Abul Abbas Ahmad ibn Mohammad ibn Kathir Farghani, born in Farghana, Transoxiana, a former part of Iran, was one of the most distinguished astronomers in the service of al-Mamun and his successors and died in Egypt after 861 CE. He wrote "Elements of Astronomy" (Kitab fi al-Harakat al-Samawiya wa Jawami Ilm al-Nujum i.e. the book on celestial motion and thorough science of the stars), which was translated into Latin in the 12th century and exerted great influence upon European astronomy before Regiomontanus. He accepted Ptolemy's theory and value of the precession, but thought that it affected not only the stars but also the planets. He determined the diameter of the earth to be 6,500 miles, and found the greatest distances and also the diameters of the planets.
Farghani's activities extended to engineering. According to Ibn Tughri Birdi, he supervised the construction of the Great Nilometer at al-Fustat (old Cairo). It was completed in 861 CE, the year in which the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, who ordered the construction, died. But engineering was not Farghani's forte, as transpires from the following story narrated by Ibn Abi Usaybi'a.
Al-Mutawakkil had entrusted the two sons of Musa ibn Shakir, Mohammad and Ahmad, with supervising the digging of a canal named al-Ja'fari. They delegated the work to Farghani, thus deliberately ignoring a better engineer, Sind ibn Ali, whom, out of professional jealousy, they had caused to be sent to Baghdad, away from al-Mutawakkil's court in Samarra. The canal was to run through the new city, al-Ja'fariyya, which al-Mutawakkil had built near Samarra on the Tigris and named after himself. Farghani committed a grave error, making the beginning of the canal deeper than the rest, so that not enough water would run through the length of the canal except when the Tigris was high. News of this angered the Caliph, and the two brothers were saved from severe punishment only by the gracious willingness of Sind Ibn Ali to vouch for the correctness of Farghani's calculations, thus risking his own welfare and possibly his life. As had been correctly predicted by astrologers, however, al-Mutawakkil was murdered shortly before the error became apparent. The explanation given for Farghani's mistake is that being a theoretician rather than a practical engineer, he never successfully completed a construction.
The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, written in 987 CE, ascribes only two works to Farghani: (1)"The Book of Chapters, a summary of the Almagest" (Kitab al-Fusul, Ikhtiyar al-Majisti) and (2)"Book on the Construction of Sundials" (Kitab 'Amal al-Rukhamat).
The Jawami, or 'The Elements' as we shall call it, was Farghani's best-known and most influential work. Abd al-Aziz al-Qabisi (d. 967 CE) wrote a commentary on it, which is preserved in the Istanbul manuscript, Aya Sofya 4832, fols. 97v-114v. Two Latin translations followed in the 12th century. Jacob Anatoli produced a Hebrew translation of the book that served as a basis for a third Latin version, appearing in 1590, whereas Jacob Golius published a new Latin text together with the Arabic original in 1669. The influence of 'The Elements' on mediaeval Europe is clearly vindicated by the presence of innumerable Latin manuscripts in European libraries.
References to it in madiaeval writers are many, and there is no doubt that it was greatly responsible for spreading knowledge of Ptolemaic astronomy, at least until this role was taken over by Sacrobosco's Sphere. But even then, 'The Elements' of Farghani continued to be used, and Sacrobosco's Sphere was evidently indebted to it. It was from 'The Elements' (in Gherard's translation) that Dante derived the astronomical knowledge displayed in the 'Vita nuova' and in the 'Convivio'.
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