Work C.1.1
al-Kindī
كتاب في الصناعة العظمى
Kitāb fī l-Ṣināʿa al-ʿuẓmā
An extensive treatise on Almagest I.1–8, dedicated to the authors’s son Aḥmad. Ibn al-Nadīm’s reference to a Risāla fī Ṣināʿat Baṭlamyūs al-falakiyya by al-Kindī is presumably to this work (Rosenthal, p. 436). The extant text closes with the following remark: ‘Since we have presented the [things] of this science [i.e., astronomy] that needed to be presented [and] that are like its principles, let us complete this part of our book and we let it be followed by what follows it naturally’ (MS Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ayasofya 4830, f. 80v:16–17). This seems to indicate that al-Kindī also wrote, or planned to write, a commentary on the remaining parts of the Almagest.
Content: The treatise consists of eight chapters (nawʿ). In addition to contributions by al-Kindī himself (e.g., a discussion about the subject matter of astronomy and references to other works by himself; see Rosenthal, pp. 440–442), two main sources can be identified by a comparison with earlier works. First, Rosenthal (p. 439, n. 2) remarks that al-Kindī’s quotations show ‘a good number of modifications which may go back to an earlier revision of the translation’, i.e., of the translation of the Almagest by al-Ḥajjāj (A.1.1). Second (Rosenthal, p. 446), al-Kindī includes parts of an early translation of Theon’s commentary on the Almagest, of which we otherwise only have a brief reference in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Kitāb al-Fihrist. The treatise includes 15 figures that can all be found in Theon’s commentary but not in the Almagest itself.
Text: [ Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ayasofya 4830]
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Bibl.: Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist (ed. FlügelGustav Flügel, Kitâb al-Fihrist, 2 vols, Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–1872, vol. I, p. 258:16; ed. SayyidAyman Fu’ād Sayyid, Kitāb al-Fihrist li-Abī l-Faraj Muḥammad bin Isḥāq al-Nadīm (allafa-hu sana 377 H), 4 vols, London: Al Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2009, vol. III, p. 189:5; tr. DodgeBayard Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm. A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 2 vols, New York / London: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 620). — Franz Rosenthal, ‘Al-Kindī and Ptolemy’, in Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida, Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1956, vol. II, pp. 436–456; GAS VIFuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, Vol. VI: Astronomie bis ca. 430 H., Leiden: Brill, 1978, pp. 90 (no. 4) and 153; ʿAzmī Ṭaha al-Sayyid Aḥmad, Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī. Fī l-Ṣināʿa al-ʿuẓmā, Cyprus: Dār al-shabāb, 1987; MAOSICBoris A. Rosenfeld and Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Mathematicians, Astronomers, and other Scholars of Islamic Civilization and their Works (7th–19th c.), Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA), 2003, p. 39 (no. 79, A1); BEAThomas Hockey (ed.), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 2 vols, Dordrecht: Springer, 2007 article ‘Kindī’ by Glen M. Cooper; Ulrich Rudolph (ed.), Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie. Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1. 8.-10. Jahrhundert, Basel: Schwabe, 2012, pp. 115–116 (supplemented English tr. Ulrich Rudolph, Rotraud Hansberger and Peter Adamson (eds), Philosophy in the Islamic World, vol. I: 8th-10th Centuries, Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2017, pp. 176–177); Emma Gannagé, ‘Al-Kindī, Ptolemy (and Nicomachus of Gerasa) Revisited’, Studia graeco-arabica 6 (2016), pp. 83–111; Maria Americo, An Analysis of Ninth-Century Reception of Claudius Ptolemy’s Astronomy in the Arabic Tradition, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2019.
Ed.: Critical edition in Aḥmad, pp. 115–224. English translation of Chapter VII in Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 216–223.
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