This article focuses upon three main concerns. The first is an overview of the textual tradition of a central part of Arabic mechanics dealing with the science of weights. A short paragraph on the ongoing digitization of Arabic mechanical writings is appended to this description of texts in order to indicate how they are being analyzed with the new tools of information technology. This is followed by an assessment of the historical significance of the Arabic science of weights, in which the transformation brought about in this important sub-field of Arabic mechanics is interpreted as the reorganization of a core part of ancient mechanics into an independent science of weights. Upon this basis, a strong claim is made in favour of the independent status of ʿilm al-athqāl, which may no longer be confused with ʿilm al-ḥiyal, understood as a general descriptive discourse upon different types of machines. Finally, the paper presents a preliminary survey of the institutional setting for the control of weighing instruments in Islamic medieval society through the office of ḥisba.
This paper investigates the problems of transferring scientific literature from one culture to another, in this case, with respect to the translation of texts from Arabic into Latin in the sixth-seventh centuries AH/twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD. It takes as its starting point the injunction of Ibn ʿAbdūn to the market-traders of Seville in the early sixth/twelfth century that they “should not sell to the Jews or Christians books concerning science . . . [because] they translate them and attribute them to their co-religionists and their bishops” and investigates whether Christian translators made the translations against the will of Islamic authorities, disguised the translations’ Arabic origin to pass off the works as their own and dishonoured Islam in their treatment of Arabic books. Only in the last case is there some evidence of practices that may give grounds for Ibn ʿAbdūn’s prohibition.