A Hitherto Unknown Arabic Manuscript of Thābit b. Qurra’s Version of the Almagest

Abstract

Until recently, only two Arabic translations of Ptolemy’s Almagest were thought to have survived, one by al-Ḥajjāj made under the caliph al-Maʾmūn and one by Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn, later revised by Thābit b. Qurra, prepared in the second half of the third/ninth century. In the 2010s, a third Arabic version of the Almagest, authored by Thābit b. Qurra alone, was first shown by Dirk Grupe to be extant in a partial Latin translation in a Dresden manuscript, and then in an Arabic manuscript in Jaipur that breaks off after chapter VI.2. We introduce here a second manuscript of this Thābit version, extant in the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, which is around four centuries older than the Jaipur manuscript, was copied from a manuscript by the hand of al-Bīrūnī, and extends the text till the middle of Book VIII. After a general introduction, we provide a detailed description of this manuscript.