Beschreibung:

Musa bin Muhammad Qadi Zadeh al-Rumi, Sharh al-Mulakhas fi'Ilm al-Hay'a (an Astronomical Treatise), in Arabic, decorated manuscript on paper [Timurid Persia, last decades of fifteenth century] 86 leaves (including 4 contemporary flyleaves), complete, single column, 19 lines black nasta'liq, some overlining and many diagrams in the text in red, some very light waterstaining to outer margins, overall very clean and presentable copy, numerous contemporary ink ownership annotations and stamps to endpapers, including some poetic verses, 170 by 100 mm.; eighteenth-century morocco with flap, ruled in blind with central cartouches to covers also in blind, a little stained and worn, head and tail of spine worn with slight loss to leather An astronomical comnentary on fourteenth-century Persian physician Mahmoud ibn Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Jaghmini's Al-Mulakhas fi'Ilm al-Haya, by celebrated Ottoman astronomer and mathematician Qadi Zadeh al-Rumi. The present work is one Qadi Zadeh's best known works, alongside the Sharh Ashkal al-Ta'sis (Commentary on Samarkandi's Arithmetics), but he is perhaps most well known for producing the first truly comprehensive stellar catalogue of over 992 stars, entitled the Zij'i Sultani alongside fellow astronomer Ulugh Beg. Qadi Zadeh was active in Samarkand until his death in 1436 AD, making the present manuscript a very early Persian translation of his work, copied only a few decades after the author's death. Other manuscript copies to have appeared on the open market in the past few decades have all been of Ottoman origin and in Turkish translation and dated firmly in the seventeenth century (Christie's, 11 April 2008, lot 152 and 8 April 2011, lot 40, for details).