The Arabic edition of Euclid's Elements

Time: Monday December 5, 10.15 - 12.00
Venue: P. A. Munch's building, seminar room 10 (ground floor)

In addition to her open lecture, Sonja Brentjes will participate in a seminar where we look at the Greek, Arabic and Latin texts of selected passages and discuss the transmission of Euclid’s Elements, on Sunday December 4th. If you wish to join the seminar please contact Amund Bjørsnøs - amund.bjorsnos@ikos.uio.no.

The Elements of Euclid, written or compiled in Alexandria around 300 BC, is one of the truly foundational texts in the history of human intellectual activity. It has been continuously read and commented on for over 2000 years, and was used as a textbook in schools and universities until at least the 19th century.

The Elements was written in Greek, at a time when this language was the only language west of India to produce scientific treatises. During the 8th century AD this was about to change. The Greek philosophical and scientific tradition had then long ago ceased to exist as a living tradition, and the last innovative work on geometry had been written as much as a thousand years earlier, by Apollonius of Perga around 200 BC.

Euclid’s old city, Alexandria, was taken by the Muslim armies in 642. In 762, the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty, Baghdad, was founded. Over the next centuries, and lasting over a millennium, a distinct Arabic and Islamic culture evolved that was to revive the long-dead Greek sciences and develop them further.

In fact one of the earliest scientific texts to have been translated into Arabic was the Elements of Euclid, probably during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809). The text was subsequently thoroughly studied, the translation revised several times during the next century, numerous commentaries was written and research in geometry was greatly advanced.

In light of its importance in the Islamic tradition and in Europe, where it was translated into Latin during the 12th century (mainly from Arabic), it is rather puzzling that this text has not received more attention than it has. One of the more specific reasons is perhaps that the editor of the Greek text, the Danish philologist Johan Heiberg, declared that the Arabic tradition was irrelevant for establishing a critical edition of the Greek text. In the heyday of Classical Philology there was no room for deviations from the straight path.

Until this day there is no critical edition of the Arabic Elements, and it has never appeared in print; instead we have a rich manuscript tradition that has only recently begun to be studied in earnest.

Sonja Brentjes' main scholarly focus has been on the study of the transmission of Greek mathematical works into Islamic societies and Medieval Latin Europe, in particular Euclid’s Elements. During the last ten years, her research also included the study of early modern exchanges of knowledge between travellers and scholars from Europe and Islamic societies in western Asia; investigation of the cultural contexts of the mathematical and other sciences in specific Islamic societies, such as their role in the educational institutions of Egypt and Syria, the practices of courtly patronage and the relationship between the arts and the sciences.

Her main publications on Euclid’s Elements (only abbreviated refs needed, thanks to Google)

‘An exciting new Arabic version of Euclid's Elements: MS Mumbai, Mullâ Fîrûz R.1.6’ (Revue d'histoire des mathématiques, 12, 2006)

‘Observations on Hermann of Carinthia’s Version of the Elements and its Relation to the Arabic Transmission’ (Science in Context, 14, 2001)

‘Two comments on Euclid’s Elements? On the relation between the Arabic text attributed to al-Nayrizi and the Latin text ascribed to Anaritius’ (Centaurus, 43, 2001)

‘Ahmad al-Karabisi's commentary on Euclid's Elements’ (Sic itur ad astra. Festschrift in honor of Paul Kunitzsch, ed. Folkerts and Lorch, 2000)

‘On the Persian Transmission of Euclid’s Elements’ (La science dans le monde iranien, ed. Vesel et al., 1998)

‘Textzeugen und Hypothesen zum arabischen Euklid in der Uberlieferung von al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf b. Matar (zwischen 786 und 833)’ (Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 47, 1994)

‘Varianten einer Hajjaj-Version von Buch II der Elemente’ (Vestigia Mathematica. Studies … in honour of H.L.L. Busard, ed. Folkerts and Hogendijk, 1993)

Latest papers/publications
‘The study of geometry according to al-Sakhawi (Cairo, 15th c) and al-Muhibbi (Damascus, 17th c)’ (Munich 2008)

‘Courtly Patronage of the Ancient Sciences in Post-Classical Islamic Societies’ (Madrid 2008)

‘Euclid's Elements, Courtly Patronage and Princely Education’ (London 2008)

‘Reflections on the Role of the Exact Sciences in Islamic Culture and Education between the Twelfth and the Fifteenth Centuries’ (Casablanca 2007)

‘Multilingualism of Early Modern Ottoman and Western European Maps’ (Brussels 2007)

‘Astronomy – a temptation: encounters between Western Euope and the Middle East’ (Munich 2007)

Forthcoming papers
‘The Interplay of Science, Art and Literature in Islamic Societies before 1700’ (New Delhi 2009)

‘Safavid art, science, and courtly education in the seventeenth century’ (Tehran 2009)

‘Giacomo Gastaldi's maps of Anatolia - the evolution of a shared Venetian-Ottoman cultural space?’ (Boston 2009)

 

Academic profile and bibliography adapted from the website of Departamento de Filosofía y Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, University of Seville

See further:

Sonja Brentjes' biography

Sonja Brentjes' papers (downloads available).