The history of Arabic veterinary medicine goes back to the early Abbasid, perhaps even the late Umayyad period. Among the earliest preserved texts are falconry manuals which include extensive discussions of medical conditions of trained birds of prey. About seventy manuscripts have been identified so far which preserve these manuals and later additions to the genre. Several clusters in the manuscript transmission of these texts allow us to reconstruct the history of this branch of Arabic veterinary literature, its dissemination across languages and cultures, and the people and networks involved in this history. One cluster dates to the thirteenth century and is located at the Hafsid court in Tunis. Among the manuscripts which can be traced back to this court is the only near complete copy of the falconry book for the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil which was translated into Castilian and Latin in the thirteenth century. Another cluster is located in Mamluk Egypt where a number of new texts were written as well. Interestingly, we can also see traces of translations into Turkish in this context. A third cluster is at the Ottoman court where Arabic falconry and veterinary medicine manuscripts from a variety of regions were collected.
This presentation will use these three clusters in order to illustrate how book culture and surviving manuscripts offer insights into the history of an important field of scientific knowledge during the period of 1200 to 1700 around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East.

In the early 1980s, Garry J. Tee (University of Aukland) called the attention of historians to the significant fragment of an Arabic translation of Euclid’s Elements now classed as De Beer 8 in Dunedin University Library. Nevertheless, the manuscript has remained largely unstudied, perhaps because it is now incomplete – it contains most of books I-III only. In 2007, Tee and Amal Amleh (University of Otego) announced their intention to undertake a comprehensive study of the manuscript.
This paper will present a brief overview of the manuscript, building on the initial 2007 study published by Tee and Amleh. It will then attempt to situate this manuscript in the complex history of the transmission of Euclid’s Elements from Greek into Arabic. Using a phylogenetic approach based on diagrams that was pioneered by D. Renaud (2014, 2024), it will attempt to relate this long-overlooked manuscript to other known Arabic manuscripts of the Elements through a stemma-like phylogenetic tree of the known manuscripts. A preliminary study of Book I has already suggested that this manuscript, at least in regard to its diagrams, appears to have connections to the recently discovered Paris, BULAC, MS. Ara 606; Leiden University Library 399.1 (the Codex Leidensis used by Heiberg and Besthorn in their edition of the Commentary on the Elements by al-Nayrīzī); and Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Orientali 50, the only surviving manuscript of the Pseudo-Ṭūsī redaction of the Arabic Euclid published in Rome in 1594.

Al-Kāshī (d. 1429) is celebrated for his remarkable prowess in mathematical calculations and his invaluable contributions to the Samarqand Observatory. His close association with Ulugh Beg (1394-1449), the Timurid prince, and the scholarly community of his court is well-documented. Prior to moving to Samarqand, al-Kāshī served another Timurid prince, Iskandar Mīrzā (d. 1415), in Shiraz and Isfahan from 1409 to 1414. However, following Iskandar's defeat by Shāhrukh in 1414, al-Kāshī lost his patronage and failed to secure the support of the new rulers of Isfahan and Shāhrukh in Herat. Consequently, he returned to his hometown of Kashan, distancing himself from the prominent scholarly circles of the time. After a while, Ulugh Beg continuing the scientific endeavors initiated by his cousin Iskandar, invited al-Kāshī to join his scholarly circle in Samarqand. Later, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshī, a lesser-known astronomer from Kashan, also joined Ulugh Beg's entourage, likely through the mediation of al-Kāshī, and established himself as a revered scholar in Samarqand.
This paper aims to explore al-Kāshī's scholarly trajectory in Kashan, Shiraz, and Isfahan, and to revisit his impact on the astronomical pursuits of the 15th century. Furthermore, it introduces the scholarly and scribal endeavors of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshī. Using evidence that suggests that ʿAbd al-Razzāq was al-Kāshī's son-in-law, and by exploring the work of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s three sons (al-Kāshī’s grandsons) as court astrologers in Samarqand and Herat, this paper will examine the scholarly contributions of al-Kāshī's descendants and their role in preserving and propagating his scholarly legacy.