Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung und die Darstellung der Natur (Buch der Ursachen)von Pseudo-Apollonios von Tyana by Ursula WeisserReview by: Anton HeinenIsis, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Mar., 1981), p. 140Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/231228 .

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140 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 72: 1: 261 (1981)

Ursula Weisser (Editor). Buch uber das Geheimnis der Schopfung und die Darstel- lung der Natur (Buch der Ursachen) von Pseudo-Apollonios von Tyana. (Sources and Studies in the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, Natural Sciences Series, 1.) xii + 66 pp. German intro.; xxx + 702 pp. Ara- bic text, bibl., index. Aleppo Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1979. (Paper.)

Here for the first time in the history of orientalist scholarship is a complete criti- cal edition of the Kitab sirr al-khaliqa (The Book of the Secret of Creation) in its Arabic text; it is also titled Kitdb al-cilal (The Book of the Causes). A separate study of the tradition of the text together with a Ger- man abstract is planned to be published in the series Ars medica. Together with the Tabula Smaragdina, which originally had its place at the end of this treatise, the Kitdb sirr al-khalTqa was one of the best known and most influential treatises in Arabic and Latin medieval alchemy and cosmology. Long ago this book was cor- rectly identified as a spurious work of Apollonius of Tyana. No Greek prede- cessor is known, and the Arabic text in the present form was probably composed around the time of the caliph Ma'miun (A.D. 813-833).

In many respects the Kitdb sirr al-khalTqa resembles the Book of Treasures by Job of Edessa (ed. and trans. A. Mingana, Cambridge, 1935); like it the Kitdb sirr al- khalTqa sheds a good deal of light on the broad spectrum of often rather crude ex- planations of the natural phenomena, hu- man physiology and pyschology, and phi- losophical problems that provide the fer- tile soil for the growing scientific movement in the Islamic culture of the early ninth century. More specifically this Arabic text is of enormous interest for the study of the development of a scientific terminology in that language.

The edition is mainly based on four manuscripts, representing the most archaic recension and chosen from among seven- teen that were examined (out of some forty known to be extant). Even the criti- cal edition of the Latin version prepared by M. T. D'Alverny and F. Hudry was consulted in a first draft. When we further consider that the editor had to write the 702-page Arabic text, with all the variants, diligently by hand, the reader cannot fail

to feel grateful for an amazingly well- executed contribution to the early history of Arabic science.

ANTON HEINEN

* India

Axel Michaels. Beweisverfahren in der ved- ischen Sakralgeometrie: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Wissenschaft. (Alt- und Neu-Indische Studien, 20.) xiv + 209 pp., tables, bibl., indexes. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1978.

The earliest surviving literature on ge- ometry from India consists of a number of manuals, called Sulbasu-tras, whose pur- pose is to instruct the priests following the traditions of the Yajurveda (adhvaryus) in the techniques of laying out and construct- ing the altars of different shapes (the form of a hawk is the fundamental design) and sizes employed in srauta rituals. The con- struction of such altars goes back at least to the period of the Brahmanas-roughly 800-500 B.C. The Sulbasu-tras, whose ear- liest forms date at least from as early as the middle of the last millenium B.C., as- sume certain rules governing the construc- tion of the altars (e.g., that the five layers of bricks used must each contain the same, fixed number of bricks, but that the inter- stices between the bricks in one layer must not coincide with those in the layers above and below it) that necessitate a practical knowledge of some geometry. Michaels's thesis, supported by a wide reading in the relevant literature (there is a careful, ac- curate, and nearly exhaustive survey of the extant Sulbasuttras, their commentaries, and their editions on pp. 24-35), an ana- lysis of some fundamental geometrical con- structions and theorems (pp. 79-155), and a detailed philological investigation of some key technical terms (pp. 156-170), is that the geometry of the Sulbasuitras is nonaxiomatic, but is provable-in short, that the Indians in these texts transcended merely practical problems to construct a valid elementary geometry that is differ- ent from Euclid's.

While that general conclusion seems to be well founded, this reviewer regards it as rather extreme to grant to this nonaxio- matic geometry equal status with the Eu- clidean (see, e.g., p. 71) since it never

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