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Recreating the golden age of Islamic
science
Arabic texts contain many descriptions of early scientific
discoveries 17 December
2004 Western scientists often forget their debt to medieval Islamic
scholars, who guarded the scientific knowledge of ancient Greece long before
the European Renaissance reclaimed it. One of the central reasons for this
historic 'blind spot' is a lack of skill in the relevant languages — Arabic,
Babylonian, Greek, Latin and Persian. In this article in Nature, Alison Abbott reveals how a
Turkish academic, Fuat Sezgin,
is helping to redress this. The 80-year old master of several ancient languages
has displayed 800 instruments — from astrolabes and scalpels to globes and
water clocks — in the University of Frankfurt's Institute for the History of
Arabic-Islamic Science. All were built from descriptions in ancient texts of
the Arab world. The collection is little known, but that may be set to change.
There is a virtual museum in German on the Internet, and early in 2006 the
first major exhibition of the collection is planned for the Arab World Institute
in Paris, France. Link to full article in Nature Reference: Nature 432, 794 (2004) http://www.scidev.net/Features/index.cfm?fuseaction=readFeatures&itemid=352&language=1 |
