Pseudo-Archimedes is a name given to pseudo-anonymous authors writing under the name of 'Archimedes' as quoted by various sources of the

Islamic Golden Age The Islamic Golden Age was a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign o ...

such as Al-Jazari for the construction of water clocks.

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse ( ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Greek mathematics, mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and Invention, inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse, Sicily, Syracuse in History of Greek and Hellenis ...

himself is not known to have written any such manuscript as almost all the manuscripts have been lost. The only surviving manuscript from a Pseudo-Archimedes, the Book of Lemmas, is an

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

treatise not listed among Archimedes' works.

Donald Routledge Hill Donald Routledge Hill (6 August 1922 – 30 May 1994)D. A. King, “In Memoriam: Donald Routledge Hill (1922-1994)”, ''Arabic Sciences and Philosophy,'' Volume 5 / Issue 02 / September 1995, pp 297-302 was a British engineer and historian of s ...

is of the opinion that the original manuscript may have been

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

but that most of the manuscript was written by later Arabic authors. The scholar A. G. Drachmann believes that the manuscript was assembled from Arabic translations of various Greek sources, including works by

Hero of Alexandria Hero of Alexandria (; , , also known as Heron of Alexandria ; probably 1st or 2nd century AD) was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in Alexandria in Egypt during the Roman era. He has been described as the greatest experimental ...

, Ctesibius, and Philon. The manuscript is referred to by the Arabic engineers Ridwan and Al-Jazari.

References

{{authority control Archimedes Water clocks Ancient Greek engineers Pseudepigraphy