Below we illustrate a key explaining the various elements. What did al-‘Irāqī make of the hieroglyphs in the illustrations? Were they all completely invented? To begin to understand this, it is worth examining a group of images in the Book of the Seven Climes, now on display in the exhibition Egypt: faith after the pharaohs. In addition, some of the pages were embellished with pseudo-hieroglyphs, perhaps a code for the Arabic alphabet, not present in the original. 18v)Īl-‘Irāqī was usually careful to cite his sources by title and author, but the images in his work, at least in their 18th-century versions, show many changes and omissions. (left: İstanbul Arkeoloji Muzeleri Kütüphanesi, MS 1574, fol. The manuscript, now in Istanbul, could even be the one that al-‘Irāqī consulted.Īnother pair of matching illustrations in the same manuscripts, again showing numerous changes. It is attributed to the 4th-century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis and preserved in a copy made in Egypt in 1270, during al-‘Irāqī’s lifetime. Luckily, while al-‘Irāqī’s 13th-century autograph manuscript is lost, one source of his illustrations is known to us: the Book of Images ( Muṣḥaf al-ṣuwar). But how faithful was he in copying the illustrations for his book, and what changes were made as they were copied and re-copied during the five centuries of transmission linking al-‘Irāqī’s lost original to the 18th-century copy held at the British Library? Their mention in al-‘Irāqī’s title expressed an intention for his book to be all-encompassing.Īl-‘Irāqī reproduced illustrations from earlier Arabic alchemical texts and tried to decode their mysterious symbols and allegories, annotating the illustrations with his own interpretations.
The ‘climes’ (from which our word ‘climate’ is derived) are the seven latitudinal zones into which the astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy divided the inhabited world in the 2nd century AD. The Book of the Seven Climes is the earliest known study focused wholly on alchemical illustrations. His books were popular and survive in many copies, but almost nothing is known about al-‘Irāqī himself. He lived in Egypt during the reign of the Mamluk sultan Baybars I al-Bunduqdārī (r. He was right, but not exactly as he imagined!Ībū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-‘Irāqī, known as al-Sīmāwī (‘the practitioner of natural or white magic’), was an author of books on alchemy and magic. The book’s 13th-century author, Abū al-Qāsim al-‘Irāqī, believed it held ancient secrets coded in hieroglyphic texts. Among the many intriguing objects on display in the Egypt: faith after the pharaohs exhibition is an 18th-century copy of the Book of the Seven Climes ( Kitāb al-aqālīm al-ṣab‘ ah), on loan from the British Library.
0 kommentar(er)
