Greek Astronomy and the Medieval Arabic Tradition

摘要

In 1957, two brilliant historians met to consider an archaic manuscript written by a 14th-century Arab astronomer. The document they held in their hands was almost completely unknown to most historians of science, who would have considered it to be unbelievable had they known of its existence. It had been written by a timekeeper of the central Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a religious man by the name of Ibn al-Shatir. What was remarkable about the timekeeper's text was that it anticipated some of the ideas of Copernicus more than 100 years before the Polish astronomer was born. When the two historians first presented the writings of Ibn al-Shatir to their colleagues, they were greeted with responses that ranged from total disbelief to total denial-some historians even walked out of public lectures when the manuscript was mentioned. The troubling thing about the discovery was that it suggested that Copernicus might not have come up with his ideas by himself. Some historians took refuge in the notion that Copernicus and Ibn al-Shatir had arrived at the same place independently, and so this was merely another instance of "independent discovery." In time, however, it became clear that there was a hidden connection between the works of Copernicus and those of medieval Islamic astronomers. The acknowledgment of Ibn al-Shatir's work also meant that at some level the Renaissance-which was at least partly inspired by the Copernican revolution-was not a purely European creation.