Articles From Our Experts

Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq: a Medieval Arab scholar who transformed his understanding of ancient Greek medical texts into manuals for the benefit of many successive generations of students.

The sources of the British Library’s Arabic scientific manuscripts are many and various. Here we discover an individual who contributed to the collection and lived an adventurous life in London and the Middle East.

During the early ʿAbbāsid period (ninth century CE), a diverse group of scholars collaborated on the long-term project of translating an elaborate work of pure geometry dealing with the properties of the parabola, ellipse and hyperbola – Apollonius’ Conics.

How geophysicists working in the Gulf were able to contribute in the 1930s to the scientific community’s understanding of the earth’s magnetic field.

The words camphor, lemon, syrup and tamarind all derive from Arabic formularies – books in which Arabic-speaking physicians and pharmacists preserved and adapted the knowledge of earlier civilisations and presented new drugs to the public.

Today’s leaders look to their medical, economic, military, and other expert advisers, but historically rulers have also consulted astrologers, dream-interpreters, and specialists in other forms of divination and occult sciences.

Considered deadly to the “European constitution”, the hot and humid climate of the Gulf was blamed for the deaths of countless British officials in the early nineteenth century.

During WWII food shortages in the Middle East caused by locust swarms were tackled by a largely forgotten, but ultimately successful war supported by British administrators in the Gulf.

Certain collections within the British Library’s manuscript holdings represent dark links between Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial and military activities, and its acquisition of cultural and intellectual heritage.

In AD 137, Ptolemy compiled a catalogue of forty-eight constellations containing 1022 stars. ʽAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī revised critically Ptolemy’s catalogue, added new stars and identified those appearing in the Arabic folk tradition.

How and why did the British Library come to hold 14,000 Arabic manuscripts within its collections?

Six videos demonstrating the replication of a specific eighteenth-century manuscript's binding by the British Library's conservator, Flavio Marzo.

During a period often characterised as one of decay and decline, the Andaluso-Tunisian astronomer Ibn al-Raqqām wrote his Risālah fī ‘ilm al-ẓilāl, the most important treatise on sundials of the Islamic West. The instruments he describes are much more elaborate and sophisticated than the surviving examples of Medieval sundials from al-Andalus and the Maghrib.

How did an illustrated Arabic manuscript on the Art of War come into the possession of an illegitimate son of a King; his extraordinary and ultimately tragic life leading to its acquisition by the British Library?

Mathematicians in medieval Islamic societies were the first to grasp the real significance of Menelaus’ Spherics. They followed Menelaus’ approach to spherical geometry and went on to develop spherical trigonometry as an independent branch of mathematics.

Fifteenth-century Cairo was the place to be for astronomers and mathematicians. One scholar left his particular mark in a surprising variety of ways on the manuscript records of the period.

The peoples of the Islamic world excelled at designing and building water-clocks as these manuscripts show.

In the medieval and early modern periods, the same group of individuals who developed new mathematical methods and theories were often directly involved in the historical, philological preservation of ancient texts.

A 1787 letter requesting plants from the Persian Gulf for a newly established botanical garden in Kolkata illuminates the way in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge became part of the EIC’s global economic endeavour.

In the ninth century, Ḥunayn ibn Ishāq decided to explain Greek terminology, instead of simply adopting it, in his translations of the medical treatises of Galen. In doing this he helped establish Arabic as an international language of science.