Abstracta Iranica

Imprimer cette page   Signaler cette page  

294
Tusi, Nasir al-Din
Taḥrīr-e Mutawassīṭāt. Introduction by Jafar Aghayanī-Chavoshī. Tehran, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, 1383/2005.

This book contains a facsimile edition of one of the numerous extant copies of the so-called ‘Middle Books’ as edited by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī. Āqāyānī-Čāvošī gave this manuscript to the National Library of Tabriz as a gift and wrote an introduction to its publication. Farīd Qāsemlū describes technical features of the codex and its connections to other copies of the ‘Middle Books’ in Iran. A short note finally clarifies that the manuscript published here is incomplete and in one instance the pagination is wrong (the page number 82 has been left out).

The manuscript contains the works by Euclid, Theodosios, Autolykos, Hypsikles, Aristarchos, and Archimedes found in most copies of the ‘Middle Books’ known to me. It also has Ṭūsī’s own text on spherics, Ṯābit b. Qurra’s collection called « Mafrūdāt », Menelaos’s Spherics, and Archimedes’s Book on the Sphere and the Cylinder. In contrast, it omits other works such as the treatise on the measurement of surfaces and solids by the Banū Mūsā found in other manuscripts of the Middle Books. Such and further differences are quite common characteristics of the many extant copies of the Middle Books. A serious investigation of this important corpus of texts and its historical relevance is urgently needed. The facsimile edition, while not being able to deliver this kind of results, is nonetheless a welcome contribution, since no critical edition of the entire corpus is in sight.

Sonja Brentjes

Pour citer cette recension

Sonja Brentjes. Tusi, Nasir al-Din, Taḥrīr-e Mutawassīṭāt. Introduction by Jafar Aghayanī-Chavoshī. Tehran, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, 1383/2005., Abstracta Iranica [En ligne], Volume 27, mis en ligne le : 2 janvier 2007. URL http://abstractairanica.revues.org/document6341.html. Consulté le 2 décembre 2008.