Work A.6.1
Ptolemy
كتاب تستيح بسيط الكرة
Kitāb Tasṭīḥ basīṭ al-kura
The Arabic version of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium on the projection of celestial circles onto a plane. The original Greek version is lost. Ibrāhīm b. Sinān b. Thābit (d. 946) is the earliest Arabic author referring to the Planisphaerium. On this basis, Kunitzsch (‘The Role’, pp. 151–153) argues that it was translated into Arabic during the eastern-Islamic translation movement in the ninth century CE, despite the fact that Ibn al-Nadīm only knew the Arabic version of Pappus’s commentary translated by Thābit b. Qurra. Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s attribution of the translation of the Planisphaerium to Thābit may be a mistake, since he mentions Pappus’s commentary immediately afterwards.
The comments by the Andalusian mathematician Maslama al-Majrīṭī (d. 1007-8), which survive as separate works in Arabic (see C.6.1 and C.6.2), played a significant role as part of the Latin translations of the Planisphaerium made from the Arabic (see Latin A.6.1 and A.6.2). Because the extant Arabic version is often different from the Latin version, Kunitzsch & Lorch (pp. 7–8) call the former the ‘eastern recension’, while there must have been a ‘western recension’ of the Arabic text from which the Latin was made (cf. also Kunitzsch, ‘Fragments’).
Text: [Sidoli & Berggren (following their division into twenty sections in two parts)]
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Bibl.: Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist (ed. FlügelGustav Flügel, Kitâb al-Fihrist, 2 vols, Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–1872, vol. I, p. 269; English tr. DodgeBayard Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm. A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 2 vols, New York / London: Columbia University Press, 1970, vol. II, p. 642); Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn (ed. FlügelGustav Flügel, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn. Lexicon bibliographicum et encyclopaedicum a Mustafa ben Abdallah Katib Jelebi dicto et nomine Haji Khalifa celebrato compositum, 7 vols, Leipzig / London: Bentley / Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1835–1858, vol. II, p. 288 and vol. V, pp. 61–62; ed. YaltkayaŞerefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat Bilge, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī l-kutub wa-l-funūn li-... Ḥajji Khalīfa ..., 2 vols, Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1941–1943, vol. I, col. 403 and vol. II, col. 1404). — Moritz Steinschneider, Die arabischen Uebersetzungen aus dem Griechischen, Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1897, p. 215; GAS VFuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. Vol. V: Mathematik bis ca. 430 H., Leiden: Brill, 1974, p. 170. — Christopher Anagnostakis, The Arabic Version of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1984; Paul Kunitzsch, ‘Fragments of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium in an Early Latin Translation’, Centaurus 36 (1993), pp. 97–101; Paul Kunitzsch, ‘The Second Arabic Manuscript of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 9 (1994), pp. 83–89; Paul Kunitzsch, ‘The Role of al-Andalus in the Transmission of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium and Almagest’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 10 (1995–1996), pp. 147–155; Richard P. Lorch, ‘Ptolemy and Maslama on the Transformation of Circles into Circles in Stereographic Projection’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 49 (1995), pp. 271–284; Nathan Sidoli and J. Lennart Berggren, ‘The Arabic Version of Ptolemy’s Planisphere or Flattening the Surface of the Sphere: Text, Translation, Commentary’, SCIAMVS 8 (2007), pp. 37–139.
Ed.: Edition, English translation and detailed commentary in Sidoli & Berggren, including the citations in the notes by Maslama al-Majrīṭī and the Latin translation of Hermann of Carinthia; the edition is available at https://ptolemaeus.badw.de/edition/5/205/text/1. Facsimile of the Istanbul manuscript and English translation in Anagnostakis.
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