4to. 430 pp., Arabic text, title in Arabic and English, illustrations, b/w & colour plates, publisher’s original wrapper, soiled and rubbed, light staining to endpaper, otherwise copy inside clean and in good condition, biblio., (of which 1 page is in English), University of Baghdad, Arab-Scientific Heritage Centre, 1977.

Synopsis

The volume contains a facsimile of a manuscript by ibn al-Razaz al-Jazari (1136–1206), who was an Iraqi polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia, who lived during the Islamic Golden Age (Middle Ages). He is best known for writing the Kitab fí ma’rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices along with instructions on how to construct them.