ILKHANID IRAN, 13TH/14TH CENTURY

Nasir al-Din Abu Ja'far Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Tusi (d. 1274 AD) was born in Tus in AH 597/1201 AD. He was the most eminent scholar of the medieval world in trigonometry and wrote on a wide range of topics within the areas of mathematics and astronomy as well as on logic and theology. He composed about 150 works and is well-known as the founder of the observatory at Maragha in 1259 AD for the Ilkhanid ruler Hülegü, which led to a major renaissance of Islamic Astronomy (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science, An Illustrated Study, Westerham, 1976, p.105). He is considered by the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun as better than any other later Iranian scholars (James Winston Morris, "An Arab Machiavelli? Rhetoric, Philosophy and Politics in Ibn Khaldun’s Critique of Sufism", Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8, 2009, p.286).

Rosenfeld lists only one other copy of this rare text (B.A. Rosenfeld & E. Ihsanoglu, Mathematicians, Astronomers, and other Scholars of Islamic Civilization and their Works (7th – 19th C.), Istanbul, 2003, pp.211-219, no.606 – A 26, see also C. Brockelmann, GAL, I, 660–667; S. I, 924–933). This manuscript also begins with verses relating to eight zodiac signs from al-Tusi’s “poeme masnavi de 34 bayt sur les pronostics par les mansions de la lune”, see F. Richard, Catalogue des Manuscrits Persans – Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Tome II – Le Supplement Persan, Rome, 2013, pp.1130–1137, no.826.). Written in the Ilkhanid period (1256–1343), this is an early manuscript of the text possibly written during the lifetime of the author who died in 1274 in Baghdad. A further early compendium of al-Tusi’s texts sold in these Rooms, 31 March 2009, lot 11.