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Revealing Manuscripts and Embedded Texts: The Case of Arabic Optics
| Dr. Elaheh Kheirandish |
This paper
presents the result of a recent study on two Arabic optical compositions,
with a focus on their manuscript copies and “embedded” texts: The first text
is “The Book of Optics and Burning Mirrors, composed by Ahmad ibn ‘Isa”
(3rd/9th c.?); the second is titled, “The Rectification of Errors and
Problems of Euclid’s Book Called Optics” by Ya‘qub al-Kindi (d. ca.
257/870). The former, whose author’s identity and dates remain little known,
is available in two Arabic manuscript copies and a Hebrew transcription; the
latter, apparently composed later than al-Kindi’s De aspectibus, surviving
only in Latin, is known through a single manuscript.
The manuscripts of Ibn ‘Isa and al-Kindi’s compositions contain the
following revealing features: Ibn ‘Isa’s Optics, exposes through one of its
two Arabic manuscripts, a “note” on refraction dictated by Ibn al-Haytham;
al-Kindi’s Rectification reveals, besides a much better known author and
date, a text long considered a “Correction” following many manuscript copies
of the Recension of Euclid’s Optics by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 672/1274);
the manuscripts of both optical compositions also capture, as part of their
alternative formulation of the Euclidean visual-ray hypothesis, a striking
passage corresponding to the unique copy of the [pseudo-]Euclidean De
speculis, a text whose comparative context will be discussed as part of an
ongiong project.
The paper concludes that: (1) The Ibn ‘Isa manuscript preserving Ibn
al-Haytham’s dictation is not “incomplete” as catalogued, but rather,
imbedding the “note” onto a few folios just before the text’s ending; (2)
The al-Kindi manuscript raises transmission questions beyond correspondence
to the so-called “Correction”, and (3) The close wording of De speculis and
the two compositions may be related to the defective nature of the
manuscript tradition in both the Greek and Arabic Euclidean texts. |
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