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Book Of Curiosities
The ''Book of Curiosities'' (Arabic: ''Kitāb Gharā’ib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn'', literally translated as ''Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes'') is an anonymous 11th-century Arabic cosmography from Fatimid Egypt containing a series of early illustrated maps of the world and Celestial cartography, celestial diagrams of the universe and sky. ''The'' ''Book of Curiosities'' contains 17 maps in total, 14 of which are extremely rare not only in Geography and cartography in medieval Islam, Islamic cartography but also in greater medieval map history. The cosmography includes the earliest recorded map of Sicily as well as a rectangular world map, considered the earliest surviving map with a graphic scale. The autograph manuscript has not survived, but the Bodleian Library of Oxford University acquired one of the only known copies of the manuscript in 2002, making its contents widely accessible today due to its digitization. Based on the production pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Book Of Curiosities - Sicily Map
A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, mostly of writing and images. Modern books are typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover, what is known as the ''codex'' format; older formats include the scroll and the tablet. As a conceptual object, a ''book'' often refers to a written work of substantial length by one or more authors, which may also be distributed digitally as an electronic book (ebook). These kinds of works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). But a physical book may not contain a written work: for example, it may contain ''only'' drawings, engravings, photographs, sheet music, puzzles, or removable content like paper dolls. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Star Lore
Star lore or starlore is the creating and cherishing of mythical stories about the stars and star patterns (constellations and asterisms); that is, folklore based upon the stars and star patterns. Using the stars to explain religious doctrines or actual events in history is also defined as star lore. Star lore has a very long history; it has been practiced by nearly every culture recorded in history, dating as far back as 5,500 years ago. It was practiced by prehistoric cultures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods as well. Orion and Scorpius One example of star lore is the inventing of the story of Orion the Hunter and the Scorpius the Scorpion by the ancient Greeks. This ancient culture saw a very startling pattern of bright stars in the winter sky that, from their point of view, resembled a mighty hunter, which they named Orion. During the summer, they saw another startling pattern of bright stars that resembled a scorpion. They noticed that the constellations of Orion an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geographic Coordinate System
A geographic coordinate system (GCS) is a spherical coordinate system, spherical or geodetic coordinates, geodetic coordinate system for measuring and communicating position (geometry), positions directly on Earth as latitude and longitude. It is the simplest, oldest, and most widely used type of the various spatial reference systems that are in use, and forms the basis for most others. Although latitude and longitude form a coordinate tuple like a cartesian coordinate system, the geographic coordinate system is not cartesian because the measurements are angles and are not on a planar surface. A full GCS specification, such as those listed in the EPSG Geodetic Parameter Dataset, EPSG and ISO 19111 standards, also includes a choice of geodetic datum (including an Earth ellipsoid), as different datums will yield different latitude and longitude values for the same location. History The invention of a geographic coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi , or simply al-Khwarizmi, was a mathematician active during the Islamic Golden Age, who produced Arabic-language works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820, he worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the contemporary capital city of the Abbasid Caliphate. One of the most prominent scholars of the period, his works were widely influential on later authors, both in the Islamic world and Europe. His popularizing treatise on algebra, compiled between 813 and 833 as ''Al-Jabr'' (''The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing''),Oaks, J. (2009), "Polynomials and Equations in Arabic Algebra", ''Archive for History of Exact Sciences'', 63(2), 169–203. presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications. Because al-Khwarizmi was t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Naskh (script)
Naskh is a small, round script of Islamic calligraphy. Naskh is one of the first scripts of Islamic calligraphy to develop, commonly used in writing administrative documents and for transcribing books, including the Qur’an, because of its easy legibility. Origin The Naskh style of writing can be found as early as within the first century of the Islamic calendar. The Naskh script was established in the first century of the Hijri calendar by order of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan due to the presence of defects in the Kufic script. Two centuries before it was recorded by Ibn Muqla Like Al-Muwatta written by Malik ibn Anas in a soft, rounded script Ibn Muqla is credited with standardizing the "Six Pens" of Islamic calligraphy, also including , , , , and . These are known as "the proportioned scripts" () or "the six scripts" (). Kufic is commonly believed to predate naskh, but historians have traced the two scripts as coexisting long before their codification by Ibn Muqla, as the tw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Papermaking
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is Pulp and paper industry, made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for paper art, artistic expression. In papermaking, a dilute suspension consisting mostly of separate cellulose fibres in water is drained through a sieve-like screen, so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibres is laid down. Water is further removed from this sheet by pressing, sometimes aided by suction or vacuum, or heating. Once dry, a generally flat, uniform and strong sheet of paper is achieved. Before the invention and current widespread adoption of automated machinery, all paper was made by hand, formed or laid one sheet at a time by specialized laborers. Even today those who make paper by hand use tools and technologies quite similar to those existing hundreds of years ago, as origin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Watermark
A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations in the paper. Watermarks have been used on postage stamps, currency, and other government documents to discourage counterfeiting. There are two main ways of producing watermarks in paper; the ''dandy roll process'', and the more complex ''cylinder mould process''. Watermarks vary greatly in their visibility; while some are obvious on casual inspection, others require some study to pick out. Various aids have been developed, such as ''watermark fluid'' that wets the paper without damaging it. A watermark is very useful in the questioned document examination, examination of paper because it can be used for dating documents and artworks, identifying sizes, mill trademarks and locations, and determining the quality of a sheet of paper. The wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Folio
The term "folio" () has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging Paper size, sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way; second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books; and third, it is an approximate term for the Book size, size of a book, and for a book of this size. First, a folio (abbreviated fo or 2o) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper, on each of which four pages of text are printed, two on each side; each sheet is then folded once to produce two leaf (books), leaves. Each leaf of a folio book thus is one half the size of the original sheet. Ordinarily, additional printed folio sheets would be inserted inside one another to form a group or "gathering" of leaves prior to binding the book. Second, folio is used in terms of page numbering for some bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geography (Ptolemy)
The ''Geography'' (, , "Geographical Guidance"), also known by its Latin names as the ' and the ', is a gazetteer, an atlas (book), atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Claudius Ptolemy in Ancient Greek, Greek at Alexandria around 150 AD, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Parthian Empire, Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation – Al-Khwarizmi#Geography, Kitab Surat al-Ard – into Classical Arabic, Arabic by Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Khwarismi in the 9th century was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the Geography and cartography in medieval Islam, Islamic world. Alongside the works of Islamic scholars – and the commentary containing revised and more accurate data by Alfraganus – Ptolemy's work was subsequently highly influential on Middle Ages, Medieval and Renaissanc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emilie Savage-Smith
Emilie Savage-Smith (born 20 August 1941) is an American-British historian of science known for her work on science in the medieval Islamic world and medicine in the medieval Islamic world. Education and career Savage-Smith was born on 20 August 1941, in the US, and became a dual citizen of the UK and US in 2003. She was an undergraduate at DePauw University, graduating in 1962, and completed her Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her doctoral dissertation, ''Galen on Nerves, Veins and Arteries'', was a critical edition of book 16 of Galen's '' De usu partium corporis humani'', including a translation from the Arabic edition of Hunayn ibn Ishaq. She is retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the University of Oxford, where she continues to be Fellow Archivist of St Cross College, Oxford and a senior research consultant for the Bodleian Library. She is the president of the Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science. Before mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
