The Banu Musa and the Ingenious Devices

The three brothers known as the Banu Musa, the sons of Musa ibn Shakir, Muhammad, Ahmad and al-Hasan, were among the leading scholars and patrons of learning at the court of the Abbasid caliphs in ninth-century Baghdad, in the great age of science centred on the translation movement and the House of Wisdom. They worked in mathematics, astronomy and geometry and supported the gathering and translation of the books of the ancients; but they are best remembered for their Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitab al-Hiyal), in which they described some hundred machines and contrivances of remarkable subtlety. Most were vessels and fountains that poured, mixed or changed their flow seemingly of their own accord, lamps that trimmed their own wicks and replenished their own oil, and other automata, worked by valves, floats, siphons and other mechanisms hidden within them; among them are some of the earliest known devices of automatic control, in which a machine responds and adjusts itself without a hand to guide it. The work is a landmark in the history of mechanical engineering, in the tradition of the hiyal, the ingenious arts, that the Muslim world prized and that al-Jazari would carry further centuries later. This scene depicts a workshop of such devices in the brick city on the Tigris: the curious vessels and self-acting lamps, the hidden mechanisms, and the illustrated treatise that explains them. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.