Al-Jazari's Ingenious Devices

Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz Ismail al-Jazari was the master engineer of the court of the Artuqid princes who ruled at Amid, today Diyarbakir, on the upper Tigris in the Jazira, and in 1206 he completed one of the most remarkable works of engineering of the Middle Ages, the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitab fi Ma'rifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiyya). In it he described, with careful diagrams and exact instructions for their construction, some fifty machines: elaborate water-clocks, among them the famous elephant clock in which moving figures marked the passing hours; automata and trick vessels for the entertainment of the court; fountains that changed their patterns; and, most usefully, machines for raising water, pumps and water-wheels whose mechanisms, including the crankshaft and the use of valves and pistons, anticipated devices that would become central to later technology. Al-Jazari's work is prized both for the ingenuity of the machines and for the clarity with which he set down how each was made and worked, in the practical engineering tradition of the Muslim world that valued the hiyal, the mechanical arts. This scene depicts his workshop at the Artuqid court: the intricate water-driven machines, the elephant clock with its moving figures, the pumps, valves and finely cut gears, and the illustrated manuscript that explains them, in a court of dark basalt in the walled city on the Tigris. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.