing instruments. The first of these is for constructing astrolabes and is mentioned in Chapter I of the instrument treatise: it is found on folio 27r. of the Chester Beatty manuscript. The other ones are for sundial construction and his description of them correspond precisely to the tables found between Chapters 78 and 79 of the instrument treatise.
One argument supporting an attribution to Ibn al-Sarraj is the fact that almost all instruments featured in the treatise are for the latitude 36 degrees, which serves Aleppo. Ibn al-Sarraj is indeed the only known specialist of instruments from Aleppo from the early 14th century. On the other hand, whilst there are no specific references to Aleppo in the text, one finds direct references to Cairo on a few occasions (Chapters 10, 84, 91 and 93) and there are a few instruments illustrated which are designed for the latititude of Cairo, namely 30 degrees (Chapters 65 and 66). In particular, chapter 91 is devoted to the construction of the base of the ventilator (badahanj), a common feature of medieval Cairene architecture, both religious and secular (see King, Architecture and astronomy, esp. pp. 109-110 on this chapter). In Cairo the ventilators were astronomically aligned, with the open parts facing a direction perpendicular to the direction of winter sunrise. Now Najm al-Din is known to have been active in Cairo. It is however, possible that he spent part of his life in Aleppo or that he was commissioned to compose a treatise for someone in that city.
The Arabic of the known treatises of Ibn al-Sarraj is crisp and precise. The Arabic of the present treatise has neither of these features. The text is occasionally a little confused and quite colloquial in style. It gives the impression of having been written in great haste, and there is much repetitiion, especially in the section on astrolabes. The Arabic of Najm al-Din's commentary on his universal table is likewise rather colloquial, although the technical instructions are clearly presented. Both works are highly competent from a technical point of view and bristle with ingenuity. It should be borne in mind, however, that his interest in instruments was of a very practical nature, a feature which distinguishes him markedly from all of his predecessors who wrote on instruments and which is also to be observed in the writings of certain later Muslim astronomers primarily involved with timekeeping.

The contemporary context of the treatise

In Mamluk Egypt and Syria there was a lively interest in astronomy in general and in astronomical instruments in particular. Some were employed at the major mosques; indeed, it was during the late 13th and 14th centuries that the office of the mosque muwaqqit became well-established. These men were responsible for the organisation of the calendar by sighting the lunar crescent, the regulation of the astronomically determined times of prayer and the determination of the sacred direction towards Mecca. Other astronomers, including Najm al-Din al-Misri and Ibn al-Sarraj worked independently. The interest in astronomy amongst these men led to some singularly remarkable and historically significant achievements. For example, the Damascus muwaqqit Ibn al-Shatir devised a set of models that are mathematically equivalent to those of Copernicus some 150 years later. His colleague al-Khalili produced a corpus of tables for timekeeping for the latitude of Damascus which represent the culmination of the Muslim achievement in astronomical timekeeping. They were used in Damascus until the 19th century. Abu 'Ali al-Marrakushi (Cairo ca. 1280) compiled a monumental treatise on astronomical instruments of the standard variety (astrolabes, quadrants, and sundials) mainly instruments serving a single latitude. This treatise survives in several copies and was widely known in Egypt, Syria and Turkey until the 19th century.

In the 1980's Najm al-Din found his place in the history of Mamluk astronomy as the author of the largest single astronomical table from the Middle Ages. Others had compiled tables for individual latitudes which served either the sun or the stars; Najm al-Din prepared a table for both the sun and the stars which would serve all latitudes. In the mid-1990's it was realised that he compiled this table as a universal auxilary table. Later that decade he was recognised as the author of the treatise on instruments preserved in the Chester Beatty Library, of which the present manuscript is a copy. He was familiar with the treatise of al-Marrakushi on standard instruments and recorded for posterity an account of all the non-standard instruments known to him, either invented by his predecessors or conceived by himself. He was particularly interested in universal instruments, that is, instruments which provided solutions to problems of spherical astronomy for all terrestrial latitudes. His book has provided us with a much clearer idea of Muslim achievements in astronomical instrumentation, but alas no information of consequence is available concerning his life, his teachers or his relations with his contemporaries. Both of Najm al-Din's major works- his monumental universal table and his remarkable treatise on unusual instruments- failed to attract the attention they merited in the Middle Ages and no references to either are known from any later medieval sources. Now finally, his works have received the attention they deserve.

Select bibliography
Charette, Franois Astronomical instrumentation in 14th century Egypt and Syria, doctoral thesis in the history of science to be submitted to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Univesity, Frankfurt,in the year 2000.
idem A monumental medieval table for solving the problems of spherical astronomy for all latitudes, in Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 48, 1998, pp.11-64.
The encyclopaedia of Islam, new edn., 10 vols., Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1960-2000. Especially articles on asturlab; 'ilm al-hay'a; kibla; Makka; mikat; mizwala; rub'; ru'yat al-hilal; shakkaziyya; takwim; tasa; zidj.
King, David A.: The astronomical instruments of Ibn al-Sarraj, in idem Islamic astronomical instruments, London, Variorum 1987, reprinted Aldershot: Variorum 1995, IX.

The description of this lot was prepared by David King and Franois Charette (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt). Christie's is very grateful for their assistance.

A full list of contents, concordance with the Chester Beatty manuscript and bibliography is available on request.

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