The Arabic Version of Euclid’s Optics

Like all classical Greek texts on science, Euclid's works on optics initially came to the West mainly through medieval Arabic texts and commentaries. This book presents a critical translation of an Arabic texts and of Arabic commentaries on the text, and places the whole in a historical context.

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Like all classical Greek texts on science, Euclid's works on optics initially came to the West mainly through medieval Arabic texts and commentaries. While several Greek versions of the Optika were discovered and translated as early as the sixteenth century, sorting out what may have been Euclid's original has not been easy. This book presents a critical translation of an Arabic texts and of Arabic commentaries on the text, and places the whole in a historical context. The Optics is particularly interesting in that Euclid's text was considerably transformed in the process of translation into Arabic "equivalents"; in addition, several of the Arabic editions of Euclid's text (c. 300 BC) contained liberal admixtures of a much later book by Ptolemy (c. 200 AD) of the same title. What was referred to as "Euclid's Optics," the "Kitab Uqlidis fi Ikhtilaf al-manazir," thus became as much an exposition of an Arabic version of a visual theory as a translation of Euclid's ideas on the subject. In preparing this edition, Dr. Kheirandish has thus not only sorted out the various manuscript versions of Al-Manazir, but also related and unrelated texts that were often confused with it.