Ali ibn Ibrahim ibn al-Shatir al-Dimashqi. Jadwal Matali` al-Qamar `ala Ala al-Asturlab, autograph copy, signed by the author, Damascus, dated A.H. 770/A.D. 1368

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Description

10 folios, text and tables written in a neat scholars naskhi hand in black, red and green ink, tables ruled in red, colophon on f.8a, further author's signature on f.2a, ttile page with author's statementof autograph on f.1a, later marginal glosses in black ottoman hands, later binding of marbled boards and red leather spine

Catalogue Note

This small volume is an important autograph copy of a work on astronomy by the celebrated 14th century scholar Ibn al-Shatir (1304-1375). The author was well known in his own time as the official timekeeper of the Great (Umayyad) Mosque in Damascus, and hence had to know about the movement of the heavenly bodies. Indeed, of the three autograph notes in the present work , two record that he wrote it in the "chamber of the timekeepers". The full text of the two main autograph notes is as follows:

Title page: "Tables for the rising of the moon for the instrument of the astrolabe, by the author the poor `Ali ibn Ibrahim ibn al-Shatir al-Dimashqi, he wrote it for himself over a period of two days in the chamber of the timekeepers next to the clocktower under the Tower (literally the "call-to-prayer tower") of the Bridegroom in the Umayyad mosque in the city of Damascus, may God prolong its life, at the end of Safar in the year 770 praise be to God"

Folio 8a: "It was completed by the hand of the compiler the poor `Ali ibn Ibrahim ibn al-Shatir al-Dimashqi at the beginning of Rabi` al-Awwal in the year 770 in the chamber of the timekeepers under the Minaret of the Bridegroom in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus the Blessed and it was compiled and written for the Muezzin team of the mosque"

Ibn al-Shatir's best-known contribution to astronomy was the updating of the astronomical tables of the 2nd century Alexandrian mathematician Claudius Ptolomaeus (Ptolemy), in which Ibn al-Shatir radically reformed and corrected certain aspects of the calculations of the movements of the sun, moon and planets. Ibn al-Shatir's new calculations still retained the earth as the centre of the cosmos (geocentric), but in the late 1950s the scholar E. Kennedy discovered that the mathematical information that Ibn al-Shatir had developed was identical to that of Copernicus two centuries later, despite the fact that Copernicus was positing the sun as the centre planetary movement (heliocentric). The possiblitly that Copernicus knew Ibn al-Shatir's work is still being explored.

The exact title of the present work is unrecorded, but it seems likely that it is a fragment of a larger work, such as Al-Zijj al-Jadid or Jadwal li-`Ard Shamal. This is also implied by the pagination, which goes from 53 to 62, indicating that these folios were physically part of a larger volume in the past.

For further references see: Sezgin, Vol.VI, pp.34,36, 55, 56, 85; Brockelmann, GII, p.156, SII, p.157.