Abū Maʿshar
Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī was born in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, in 787, and died near Baghdad in 886. He worked at the Abbasid court a generation after Māshāʾallāh, inside the world the The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement had already built 1.
Tradition
Held byAbū Maʿšar on Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), 2 vols., Baghdad, 9th century
The later Arabic biographical tradition holds that he trained first as a scholar of hadith and took up astrology only in his forties, reportedly after a rivalry with the philosopher al-Kindī. This entry reports the story as transmitted, since it rests on later biographers and on no document contemporary with him.
Two books, and why they matter more than most
He wrote more than the two works held here, but these two carried the doctrine furthest.
The Kitāb al-Madkhal al-Kabīr, the Great Introduction to Astrology, is a comprehensive technical manual written in the mid-ninth century: the physical rationale for astrology, the zodiac, the planets, the aspects and the branches of practice 2. Abū Maʿshar himself later produced a shorter Abbreviation of it, which is the text edited alongside Adelard of Bath’s twelfth-century Latin translation in the edition cited here 2; see The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement.
The Kitāb al-Milal wa-d-Duwal, the Book of Religions and Dynasties, known in its Latin dress as De Magnis Coniunctionibus, is a different kind of work: a theory of historical change built on the periodic conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, graded by how far each conjunction has advanced through the four triplicities, and correlated with events of increasing scale, from a change of dynasty to the rise of a religion. The Latin translation was made probably at Toledo around the 1130s 1.
Correction
Commonly saidAbū Maʿshar's importance is that of a conduit, relaying Greek and Persian astrology to Latin Europe unchanged.
The conjunction theory of historical change is Abū Maʿshar’s own synthesis, built from material shared with earlier Sasanian and Hellenistic astrological historiography and organized into a systematic doctrine that is his 1. Treating him only as a channel erases the part of the work that is original.
The double translation, and what it produced
Both major works reached Latin Europe by more than one route. Adelard of Bath translated the shorter Abbreviation; the fuller Great Introduction was translated independently by John of Seville, working from the Arabic in the Iberian peninsula, giving Latin readers two overlapping routes into the same doctrine 23. That duplication is itself informative: it means a discrepancy between two Latin readings of Abū Maʿshar can sometimes be checked against a second independent translation as well as against the Arabic, an unusual position for a medieval scientific text to be in.
Gap in the evidence
John of Seville has himself been confused in older scholarship with a distinct Toledo-based translator, John of Spain; the two have been disentangled in the modern literature, but which specific works belong to which John is not settled for every text attributed to either name 3. See The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement for what this site verifies about that translator generation.
Between the two works together, Abū Maʿshar’s astrology, both the technical manual and the historical doctrine, is among the most consequential single channels by which this site’s subject reached the Latin West. The Zīj al-Sindhind and The Tetrabiblos document others; his was one of the widest, because his works were copied, translated twice over, and printed repeatedly once print arrived.
References
- Abū Maʿshar, trans. Charles Burnett, Keiji Yamamoto, Michio Yano. Abū Maʿšar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, together with the Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 15. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994 (composed c. 850 CE), viii + 170 pp.. ISBN 9789004099975 recordprimary source
Critical edition and translation of Abū Maʿshar's own abridgement of his larger Introduction, printed alongside Adelard of Bath's twelfth-century Latin translation of it, so the Arabic original and its Latin vehicle sit in one volume. Record confirmed against the contemporary review in the Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes and the publisher's own catalogue entry.
- Abū Maʿshar, trans. Keiji Yamamoto, Charles Burnett. Abū Maʿšar on Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), 2 vols.. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 33. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (composed 886 CE). ISBN 9789004117334 recordprimary source
Volume I edits and translates the Arabic Kitāb al-Milal wa-d-Duwal; volume II edits the Latin translation, made probably at Toledo around the 1130s and known as De Magnis Coniunctionibus. The great-conjunctions doctrine of dynastic and religious change, worked out from the slow cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, is Abū Maʿshar's own synthesis rather than a straight relay of a Greek or Sanskrit source. Record confirmed against the publisher's listing and independent library holdings.
- E. S. Kennedy, David Pingree. The Astrological History of Māshāʾallāh. Harvard Monographs in the History of Science, 5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. ISBN 9780674050259 recordscholarly
Edition, translation and analysis of the fragments of Māshāʾallāh's Arabic historical-astrological writing, transmitted through a Latin epitome and a Byzantine Greek excerpt. The primary source for the astrologers' role in the 762 election of the moment for founding Baghdad. ISBN and publisher record confirmed against Harvard University Press's own series listing and the contemporary review in the British Journal for the History of Science.
- Charles Burnett. John of Seville and John of Spain: A mise au point. Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 44, 2002, 59-78. doi:10.1484/J.BPM.2.303854 recordpeer reviewed
Untangles John of Seville, translator of Arabic astrological texts including Abū Maʿshar's larger Introduction, from John of Spain (Johannes Hispanus), a distinct Toledo-based translator the two are often conflated with in older scholarship. Reprinted with corrections in Burnett's collected volume "Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages" (Variorum, Farnham, 2009), article VI. DOI confirmed by resolution to Brepols Online, the journal's publisher.