Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology (review)

Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology. By Donald R. Hill. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1998. Pp. xxvi+368. $110.95.

This book is slightly different from the usual Variorum book wherein the author, or someone acting on his or her behalf, decides to collect under a common theme a set of articles already published in widely scattered journals. In this case, the author was deceased, and it was one of his loyal friends, David King, who undertook the task of collecting from Donald Hill's articles some twenty titles (almost half of Hill's total article production), adding to them a full bibliography and a eulogy, and thus making this volume look more like a memorial dedicated to the well-deserving Hill, who is still sorely missed by historians of Islamic science and technology.

The rearrangement of the articles into such categories as general Islamic technology (eight articles), Greek technology (two), specific Islamic technologies (six), technology in Andalusia (two), and technology and war (two) was all painstakingly done by King. And to him the reader will be forever grateful, not only because he brought some coherence to the pattern of those articles by grouping them as such, but because he also undertook the more arduous task of adding some twenty pages of indices, including names of persons, titles of books, topics, and, most useful of all, technical terms. Anyone who has had the chance to work on any subject of Islamic technology will certainly appreciate this last handy list of terms, which are usually excluded from medieval lexical works and could only be gathered from the actual technical manuscripts in which they first appeared, and from which they were later exhumed by people like Hill.

For the field of Islamic technology the death of Donald Hill was indeed catastrophic, for he was not only the most prolific writer on the subject but was also, in his deep sense of urgency, responsible for spurring others to pay attention to this most interesting Islamic intellectual and cultural production. During his lifetime the field of Islamic technology witnessed the greatest production of books and articles, most of which were either published by Hill himself or by people closely associated with him. Furthermore, Hill had the great courage to produce technical translations of the most difficult Arabic texts even when he did not understand their contents as perfectly as he would have liked (an unavoidable circumstance in such a largely unexplored field), and the greater courage to attempt to write, alone or in cooperation with others, summaries of what he had found in the field for the general educated reader.

For readers of Technology and Culture perhaps the most interesting articles in this collection are those having a direct bearing on the development of mechanical clocks in medieval Europe and the relationship of that development to the impact of the imported Islamic technology. The influence of Islamic technology on medieval Europe is addressed throughout this book, as in Hill's other writings. But two articles reproduced in the present collection deal with this subject specifically: "Islamic Fine Technology and Its Influence on the Development of European Horology" and "Arabic Fine Technology and Its Influence on European Mechanical Engineering." One might also add a third, which deals with a short treatise (here partially reproduced in facsimile but accompanied by an edition of the Arabic text with a translation and commentary) by the medieval polymath al-Bž¯ru¯nž¯ on a mechanical calendar of the lunar months. This treatise fits in this category on account of its direct relationship to the development of equatoria, which are known to have been produced in Islamic Spain toward the eleventh century and may in turn have had their own influence on the development of mechanical clocks in medieval Europe.

In a final and regrettable note, the reader should be warned that the much-admired index contains what looks like a systematic error, in that all references to article two should be to one and vice versa...