Archimedes among the Ottomans: An updated survey

Abstract

This paper provides a survey of Archimedean material that was produced and disseminated during the Ottoman period, mainly in the city of Istanbul. Moving from the founding figures of Ottoman science such as Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī and Muḥammad al-Fanārī in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Muṣṭafā Ṣidqī in the eighteenth-century, the article discusses Ottoman work in several areas of Archimedean mathematics and science: 1) the number Pi; 2) Hydrostatics and Specific Gravity of Elements, for which an edition of a unique manuscript by Taqī al-Dīn al-Rāṣid is given in an appendix; 3) Geometry (e.g. the sphere and cylinder, squaring the circle, trisecting an acute angle, heptasecting a circle, and spiral lines). From an examination of the content of texts and extant manuscript witnesses, it is clear that Ottoman work on the Archimedean corpus owed a great debt to émigré scholars and was closely connected with major Islamic centers oflearning such as the Marāgha Observatory and the Samarqand School; at the same time Ottoman scholars themselves made numerous contributions to the Archimedean heritage.