Work C.1.13
al-Khāzimī
اختصار المجسطي
Ikhtiṣār al-Majisṭī
A summary of the Almagest, presumably written in the second half of the 11th century, which provides textual explanations and mathematical proofs for a rather limited set of passages. Details of observations and calculations are not discussed. Numerous figures are provided, which were not generally copied from the Almagest itself, but no tables are included. According to the preface, the author’s purpose is to make Ptolemy’s text less verbose, to adjust the language to current usage, to avoid repetition of propositions (ashkāl), to reduce the tables to their principles, to shorten the treatment of the sector figure (Theorem of Menelaos) and the theory of ratios to what is actually needed, to use sines for spherical astronomical calculations rather than chords, and in general to make the work more accessible and easier to memorise. Alternative titles: Mukhtaṣar al-Majisṭī, Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī al-mukhtaṣar, Kitāb al-Majisṭī.
Content: This summary follows the thirteen books of the Almagest itself. It also generally follows the chapters of the Almagest, but does not number these and in most cases reformulates the titles. Occasionally chapter titles were added, for example in order to introduce auxiliary theorems (muqaddamāt). The chapter titles are also provided for the large number of chapters for which no summary of the contents is given at all; this holds for all chapters containing only a table in the original Almagest, but also for many others. In some cases al-Khāzimī indicates explicitly that this concerns ‘branches’ or ‘subsections’ (furūʿ) of topics that were discussed earlier on. In other cases he takes together topics from different Almagest chapters under a single heading. Book I is preceded by a short preface, a section on the basic concepts (muṣādārāt) of the planetary models and their motions, and a section on spherical trigonometry, introducing both sines and tangents. Book IV is structured entirely differently from the Almagest itself and consists of an untitled section on lunar observations and the two irregularities in the lunar motion, followed by titled sections on finding the first lunar equation and the lunar mean motion in latitude. Book XI consists only of a reference to Book X. Book XII discusses in detail the preliminaries for the retrograde motions of the planets and the Theorem of Apollonius as found in Almagest XII.1, but these are followed only by short sections ‘On the retrogradation’ and ‘On the exposition (tabyīn) of the largest distance of the inferior planets’.
The author. It cannot be definitely decided whether the author’s name was Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Saʿīdī al-Khāzimī or al-Ḥāzimī. The earliest manuscript, Kayseri, Raşit Efendi Kütüphanesi, 1230, as well as Mashhad, Holy Shrine, 5387 write al-Khāzimī consistently; the title page of Oxford, BL, Hunt. 547 writes al-Ḥāzimī, while the very late copy Mashhad, Holy Shrine, 12297 mistakenly renders the name as al-Khārizmī. Sezgin (GAS VI, n. 1) mentions some other works by the author. An important collective manuscript extant at Istanbul University includes on ff. 1v–48r extracts (multaqaṭāt) from an astronomical book by Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Khāzimī that mentions observations made in Isfahan in 453/1061 (see Fuat Sezgin, Manuscript of Arabic Mathematical and Astronomical Treatises. Reproduced from MS A.Y. 314, Istanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 2001, pp. vi–vii and 6–101). A three-page treatise Maqāla fī Ittikhādh kura tadūru bi-dhāti-hā bi-ḥaraka musāwiya li-ḥarakat al-falak is attributed to al-Khāzimī in MS Damascus, Assad Library, 4871, ff. 73r–74r (see F. Jamil Ragep and Edward S. Kennedy, ‘A Description of Ẓāhiriyya (Damascus) MS 4871: A Philosophical and Scientific Collection’, Journal for the History of Arabic Science 5 (1981), pp. 85–108, esp. pp. 95–96) and to al-Ḥāzimī in Oxford, BL, Thurston 3, ff. 118r–119r, but was convincingly shown to be by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī (fl. c. 1120) in Richard P. Lorch, ‘Al-Khāzinī’s “Sphere that Rotates by Itself”’, Journal for the History of Arabic Science 4 (1980), pp. 287–329.
Text: [Oxford, BL, Hunt. 547]
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Bibl.: SuterHeinrich Suter, Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber und ihre Werke, Leipzig: Teubner, 1900, p. 202 (no. 120); GAS VIFuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. Vol. VI: Astronomie bis ca. 430 H., Leiden: Brill, 1978, p. 92 (no. 23 and n. 1); Richard P. Lorch, Thābit ibn Qurra. On the Sector-Figure and Related Texts, Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 2001, p. 352; 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. 166 (no. 410, A1).
Ed.: None.
MSS |
Kayseri, Raşit Efendi Kütüphanesi, 1230, ff. 73r–96v (528/1133)
Mashhad, Holy Shrine, 12297, pp. 1–23 (1307/1890)
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