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Scandinavian Journal Byzantine Modern Greek SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF BYZANTINE AND MODERN GREEK STUDIES 4 • 2018 JOURNAL OF BYZANTINE SCANDINAVIAN BYZANTINE AND MODERN GREEK STUDIES Barbara Crostini 9 Greek Astronomical Manuscripts: New Perspectives from Swedish Collections Filippo Ronconi 19 Manuscripts as Stratified Social Objects Anne Weddigen 41 Cataloguing Scientific Miscellanies: the Case of Parisinus Graecus 2494 Alberto Bardi 65 Persian Astronomy in the Greek Manuscript Linköping kl. f. 10 Dmitry Afinogenov 89 Hellenistic Jewish texts in George the Monk: Slavonic Testimonies Alexandra Fiotaki & Marika Lekakou 99 The perfective non-past in Modern Greek: a corpus study Yannis Smarnakis 119 Thessaloniki during the Zealots’ Revolt (1342-1350): Power, Political Violence and the Transformation of the Urban Space David Wills 149 “The nobility of the sea and landscape”: John Craxton and Greece 175 Book Reviews ISSN 2002-0007 No 4 • 2018 Persian Astronomy in the Greek Manuscript Linköping kl. f. 10* Alberto Bardi his paper is a study of an astronomical text redacted in Greek, contained in the fifteenth-century manuscript Linköping kl. f. 10 T(henceforth F). This text consists of a coherent group of instruc- tions on how to use a structured set of astronomical tables stemming from Islamic tradition, redacted primarily in Persian in the thirteenth century, then translated by Byzantine scholars into Greek, and spread among Byzantine scholars from the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 2. Astronomical texts and tables between the Il-khanate and Byzantium In the thirteenth century, astronomical tables stemming from Persia were mostly produced by Islamic scholars. The area, stretched out today between Iran and Azerbaijan, was ruled by the Mongols of the Il-Kha- nids dynasty. Due to their interest in astronomy and astrology, after the conquest of that region, they hired the Islamic astronomers already set- tled there and employed them in the new observatories that they built, * I am very grateful to Barbara Crostini for organizing the Uppsala workshop, which triggered the chance to study this manuscript. I also wish to thank the Institut für Byzantinistik (Prof. Dr. Albrecht Berger) of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München for the resources provided for my researches on Byzantine astronomy. I am indebted to Anne-Laurence Caudano, Barbara Crostini, Sajjad Nikfaham Khubravan and Shahrzad Irannejad for useful suggestions, as well as to the participants to the workshop for fruitful discussions, namely Filippo Ronconi, Anne Weddigen, Patrick Granholm and Anthony Lappin. 1 For more details on the exchanges between Persian and Byzantine scholars see Tihon 1987, Tihon 1990 and Ragep 2014. This introduction is indebted to those papers. 65 notably that of Maragha, founded in 1259 by the Il-khan Hulaghu, and that of Tabriz, founded not much later by Ghazan Khan.2 Information on the scientific exchanges between Persia and Byzan- tium appears in the introduction to the so-called Persian Syntaxis, an as- tronomical handbook on Persian tables redacted in Greek at around 1347 by Georgios Chrysokokkes.3 He reports that he learned astronomy a few years before, in Trebizond, a city with a good tradition of astronomical studies, by a priest called Manuel, an otherwise unknown figure. The latter had practiced astronomy learning from Gregorios Chioniades, a Byzantine scholar who had travelled to Tabriz at the end of the thirteenth century in order to learn astronomy from the Persian scholar Šams al Dīn al-Buḫārī, whose works Chioniades had translated and brought to Trebizond.4 Chioniades is the author of the most ancient translations into Greek of works of Persian astronomy, or, better, these translations are to be ascribed to him: the Zīj as-Sanjarī (composed around 1120) by al-Ḫāzinī, and the commentary of the aforementioned Šams al Dīn al-Buḫārī on the Zīj al- َAlāī, a work of the Arab astronomer Al-Fahhād (composed around 1176).5 There is evidence to suggest that at the begin- ning of the fourteenth century some Persian astronomical treatises were known in a Greek-Byzantine environment and were circulating among scholars, if not in Constantinople, for sure in Trebizond. I would like to draw attention to the fact that the astronomical texts we are considering deal with “practical” astronomy, not with theoreti- cal astronomy. The handbooks mentioned, in contrast with major works such as Ptolemy’s Almagest or Planetary Hypothesis, do not concern themselves with the mathematical and physical foundations of astro- nomy, but consist simply of instructions on how to use structured sets of astronomical tables. Learning how to use astronomical tables was 2 Tihon 1987 and Saliba 1991. See also North 2008, 204-214. 3 Mercier 1984. This text constitutes the subject of my ongoing research project. There is an old unpublished thesis on the subject, Etude sur la syntaxe perse des Georges Chrysococces by Françoise Oerlemans, supervised by J. Mogenet, but this resource could not be accessed. 4 See Ragep 2014. 5 See Leichter 2004, 6-12. Editions of Chioniades’s works: Pingree 1985, Paschos-So- tiroudis 1998, Leichter 2004. 66 possible even without being aware of the theories behind them. That is why astronomical handbooks were so popular. In late Byzantium, the genre of the astronomical handbook for a set of tables was not new to Greek tradition. The most ancient Greek source on this is the Small commentary on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables by Theon Alexandrinus (4th century CE).6 But in the thirteenth century Ptolemy’s Handy Tables were not up-to-date anymore. Importing tables from Islamic tradition, therefore, was a quick way for Byzantine schol- ars to have and practice astronomy through up-to-date tables. Those tables could help them in fixing the calendar, computing the date of Easter and predicting celestial phenomena like eclipses, which Byz- antine scholars were fond of. Though up-to-date, these tables were not necessarily more reliable; in fact, Ptolemaic tables (from the Handy Tables and from the Almagest), with which Byzantine scholars were probably more familiar, were still in use. For instance, in order to com- pute eclipses, the renowned scholar John Chortasmenos still applied Ptolemaic methods and combined them with the Persian ones; however, he still calculated eclipses through the Almagest.7 Once the Persian ta- bles were imported, instructions on how to use them were also required, because astronomical tables, despite their user-friendly format, are not easy for non-experts. These tables consisted of structured lists of as- tronomical values (numbers) based on parameters set out in Ptolemy’s Almagest. The values shown by the tables must be combined by pre- cise operations to compute an astronomical magnitude at a given time.8 While it is likely that Chioniades’s instructions are translations from Persian, other extant instructions were redacted by Byzantine scholars directly in Greek. The text at ff. 1–27 of manuscript F belongs to this genre. Such works were redacted by fourteenth-century Byzantine scholars in order to explain how to use the imported Persian tables. The text in F is enti- tled Παράδοσις εἰς τοὺς περσικοὺς κανόνας τῆς ἀστρονομίας, i.e. «In- structions for the Persian Tables of Astronomy» (henceforth Paradosis). 6 Edition: Tihon 1978. 7 Caudano 2003. 8 On the Handy Tables and their mathematics: Neugebauer 1975, 2, 969–1028. 67 3. The Paradosis of the Persian Tables9 The Paradosis in manuscript F comments on the tables provided at ff. 33-80v of the same F. Such tables were computed for the years 1408/09 CE onwards, while the computations in the texts are arranged for the year 1352 CE, except for one case for the year 1347 CE. Further hints in the texts contained in the Paradosis of F suggest that this witness was composed in the first half of the fifteenth century, not before 1408/09, as we will see. As a handbook, the Paradosis underwent several modifications with regard to structure and content. F is not the earliest version of the Para- dosis, whose most ancient extant witnesses are datable to the middle of the fourteenth century (around 1352 CE). An alternative redaction of the text is also extant. It is a part of a wider work: it consists of the Third Book of Theodoros Meliteniotes’ Tribiblos Astronomike, redacted before 1368 (henceforth Book III).10 According to modern scholarship on the Paradosis, the main ques- tions around this text can be summarized as follows: 1) who is the real author of the text: Isaak Argyros,11 Theodoros Meliteniotes,12 or some- one else? This opus is sometimes ascribed to Isaac Argyros, or to Geor- gios Chrysokokkes.13 The latter attribution is found in F; the ascription to Meliteniotes is due to textual evidence (see below); 2) what are the relationships between the Paradosis and Meliteniotes’ Book III? To solve these problems, I investigated the textual tradition of the Para- dosis for my PhD thesis.14 The most ancient witness is found to be the one contained in manuscript Florence, Laurentianus pluteus 28.13 (L), 9 Here I summarize the results I explained more accurately in Bardi 2018b. Please refer to that article for a more detailed description of my survey on the textual tradition of the Paradosis and the related bibliographical references. 10 The first two books of the Tribiblos are edited in Leurquin 1990-1993. 11 PLP 1285. 12 PLP 17851. 13 PLP 31142. 14 PhD thesis (LMU München) entitled ‘Persische Astronomie in Byzanz. Ein Beitrag zur Byzantinistik und zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, forthcoming or in the series Münchner Arbeiten zur Byzantinistik, Neuried: Ars Una. 68 which was penned by Isaac Argyros before 1374.15 As was already known from the research by Giovanni Mercati,16 the original astrono- mical work by Meliteniotes (Tribiblos) is transmitted in manuscript Vat- icanus graecus 792 (X), written by Meliteniotes himself before 1368.
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