Note 329 — Chapter III · THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MOSLEMS

The Astronomy contains: (1) in the preamble, a chapter describing the world, first the earth as a whole and then the various seas; (2) among the astronomical tables, a table of the latitudes and longitudes of places in the oikoumene. The geographical chapter was edited and translated into French by Reinaud in the introduction to his Géogr. d’Aboulféda, vol. i, 1848 (pp. cclxxxiii-ccxc), and more recently into Latin by Nallino in his great edition of Al-Battānī’s Astronomy. Nallino contends that it was drawn from a much altered version of a Greco-Syrian Ptolemy and that Lelewel and Reinaud were mistaken in thinking that its origin was non-Ptolemaic.

Al-Battānī says that he drew on a certain Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ for his astronomical tables. This was not the work of the same title by Al-Khwārizmī (see the preceding note), though its author undoubtedly derived some of his data from Al-Khwārizmī’s Kitāb as well as from the Greco-Syrian version of Ptolemy (Al-Battānī’s Astronomy, Nallino’s edit., pt. ii, 1907, pp. 209–211).