All Thinkers

Al-Jazari

Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1136-1206) was an engineer, craftsman, inventor, and mathematician who served the Artuqid dynasty in Upper Mesopotamia, in what is now south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria. He was born in the region known as al-Jazira, from which he took his name, meaning the one from the island between the two rivers. He spent most of his working life at the court of the Artuqid rulers, first at Amid (modern Diyarbakir) and later at other centres. He served as the chief engineer of the palace, where he designed, built, and maintained machines for the court. In 1206, near the end of his life, he completed his great work, the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, commissioned by his patron the Artuqid king Nasir al-Din Mahmud. The book describes fifty machines in careful detail, with step-by-step drawings showing how each was constructed and how it worked. These included automated clocks, water-raising devices, fountains, hand-washing basins, musical automata, combination locks, and many others. He finished the book shortly before his death and it was copied and preserved for centuries in the Islamic world, with surviving manuscripts now held in libraries from Istanbul to Paris to Boston. Through these manuscripts, his engineering knowledge has reached the modern world.

Origin
Upper Mesopotamia (modern Turkey/Syria)
Lifespan
1136-1206
Era
12th-13th century
Subjects
Engineering Islamic Science Automata Hydraulics Craft Knowledge
Skills
Scientific Thinking Creative Expression Research Skills Cultural Heritage And Identity Critical Thinking
Why They Matter

Al-Jazari matters because his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices is one of the most important engineering texts ever written. Before its publication in 1206, engineering knowledge had often been passed from master to apprentice in workshops, with little written record. Al-Jazari took a different approach: he described each of his machines in such precise detail — with measurements, materials, and drawings — that a skilled craftsman could rebuild the device from the book alone. This treatment of engineering as a systematic written discipline, with careful documentation of how things work, was remarkable for its time and anticipates the engineering manuals of much later centuries. The machines he documented include important innovations: the crankshaft, used to convert rotary motion into linear motion, is first clearly described in his book; he developed escapement mechanisms for clocks; he designed one of the earliest programmable machines, a band of musical automata whose repertoire could be changed by swapping pegged cylinders. His water-raising machines used camshafts and segmental gears in ways that influenced later European engineering. His book also shows engineering as a deeply craft-based activity, grounded in materials, tolerances, and practical testing. He is essential to any honest global history of technology.

Key Ideas
1
Engineering as careful written documentation
Al-Jazari's most important contribution may be the way he wrote about engineering. Before his book, the skills of making machines usually passed from one craftsman to another in workshops, with little written record. Al-Jazari described each of his fifty machines in such detail that a skilled craftsman could build it from the book alone. He included measurements, materials, step-by-step drawings, and notes on what could go wrong. This treatment of engineering as a subject worth careful written explanation is something we now take for granted in technical manuals, but it was remarkable for his time and helped make engineering knowledge transmissible across centuries.
2
Automata: machines that move by themselves
Many of Al-Jazari's machines were automata — machines designed to move, sound, or perform actions on their own without continuous human control. He built water clocks where figures came out, bowed, and struck bells at each hour. He built a peacock that spread its tail when a ruler washed his hands. He built a band of musicians, placed on a floating platform, who appeared to play flutes and drums through hidden mechanisms. These machines were not just entertainment. They raised a question that has become central to modern technology: what can a machine do on its own, and what does it mean for a made object to act like a living thing?
3
Water and gravity as power sources
Al-Jazari designed many machines that used water as their power source. Some used the flow of water to turn wheels, lift buckets, or drive other mechanisms. Others used the slow emptying of a reservoir to measure time, like a water clock. Gravity did the work: water flowed downwards, and Al-Jazari's cleverness was in arranging the channels, floats, siphons, and valves so that the falling water did something useful. This kind of engineering — working with natural forces that are freely available rather than against them — is now called passive design, and it is central to sustainable engineering today.
Key Quotations
"It is not permissible once one has understood a subject completely to neglect to give credit to the pioneers."
— Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari is making a statement about the ethics of knowledge. A craftsman or engineer who has learned from earlier masters owes those masters recognition in what they write or build. This is an early statement of what later centuries would call intellectual honesty or proper attribution. It is also a reminder that Al-Jazari himself did not think he had invented everything in his book. He drew on the Banu Musa brothers of ninth-century Baghdad and on other earlier engineers, and he said so.
"I have tried to accomplish that which the ancients strove for but did not attain."
— Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari acknowledges his debt to earlier engineers while also claiming his own contribution: he has taken work they began and carried it further. This is a careful and humble statement. He does not claim to have invented everything from scratch, but he does claim that he has added something. The combination of respect for the tradition and confidence in one's own contribution is a good model of how engineering knowledge has actually developed across centuries and civilisations.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Scientific Thinking When introducing engineering as a distinct way of knowing
How to introduce
Show students one of Al-Jazari's drawings — the elephant clock or the peacock fountain works well. Ask: what kind of person could make something like this? What does making it require knowing? Draw out the different kinds of knowledge involved: mechanics, materials, measurement, problem-solving, and patient testing. Then contrast with a scientist studying how something in nature works. Engineering makes things; science explains things. Both are rigorous and connected, but they are different. Ask students to think of something they have tried to make themselves and what they had to learn in the process.
Cultural Heritage and Identity When introducing the scientific and technical achievements of the Islamic world
How to introduce
Ask students what they know about engineering and technology in the twelfth century. Most will think of this as a period when not much was happening. Introduce Al-Jazari: writing in 1206, he produced one of the greatest engineering texts ever written, describing fifty machines including programmable musical automata and large astronomical clocks. Ask: why is this period often called the Dark Ages? What does calling it that miss about what was happening in places like Al-Jazari's Upper Mesopotamia, or in Al-Andalus where Ibn Rushd worked? Connect to Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldun.
Further Reading

For an accessible introduction

Donald R. Hill's translation of The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1974, Reidel) is the standard English edition.

For a shorter overview

The essay on Al-Jazari in Ahmad Hassan and Donald Hill's Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (1986, Cambridge University Press) is clear and well-illustrated. The 1001 Inventions exhibition website offers an accessible public introduction to Al-Jazari and related figures.

Key Ideas
1
The crankshaft: turning rotation into back-and-forth motion
One of Al-Jazari's most important mechanical innovations was a clear working description of the crankshaft: a bent axle that converts rotary motion into linear, back-and-forth motion. A crankshaft is what allows a rotating wheel to drive a pump, a saw, or a piston. The crankshaft became one of the foundational devices of all later mechanical engineering — steam engines, petrol engines, sewing machines, and countless others all depend on it. Al-Jazari used the crankshaft to drive water pumps, translating the rotation of a waterwheel into the up-and-down motion of pistons that lifted water. His description is among the earliest clear accounts of the device.
2
Programmable machines: the peg drum
Al-Jazari built a musical automaton that could play different tunes. The secret was a wooden cylinder studded with pegs at carefully chosen positions. As the cylinder rotated, the pegs struck levers, which operated the drums and flutes. By moving the pegs to different positions, a craftsman could change what the machine played. This is one of the earliest known programmable machines: a device whose behaviour could be changed without rebuilding its mechanics. The same idea — information encoded in physical positions that a machine reads — runs through music boxes, punched-card looms, the early computers of Charles Babbage, and the programs that run on every modern computer.
3
Precision in craft: measurements, tolerances, and testing
Al-Jazari wrote not only about what his machines did but about how to build them properly. He gave measurements in specific units, specified materials, and described how pieces should fit together. He discussed what happens when pieces are slightly out of place: a gap too wide, a bearing too tight. He noted which errors could be tolerated and which would stop the machine working. This concern with precision and tolerance is central to all modern engineering. Making something work is not only a matter of having the right idea; it requires controlling how exactly the physical parts match the idea. Al-Jazari understood this and made it a visible part of his book.
Key Quotations
"I saw that the ancient sages had described and depicted many things in their books, but I found much that required clarification and illustration."
— Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari is explaining his method. The earlier engineering texts he inherited often described machines in words alone, or in incomplete drawings, so that a craftsman trying to build from them would have to guess. He decided to do better. His book pairs careful written descriptions with detailed drawings, showing not only the finished machine but views of its parts, their relationships, and the order in which they should be assembled. This integration of word and picture in technical writing was ahead of its time and shaped the engineering manuals of later centuries.
"What is not reduced to practice is mere theory, and it is incumbent on us to follow practical methods."
— Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari is stating his philosophical commitment as an engineer. Theoretical knowledge alone, however impressive in a book, is not engineering knowledge; engineering is the knowledge of how to make something that actually works. A machine that sounds clever on paper but cannot be built, or breaks when built, has not been properly understood. This principle of reduction to practice is one of the central commitments of engineering as a discipline and distinguishes it from pure mathematics or pure natural philosophy, however much it may draw on them.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Research Skills When teaching how to document a process or a design clearly
How to introduce
Explain that before Al-Jazari, engineering knowledge was often transmitted by watching a master in a workshop, with little written record. Al-Jazari did something different: he described his machines so carefully that a skilled person could build them from the book alone. Ask students to try a small version of this task. Give them a simple object — a paper aeroplane, a pencil sharpener, a knotted string — and ask them to write instructions so that someone who has never seen the object could make or use it. Discuss what makes technical documentation clear and what makes it confusing. Connect to the broader skill of communicating processes clearly.
Scientific Thinking When discussing the relationship between theory and practice
How to introduce
Present Al-Jazari's statement that what is not reduced to practice is mere theory. Ask students what they think of this. Is it always true? Can a piece of abstract mathematics or theoretical physics be valuable even if it is never applied? When is it important to insist that ideas should work in practice, and when is it fine for them to remain theoretical? Use examples: a theorem in number theory that has no current application; an engineering principle that has not yet been successfully tested; a policy proposal that sounds good but has never been tried. Discuss how different disciplines treat the theory-practice relationship differently.
Critical Thinking When examining the history of computing and programmable machines
How to introduce
Introduce Al-Jazari's musical automaton: a cylinder studded with pegs that, as it turns, causes different sounds to play. Moving the pegs changes the tune. Ask students: is this a computer? Why or why not? Discuss what makes a machine programmable — the ability to change its behaviour without rebuilding its physical structure. Trace the line from Al-Jazari's peg drum through the Jacquard loom, through Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, to modern computers. Ask: what is the same about all these machines? What has changed? Connect to Ada Lovelace's insight that a programmable machine could manipulate any symbols, not just numbers.
Further Reading

Donald R. Hill's Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology (1998, Ashgate) collects his scholarly essays. George Saliba's Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007, MIT Press) places Al-Jazari in the broader history of how Islamic scientific and engineering knowledge shaped later European developments. Salim Al-Hassani's work through the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, based at the University of Manchester, makes related scholarship widely available.

Key Ideas
1
Combination locks and the security of knowledge
Al-Jazari designed combination locks — locks opened by a series of movements in the correct order rather than by a physical key. One of his locks had twelve levers; the correct combination had to move specific levers in specific directions. This was not only a practical device but a philosophical one. A combination lock encodes a secret in its mechanism: the lock knows the right combination because of how its parts are arranged. Someone who has the secret can open it, and someone who does not cannot. This logic of encoded information runs through all of cryptography and much of modern computing. Al-Jazari's locks are an early example of knowledge translated into physical mechanism.
2
The castle clock: astronomy, time, and mechanism
One of Al-Jazari's most elaborate machines was a large astronomical water clock, sometimes called the castle clock. It stood the height of a man and incorporated many moving parts: a representation of the zodiac, the sun and moon, five musical automata, and figures that moved at each hour. The clock tracked solar time, which varies with the seasons, and adjusted itself automatically. To build such a machine required integrating knowledge from astronomy, hydraulics, mechanics, and music, all coordinated by careful timing. It was one of the most complex machines of its era anywhere in the world. Reconstructions based on Al-Jazari's drawings have been built in modern times and do work as described.
3
The Artuqid court as a centre of engineering knowledge
Al-Jazari worked at the court of the Artuqid dynasty, a smaller Turkic dynasty that ruled parts of Upper Mesopotamia in the twelfth century. The Artuqid rulers supported his work financially and gave him the time and resources to build elaborate machines. This is a reminder that engineering knowledge does not only develop in the largest or most famous centres; smaller courts and patronage networks have often been important incubators. The Artuqid support also raises questions about the relationship between engineering and power. The machines Al-Jazari built were often for the court's ceremonial and practical use. Understanding who pays for engineering, and for what purposes, is a permanent question in the history of technology.
Key Quotations
"Of all the doors to knowledge, this is the one that opens onto the visible works of wisdom."
— Attributed paraphrase, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari is making a claim about the status of engineering as a form of knowledge. In the intellectual hierarchies of his era, practical arts were often placed below theoretical sciences like theology and philosophy. Al-Jazari pushes back: the work of making machines is the point at which invisible principles become visible. A properly working water clock is a visible demonstration of hydraulics, mechanics, and astronomy all at once. Engineering is not a lower kind of knowledge but the meeting point where knowledge becomes tangible. This framing gave engineering a dignity it has not always been granted.
"It is for this reason I have chosen plain diction, to be understood by the craftsman no less than by the learned."
— Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206
Al-Jazari is explaining a choice about audience. He could have written in the technical and theological Arabic of the scholarly elite. Instead he chose language that a working craftsman could understand. This was a democratic choice about who engineering knowledge was for: it was not only for courtiers and scholars but for the people who actually made things. The choice also reflected the practical nature of the book. A book meant to be used in workshops has to be written so that people in workshops can use it. This accessibility was part of what allowed his work to survive and spread.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Creative Expression When examining the place of craft in intellectual culture
How to introduce
Introduce Al-Jazari's decision to write in language that ordinary craftsmen could understand, rather than the scholarly Arabic of his era. Discuss what this choice meant for the dignity of craft knowledge and for who could participate in engineering. Ask: in your own society, how is the knowledge of craftspeople and makers treated? Is there a hierarchy between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge? Should there be? Connect to Robin Wall Kimmerer's respect for traditional ecological knowledge and to questions about whose knowledge gets written down, whose gets taught, and whose gets forgotten.
Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining the transmission of technological knowledge across civilisations
How to introduce
Trace the pathway by which ideas like the crankshaft moved from Al-Jazari's Upper Mesopotamia into later European engineering, often through unacknowledged Arabic and Persian sources. Ask: how do we recover these histories when much of the original documentation is in languages the dominant historical tradition did not read? What does it mean that the standard story of the industrial revolution often begins in eighteenth-century Europe without mentioning the twelfth-century Islamic engineering it drew on? Connect to Diop on the historical erasure of African contributions and to the broader question of how the standard history of science and technology has been constructed.
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Al-Jazari's machines were toys without practical importance.

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What to teach instead

Some of Al-Jazari's machines were ceremonial or entertaining, but many did serious practical work. His water-raising machines irrigated farmland and supplied drinking water. His clocks measured time, including for prayer observances. His combination locks secured important storage. Even the ceremonial automata involved the same engineering principles — crankshafts, gears, camshafts, escapements — that later became essential to industrial machines. The distinction between toy and practical device is also blurry: a machine that teaches a generation of engineers how to handle precise mechanical timing has immense practical importance, even if its immediate purpose was to amuse a court.

Common misconception

Al-Jazari invented the crankshaft and other devices entirely on his own.

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What to teach instead

Al-Jazari himself was clear that he built on a tradition. The Banu Musa brothers of ninth-century Baghdad had described many ingenious devices in their own Book of Ingenious Devices. Earlier Greek engineers like Hero of Alexandria had developed automata and hydraulics. Persian engineers and Chinese clockmakers developed related ideas along parallel paths. Al-Jazari's contribution was not to invent everything from scratch but to synthesise, clarify, extend, and document an inherited tradition so well that later engineers could reliably build on his work. The history of engineering is almost never about solitary inventors; it is usually about the development of traditions across centuries and regions.

Common misconception

The Islamic Golden Age was mostly about preserving Greek learning, not original engineering.

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What to teach instead

This misconception treats Islamic civilisation as a passive intermediary between ancient Greece and modern Europe. In fact, engineers like Al-Jazari and the Banu Musa produced substantial original work. They invented new mechanisms, designed new machines, developed new mathematical techniques, and extended the tradition they inherited in real ways. The idea that Islamic scholars were mainly copyists is both historically wrong and politically damaging: it attributes original thought only to Greek and European origins while treating everything in between as transmission. Al-Jazari's book shows what this pattern misses: hundreds of pages of genuine engineering innovation.

Common misconception

The book's drawings are just decorations, not real technical illustrations.

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What to teach instead

The drawings in the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices are genuinely technical. They show cross-sections, exploded views, the working positions of parts, and the relationships between moving components. Modern reconstructions based on these drawings have been built and work as Al-Jazari described. The drawings are also beautiful, which has sometimes led observers to treat them as decorative art rather than technical documentation. The beauty does not reduce the technical content. Al-Jazari understood that clear drawings were part of engineering knowledge, and his illustrations were designed to teach as well as to please the eye.

Intellectual Connections
Develops
Ibn Sina
Al-Jazari worked within the wider Islamic intellectual tradition that Ibn Sina helped to shape a century and a half earlier. While Ibn Sina's work was primarily philosophical and medical, he represented the culture of rigorous, systematic written knowledge that Al-Jazari extended into engineering. Al-Jazari's insistence on careful definitions, step-by-step explanations, and integration of theory with practice belongs to the same intellectual world. The connection is not one of direct influence in particular ideas but of shared commitments to writing down knowledge carefully so that later generations can build on it.
Complements
Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
Al-Jazari and Ibn Rushd were near contemporaries working in different parts of the Islamic world — Al-Jazari in Upper Mesopotamia, Ibn Rushd in Al-Andalus — and in different branches of knowledge. Ibn Rushd worked on philosophy and law; Al-Jazari worked on machines and engineering. Together they show the range of serious intellectual work happening in the Islamic world of the twelfth century. Both figures illustrate that this period was not a dark age but a vibrant one, and both produced work that shaped later traditions in ways that are not always acknowledged in the standard histories.
Anticipates
Ada Lovelace
Al-Jazari's programmable musical automaton — a cylinder studded with pegs that could be moved to change the tune — is an early example of the idea that a machine's behaviour can be separated from its physical structure and encoded in a removable pattern. This is the same idea that underlies modern computing, where programs control the behaviour of a fixed physical machine. Ada Lovelace, six centuries later, would give this idea its most important early articulation: a programmable machine could in principle manipulate any symbols, not just the particular ones it was originally designed for. Al-Jazari's peg drum is a much simpler device, but it stands in the same lineage.
In Dialogue With
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Al-Jazari and Kimmerer both insist that careful practical knowledge — knowledge of how to do things in the physical world — deserves serious intellectual respect. Al-Jazari wrote engineering in a form meant to reach working craftsmen; Kimmerer writes science in a form that honours the traditional ecological knowledge of her Potawatomi heritage. Both challenge the hierarchy that places abstract theoretical knowledge above the know-how of working with materials, plants, water, and tools. Reading them together extends the recognition of practical knowledge across centuries and across very different kinds of knowing.
In Dialogue With
Hypatia of Alexandria
Al-Jazari and Hypatia both worked in the tradition of careful mathematical and mechanical knowledge that flowed from ancient Alexandria through Arabic and Persian scholarship into the medieval Islamic world. Hypatia's commentaries on mathematical and astronomical works, along with similar work by others in late antiquity, helped preserve the Greek engineering tradition that Al-Jazari later built on. The connection is through the long chain of transmission: engineers and mathematicians of antiquity, the translators and scholars of early Baghdad, and eventually the Artuqid court where Al-Jazari worked. Reading them together traces the long continuity of technical knowledge across religions and empires.
Anticipates
Thomas Kuhn
Al-Jazari's approach to engineering as a tradition of practice — inherited from earlier masters, extended by current workers, transmitted to later generations — anticipates aspects of Kuhn's account of science as tradition-based practice. Kuhn argued that normal science operates within a shared framework of methods and commitments rather than as a series of isolated individual insights. Al-Jazari's book is a textbook example of this pattern in engineering: he acknowledges his sources, extends the tradition at specific points, and writes in a form designed to carry the tradition forward. The connection is not one of direct influence but of similar recognition of how technical knowledge actually grows.
Further Reading

For manuscript studies

Rachel Ward's work on the illustrated manuscripts of Al-Jazari in collections including the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul.

For the Artuqid context

Oya Pancaroglu's work on Artuqid visual culture and patronage.

For reconstructions of Al-Jazari's machines

The work of Atilla Bir, Mustafa Kacar, and others based in Turkish engineering schools has produced detailed studies and physical reconstructions of many of the machines described in the book.