Ptolemy S Almagest

Ptolemy's Almagest is one of the most influential scientific works in history. A masterpiece of technical exposition, it was the basic textbook of astronomy for more than a thousand years, and still is the main source for our knowledge of ancient astronomy. This translation, based on the standard Greek text of Heiberg, makes the work accessible to English readers in an intelligible and reliable form. It contains numerous corrections derived from medieval Arabic translations and extensive footnotes that take account of the great progress in understanding the work made in this century, due to the discovery of Babylonian records and other researches. It is designed to stand by itself as an interpretation of the original, but it will also be useful as an aid to reading the Greek text.

The Almagest is by far the greatest work in astronomy in ancient times. In a massive series of thirteen books, Ptolemy shows how every detail of the motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars can be expressed using geometrical models that can be used to compute celestial positions with remarkable accuracy The present selection covers all the essential features of Ptolemy s treatment of the heavens, omitting only more difficult and abstruse matters such as the moon s motion and the calculation of eclipses. In the interest of conciseness, development of planetary theories is restricted to two planets, one inferior (Venus) and one superior (Mars). Ptolemy s text is accompanied by extensive notes and introductions that are aimed at making the book accessible to students encountering Ptolemy for the first time. This edition is designed to provide everything needed for a one-semester course, or it can be a component of a more general course on planetary theory or history of astronomy."

The Almagesti minor is one of the most important works of medieval astronomy. The Almagesti minor, probably written in northern France circa 1200, is a Latin summary of the first six books of Ptolemy's astronomical masterpiece, the Almagest. Also known to modern scholars as the Almagestum parvum, the Almagesti minor provides a clear example of how a medieval scholar understood Ptolemy's authoritative writing on cosmology, spherical astronomy, solar theory, lunar theory, and eclipses. The author incorporated the findings of astronomers of the Islamic world, such as al-Battāanīi, into the framework of Ptolemaic astronomy, and he altered the format and style of Ptolemy's astronomy in order to make it accord with the author's ideals of a mathematical science, which were primarily derived from Euclid's Elements. The Almagesti minor had a profound effect upon astronomical writing throughout the 13th-15th centuries, including the work of Georg Peurbach and Johannes Regiomontanus. In this first volume of the Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus series, Henry Zepeda offers not only a critical edition of this little-studied text, but also a translation of it into English, analysis of both the text and its geometrical figures, and a thorough study of the work's origins, sources, and long-lasting influence.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

This publication would not have been what it is without the help of many institutions and people, which I acknowledge most gratefully. I thank the Central Library and Documentation Center, Iran, and its director, Mr. Iraji Afshar, for permission to publish photo graphs of that part of ms. 392 of the Shrine Library, Meshhed, containing Diocles' treatise. I also thank the authorities of the Shrine Library, and especially Mr. Ahmad GolchTn-Ma'anT, for their cooperation in providing photographs of the manuscript. Mr. GolchTn Ma'anT also sent me, most generously, a copy of his catalogue of the astronomical and mathematical manuscripts of the Shrine Library. I am grateful to the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and the Universiteits-Bibliotheek, Leid'en, for providing me with microfilms of manuscripts I wished to consult, and to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, for granting me access to its manuscripts. The text pages in Arabic script and the Index of Technical Terms were set by a computer-assisted phototypesetting system, using computer programs developed at the University of Washington and a high-speed image-generation phototypesetting device. A continuous stream of text on punched cards was fed through the Katib formatting program, which broke up the text into lines and pages and arranged the section numbers and apparatus on each page. Output from Katib was fed through the compositor program Hattat to create a magnetic tape for use on the VideoComp phototypesetter.