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Three singular treatises from Yemeni manuscripts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
I should like to discuss briefly three Arabic treatises that are quite different from one another with regard to content, authorship, and provenance. They do, however, share one interesting feature. Each one survives in just two manuscript copies, both in a Yemeni hand, the one in Arabic script, the other also in the Arabic language but written in Hebrew characters. The circumstances of their survival are instructive concerning the intellectual histories of both Jews and Muslims in the Yemen, and especially with regard to the relationships that obtained between these two communities. We may also add that none of these treatises, each of which is of some interest to its respective field, has been the subject of even a cursory study.
- Type
- Notes and Communications
- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 568 - 571
- Copyright
- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1991
References
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13 Their number may be expected to grow dramatically now that the awesome treasures of Russian libraries are again accessible. We shall here refer only to some additional Yemeni transcriptions that we listed in our monograph (abovė, n. 5.), 23–9, including copies or fragments of Euclid, Simplicius's commentary to Euclid, Ikhwān al-Ṣafā, Thābit b. Qurra's Tashīl al-Majisṭī, the z;ī jes of Kushyār, Ibn Yūnus, and al-Fārisī, Jābir b. Aflaḣ's Iṣlāḥal-Majisṭī, al-Bīrūnī's Tafhīm, and others; we may also mention that, since the publication of that work, we have discovered some more Yemeni transcriptions, the most noteworthy of which is a copy of Ibn al-Haytham's Fī Istikhrāj khaṭṭ niṣf al-nahār bi-ẓill wāḥid, which survives in only two Arabic-letter copies (Sezgin, GAS, v (Frankfurt, 1974), p. 368, no. 21).
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