al-Jazari

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Al-Jazarī (actually Badī 'az-Zamān Abū l-'Izz ibn Ismā'īl ibn ar-Razzāz al-Jazarī , Arabic بديع الزمان أبو العز بن إسماعيل الرزاز الجزري) was an Islamic engineer and author of the 12th and early 13th centuries. The part of the name al-Jazari is a designation of origin and can refer to the landscape of Jazira , the northern part of Mesopotamia between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris , or to the city of Jazirat Ibn Umar , today's Cizre . Al-Jazari was, according to his own statements, since 577 H. (1181/1182 AD) in the service of a branch of the Turkmen dynasty of the Ortoqids in the Diyār Bakr region, based in Āmid, today's Diyarbakır .

plant

Al-Jazari's water pumping station from a manuscript from the first half of the 13th century.
Al-Jazari's elephant clock from a manuscript from around 1315.

Around 1205 al-Jazarī wrote his work on mechanical devices, the Kitāb fī maʿrifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya ( Arabic كتاب في معرفة الحيل الهندسية ' Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices '), also known as Automata in Western culture. In this work he declares that he wrote it for the ruler of part of the region Diyār Bakr, the Ortoqid prince Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd, and that he had already served his father and brother.

The richly illustrated, six-part work contains descriptions of the construction and function of clocks , various vessels for drinking and bloodletting , fountains , pumping stations and other mechanical objects such as doors and door locks , but also surveying equipment.

From the introduction to his work it can be concluded that al-Jazari saw himself in the tradition of mechanical engineering in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East from Hellenistic times to his time and that his predecessors, including Apollonius who probably worked in Byzantium, were a group of Authors referred to as pseudo-Archimedes, the Banū-Mūsā brothers , Hibat Allaah b. al-Ḥusayn and Yūnus al-Asturlābī as well as authors not known by name recognized as role models.

reception

The work was widely distributed in the Arab world and through translations into Turkish and Persian. In the course of the long tradition of the treatise , the representations were brought into line with current tastes. Donald Routledge Hill submitted an annotated, critical translation into English in 1974, which largely follows Manuscript Graves 27 from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University , a 1468 copy after a 1341 copy, which is considered to be the earliest nearly complete version.

The Kitāb fī maʿrifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya is considered to be the most important source on the progressive state of Arabic technology in the Middle Ages . The work should also have been known to the engineers of the Renaissance . Further developments of this can be found in Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations .

Many of the apparatuses described have recently been experimentally reconstructed and have proven to be functional. A famous example of this is al-Jazari's elephant clock .

literature

  • Donald Routledge Hill (Ed.): The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari . Reidel, Dordrecht et al. 1974, ISBN 90-277-0329-9
  • Gerhard Jaritz: al-Jazari . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 5, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7608-8905-0 , Sp. 310.

Web links

Commons : al-Jazari  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Jaritz: al-Jazari . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 5, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7608-8905-0 , Sp. 310.
  2. ↑ a b Donald Routledge Hill: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices: (Kitāb fī maʿrifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya) by Ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazzarī. Dordrecht et al. a. : D. Reidel Publishing Company 1974, p. 3.
  3. ↑ Bahattin Karagözoğlu: Science and Technology from Global and Historical Perspectives. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG 2017, p. 170.
  4. ↑ Donald Routledge Hill: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices: (Kitāb fī ma 'rifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya) by Ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazzarī. Dordrecht et al. a. : D. Reidel Publishing Company 1974, p. 15.
  5. ↑ Donald Routledge Hill: al- D̲j̲azarī. In: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition . Edited by: P. Bearman et al. Online since 2012.
  6. ↑ Donald Routledge Hill: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices: (Kitāb fī ma 'rifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya) by Ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazzarī. Dordrecht et al. a. : D. Reidel Publishing Company 1974, pp. 4-6. The entire work online at marcell.memoryoftheworld.org: PDF 28.46 MB.
  7. ↑ Marc van den Broek : Leonardo da Vinci's ingenuity. A search for traces , Mainz, 2018, ISBN 978-3-961760-45-9 , pp. 30–31
personal data
SURNAME al-Jazari
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Badī 'az-Zamān Abū l-'Izz ibn Ismā'īl ibn ar-Razzāz al-Jazarī
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Arab-Turkish author, inventor and cyberneticist of the Middle Ages
DATE OF BIRTH before 1181
DATE OF DEATH 13th Century