Albumasar

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Depiction of Albumasar on the astronomical clock by Nikolaus Lilienfeld

Albumasar ( Ja'far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'schar al-Balchi , Arabic أبو معشر جعفر بن محمد بن عمر البلخي, DMG Abū Maʿšar Ǧaʿfar b. Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Balḫī , also called al-Falaki , * around 787 in Balch ; † 886 ) was a Persian mathematician , astronomer and astrologer .

Live and act

Albumasar was born in the city of Balkh in the province of Khorasan , what was then Persia. At the beginning of his scholarly career he studied the teachings of Muhammad , but turned to astronomy and astrology between the ages of 30 and 40. He made horoscopes of both Mohammed and Christ . According to his interpretation of the stars, the world was created when the seven planets known at the time (i.e., the sun and moon , Mercury , Venus , Mars , Jupiter and Saturn ) were conjunct in the first degree of the constellation Aries. For the end of the world, he also made a forecast for a similar conjunction.

He was quoted by Tycho Brahe as an early critic of the Peripatetic regarding comets beyond the lunar sphere (see comet of 1577 ), even if Albumasar's traditional reason for the color change is not convincing.

His book Introductorium in Astronomiam is one of the Arabic texts which the philosophical works of Aristotle have passed on in Arabic translation.

Albumasar was a prolific writer and is believed to have written over 50 books. In medieval Europe he was considered the most important Iranian astrologer, with a great influence on the genesis of the medieval astrological worldview. His books, translated into Latin in the 12th century, were widely circulated as manuscripts but were not printed until some two hundred years later.

Fonts

From Albumasar's Introduction to Astronomy, Baghdad 848
  • De magnis conjunctionibus et annorum revolutionibus ac eorum profectionibus . Printed in Augsburg in 1489 and in Venice in 1515. Ed. K. Yamamoto, Ch. Burnett, Leiden, 2000, 2 vols. (Text in Arabic and Latin)
  • De judiciis astrorum
  • Introductorium in astronomiam . Written in Baghdad 848. Into Latin transl. by Johannes Hispalensis and Hermann von Carinthia . printed in Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt 1489 and in Venice 1495. (Augsburg 1489 and Venice 1515)
  • Libri Mysteriorum , into Italian transl. by Giuseppe Bezza da Angelicus
  • Flores astrologiae . Printed in Venice by Giovanni Battista Sessa in 1488.
  • Flores astrologiae [from the Arab. trans. by Johannes Hispalensis] 1496.
  • Flores astrologiae - Astrological flower picking . Translated into German by Dr. Janine Deus, Tübingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89997-201-6

literature

  • Eugenio Garin : Astrology in the Renaissance. Frankfurt a. M. 1997. (Albumasar reception in the Renaissance.)
  • Richard Lemay: Abu Maʿshar and Latin aristotelianism in the twelfth century. The recovery of Aristotle's natural philosophy through Arabic astrology , Beirut 1962.
  • David Pingree : Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran , in: Isis 54, 1963. pp. 229-246. e-text
  • David Pingree : Abū Ma ʿ shar Al-Balkhī, Ja ʿ far Ibn Muḥammad . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 1 : Pierre Abailard - LS Berg . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1970, p. 32–39 ( article online (Abū Ma) , Encyclopedia.com).
  • Francis James Carmody : Arabic astronomical and astrological sciences in Latin translation. A critical bibliography. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1956; on Albumasar pp. 88–101 ( full text online , HathiTrust ).

Web links

Commons : Albumasar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Flowers of Abu Ma'shar. In: World Digital Library . 1488, accessed July 15, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Peripatetics were called the representatives of the Aristotelian opinion. They could not accept "new stars" and comets behind the moon.
  3. ↑ see p. 19 by Bernd Pfeiffer: A “peacock tail” in the sky? The influence of comet observations around 1600. (Oct. 13, 2013; PDF; 3.5 MB)
  4. ↑ Introduction to Astronomy, Containing the Eight Divided Books of Abu Ma'shar Abalachus. In: World Digital Library . 1506, accessed July 15, 2013 .
  5. ↑ http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fdaten.digitale-sammlungen.de%2F%7Edb%2Fmets%2Fbsb00025305_mets.xml
personal data
SURNAME Albumasar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ja'far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi; AbuMa'shar; al-Falaki
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Persian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer
DATE OF BIRTH at 787
PLACE OF BIRTH Balch
DATE OF DEATH 886