Māshāʾallāh
Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī worked as an astrologer at the Abbasid court in the second half of the eighth century, one generation before Abū Maʿshar and squarely inside the opening decades of the The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement. The Arabic biographical tradition identifies him as Jewish, from Basra 1.
The founding of Baghdad
He is recorded, together with members of the Nawbakht family, as one of the astrologers who read the sky for Caliph al-Manṣūr to elect a moment for laying the foundations of Baghdad in 762, a piece of electional astrology practised as a matter of state business 1. This entry does not reproduce the specific planetary degrees attached to that chart in popular retellings, because that level of detail has not been checked here against the edition that would confirm it.
Tradition
Held byMāshāʾallāh, The Astrological History of Māshāʾallāh, Baghdad, second half of the 8th century
Historical astrology of this kind treated the moment a city or a dynasty began as a chart in its own right, one whose planetary configuration could be read for the future of the thing founded, on the same principles used for a person’s nativity.
What survives, and by what route
Very little of Māshāʾallāh’s own Arabic text of his historical-astrological writing survives directly. What does survive is preserved through a later Latin epitome and a separate Byzantine Greek excerpt, which is why the modern edition of his astrological history is a work of reconstruction from two independent derivative witnesses 1. Alongside this, a substantial body of shorter treatises on nativities, interrogations and elections circulated under his name and reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century, the stage documented in The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement.
Gap in the evidence
How much of the doctrine of historical astrology that Māshāʾallāh practised, and that Abū Maʿshar later systematized around the cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, descends from a specifically Sasanian Persian astrological historiography is argued rather than settled in the secondary literature, and this entry does not adjudicate it.
Why he belongs at the start of this stage
The most technically influential astrologer of the early Abbasid period was Abū Maʿshar, a generation later. Māshāʾallāh is, on the evidence available, the earliest named astrologer whose work connects a specific, dated political event, the foundation of the Abbasid capital, to the practice this site describes, and the earliest point at which Arabic horoscopic astrology and the translation movement that fed it are visible together in one surviving record 12.
References
- 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.
- Dimitri Gutas. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries). Arabic Thought and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. ISBN 9780415061339 recordscholarly
The standard account of why the translation movement happened, not only that it did: patronage, the Abbasid ideology of universal empire, and the demand for astrology and astronomy as an early driver alongside medicine and philosophy. Paperback ISBN and pagination (xvii + 230 pp.) confirmed against the Cambridge Core review of the 1998 printing; a hardback impression carries ISBN 9780415061322.