Kushyar ibn Labban al-Jili Ptolemaic Tradition and Islamic Innovation: The Astronomical Tables of Kushyar ibn Labban

prima edizione Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus - Texts (PALT 2) Kushyar ibn Labban al-Jili Ptolemaic Tradition and Islamic Innovation: The Astronomical Tables of Kushyar ibn Labban B. van Dalen (ed.) XVIII+614 p., 8 b/w ill. + 16 colour ill. + 159 pages of tables, 178 x 254 mm, 2021 ISBN: 978-2-503-59341-8 Languages: English, Arabic Hardback The publication is available. Retail price: EUR 160,00 This book provides a critical edition of the mathematical tables in the popular Arabic astronomical handbook of the Iranian astronomer Kushyar ibn Labban (c. 1000). The Jami? Zij (Comprehensive Zij) was a highly popular Arabic astronomical handbook with tables written by the Iranian astronomer Kushyar ibn Labban al-Jili around the year 1000. It belonged to an important category of works, modelled after Ptolemy's Almagest and Handy Tables, that allowed the practising astronomer/astrologer to carry out all necessary calculations of arcs on the celestial sphere and planetary positions, and ultimately to cast horoscopes. Around one hundred such works are extant, but only very few have been edited, translated or studied in detail. This book contains a full treatment of Book II of Kushyar's astronomical handbook centred around a critical edition of all the mathematical tables and their paratexts. It sets new standards for the edition of such tables by designing new types of apparatus entries for related variants in the tabular values. The introductory part describes the eight surviving manuscripts that transmit Kushyar's tables and establishes by a detailed survey that they represent at least three different versions of the Jami? Zij that in all likelihood stem from Kushyar himself. An extensive commentary with mathematical analyses uncovers numerous new details of the methods by which the tables were computed, the astronomical parameter values on which they were based, the sources for the tables, and their influence on later zijes. These results show how Kushyar, on the one hand, stayed firmly within the framework of the Ptolemaic tradition, but on the other introduced several types of innovations that later became common in Arabic and Persian astronomical handbooks. Benno van Dalen is one of the leading historians of Islamic astronomy and its transmission to China, India and Europe. He has published extensively on Arabic and Persian astronomical tables and their mathematical analysis. Van Dalen received his PhD from the University of Utrecht in 1993 and worked for more than ten years at the Institute for the History of Science in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2013 he has been one of the two research leaders of the project Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich. Table of Contents Preface Part I: Introduction Part II: Tables Part III: Texts Part IV: Commentary Quick references: zijes and technical concepts for the analysis of tables Indexes Bibliography