Thinkers Timeline

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.