Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World

311 Pages·2010·2.51 MB·English

by  John Freely

ALSO BY JOHN FREELY
Strolling Through Istanbul (with Hilary Sumner Boyd) Strolling Through Athens
Strolling Through Venice
Istanbul: The Imperial City
Inside the Seraglio: The Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul
The Western Shores of Turkey
The Lost Messiah: In Search of the Mystical Rabbi, Sabbatai Sevi
Jem Sultan, The Adventures of a Captive Turkish Prince in Renaissance Europe
John Freely's Istanbul
The Emergence of Modern Science, East and West

To Toots, as always
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Introduction
1. Ionia: The First Physicists
2. Classical Athens: The School of Hellas
3. Hellenistic Alexandria: The Museum and the Library
4. From Athens to Rome, Constantinople, and Jundishapur
5. Baghdad's House of Wisdom: Greek into Arabic
6. The Islamic Renaissance
7. Cairo and Damascus
8. Al-Andalus, Moorish Spain
9. From Toledo to Palermo: Arabic into Latin
10. Paris and Oxford I: Reinterpreting Aristotle
11. Paris and Oxford II: The Emergence of European Science
12. From Byzantium to Italy: Greek into Latin
13. The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres
14. The Debate over the Two World Systems
15. The Scientific Revolution
16. Samarkand to Istanbul: The Long Twilight of Islamic Science
17. Science Lost and Found
18. Harran: The Road to Baghdad

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
7 The Greek World in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries
B.C.
9 The use of a gnomon in determining the seasons (from
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution)
29 The apparent motion of typical stars in the northern sky
over a two-hour period, where the center of rotation is the
north celestial pole, the projection of the north geographic
pole (from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution)
29 The apparent motion of the sun among the constellations;
the effect is due to the fact that the observer, on the earth, is
orbiting around the sun (from James B. Kaler, Astronomy!)
30 The tilt of the earth's axis as the cause of the seasons (from
Robert H. Baker, Astronomy: An Introduction)
31 Above: The apparent motion of the sun through the
constellations Aries and Taurus. Below: The apparent motion
of Mars through the constellations Aries and Taurus,
showing its retrograde motion (from Thomas S. Kuhn, The
Copernican Revolution)
34 Aristotle's cosmology (from Petrus Apianus, Cosmographia
per Gemma Phrysius Restituta [Antwerp, 1539]).
41 Measurement of the earth's circumference by Eratosthenes
(from Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, Introduction to Astronomy)
45 Stellar parallax (from Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin,
Introduction to Astronomy)
46 From Aristarchus's On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and
the Moon. Above: The lunar dichotomy. Below: A lunar
eclipse diagram (from Albert Van Helden, Measuring the
Universe)
47 The conic sections (from Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin,
Introduction to Astronomy)
48 The epicycle theory of Apollonius (from G. E. R. Lloyd,
Greek Science After Aristotle)
49 Inventions of Hero's. Above: Temple doors opened by fire
on an altar. Below: A steam engine (from G. E. R. Lloyd,
Greek Science After Aristotle)
51 The precession of the equinoxes. Above: Precession caused
by the forces of the sun and the moon on the earth's
equatorial bulge. Below: The path of the north celestial pole
in the celestial sphere (from Robert H. Baker, Astronomy: An
Introduction)
54 Ptolemy's concept of the equant (from A. Pannekoek, A
History of Astronomy)
55 A simplified version of Ptolemy's planetary model (from G.
E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle)
56 Ptolemy's experimental investigation of refraction (from G.
E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle)
73 The Islamic World ca. 800.
A.D.
88 The constellation Perseus shown in al-Sufi's Treatise on the
Constellations of the Fixed Stars, from a tenth-century Arabic
manuscript (from the British Library, Or. Ms. 5323 f.21v).
93 A water-raising machine, from a fourteenth-century Arabic
manuscript of al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices (Bodleian Library, Oxford; Peter
Whitfield, Landmarks in Western Science)
133 Development of the Hindu-Arabic numbers (from Carl
Boyer, History of Mathematics)
163 The formation of primary and secondary rainbows (from
Isaac Newton's Opticks)
186 The Copernican heliocentric theory, De Revolutionibus,
1543 (from Angus Armitage, Copernicus and Modern
Astronomy)
194 A model of the Copernican system from Thomas Digges's
A Prognostication Everlasting, 1576 (from Peter Whitfield,
Landmarks in Western Science)
198 The Tychonic system (from Tycho Brahe, De Mundi
aetherei recen- tioribus phaenomenis…, Uraniborg, 1588; Kitty
Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler)
203 Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion (from Kitty
Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler)
220 An illustration from Newton's Principia showing a
projectile in orbit around the earth.
232 Takiyuddin's Istanbul Observatory (from the Shahanshahi-
namah, sixteenth century, MS No. 1404, Istanbul University
Library).
INTRODUCTION
Modern science traces its origins back to ancient Greece, beginning with the first
philosophers of nature in the sixth century B.C. Greek science flourished for more than a
millennium, ending with the collapse of classical civilization in the early Christian era,
when virtually all the cities of the Greco-Roman world were utterly destroyed,
beginning the Dark Ages of western Europe. And yet a thousand years later Greek
classics inspired the Renaissance and brought about the rebirth of science. When
Copernicus published his sun-centered planetary theory in 1543, he was reviving the
work of a Greek astronomer who had proposed the same idea some eighteen centuries
earlier.
How did ancient Greek science survive and by what means was it transmitted to
western Europe? The answer to those questions is the main theme of this book, a story
that begins on the Aegean shore of Asia Minor at Miletus, where the first Greek
physicists emerged, influenced by ancient Mesopotamian lore in astronomy and
mathematics. The story then moves in turn to classical Athens, Hellenistic Alexandria,
imperial Rome, Byzantine Constantinople, Nestorian Jundishapur, Abbasid Baghdad,
Fatimid Cairo and Damascus, Muslim Cordoba, Toledo of the Reconquista, Norman
Palermo, and Latin Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century, setting the stage for the
European scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finally to
Mongol Samarkand and Ottoman Istanbul, tracking the last peak of Islamic science and
its long decline.
The story has never been fully told in a book for the general reader, and there is not
even a specialist work on the subject as a whole, as I learned when I began my career as
a physicist and started reading about the history of science. My first studies in this field
began in 1966-67, when I had a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford under the tutelage of
Alistair Crombie, who pioneered the study of how Greek science came to western
Europe in translation from Arabic into Latin after having been preserved and developed
in the Islamic world. This led me to study the Islamic renaissance of the eighth and
ninth centuries, when the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical works into
Arabic under the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad began the first stage in the journey that
would eventually lead to the emergence of science in Europe. According to Dimitri