Kitāb al-Mijisṭī li-Baṭlaymūs (Arabic translation of Ptolemy, Almagest)

Kitāb al-Mijisṭī li-Baṭlaymūs (Arabic translation of Ptolemy, Almagest)

Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest, written in Alexandria in the second century CE, elucidated a geocentric, spherical model of the universe that would remain essentially unchallenged across the Mediterranean world for over 1,300 years. Though the Greek text was maintained in the Byzantine world, in the Latin West, it remained poorly understood until three twelfth-century translations were made. This manuscript, written in Aragon on Florentine paper, contains the more widespread of the two surviving Arabic translations, that of the ninth-century Nestorian Christian physician, Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn (ca. 830–910), revised by his Sabian contemporary, Thābit ibn Qurra (826–901). It was copied in Saragossa [Sarqusṭah] in 1381 by the scribe Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad ibn Salāmah al-Ṣin[. . .]ānī al-Muhājirī (?) for his master and teacher, Ibn al-Qursunuh, a Jewish astronomer at the court of King Peter IV of Aragon (1319–87), known more commonly as Jacob ben Abraham Isaac Corsono.

Author: Ptolemy; Translators: Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn and Thābit ibn Qurra; Scribe: Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad ibn Salāmah al-Ṣin[. . .]ānī al-Muhājirī (?), an astronomer (colophon, fol. 185r)

A.H. 783 (1381)

Manuscript on paper, 185 fols.

University of Pennsylvania, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, LJS 268

Saragossa, Spain