Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to identify and describe careers related to physics and the education and training they need. The museum offers one person who worked as an engineer in the Islamic world and what his record says about that work. It holds nothing on the education these careers require today, so your class will bring that. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- A2.1 identify and describe a variety of careers related to the fields of science under study […] and the education and training necessary for these careers
2 Before you start
A thought to carry into the lesson.
3 The lesson
What does a career look like in a record?
Look at the expectation: it asks for a career and for the training behind it. Ask what a record tells you about the work, and what it leaves unsaid about how the person came to it.
Go deeper
Read the plan of a book as the plan of a job. TDV records that al-Jazari served the Artuqids at Amid in 1181–1206 2. It gives the book two titles, Kitab fi marifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya and al-Jami bayn al-ilm wa-l-amal al-nafi fi sinaat al-hiyal, and six divisions: clocks, vessels for drinking and banquets, handwashing and bloodletting vessels, fountains and automatic musical instruments, water-raising machines and miscellaneous devices 2. The first four have ten chapters each and the last two five each: fifty devices in the account 2. The encyclopedia describes coloured drawings, lettered parts and instructions moving from the general form to making components, assembly and operation 2.
Why they did it
The museum's records hold no passage in which al-Jazari says why he wrote his book, and they do not report what the book's own introduction says. What they show is who asked for it: TDV connects the book to Artuqid patronage, and the Met's catalogue likewise identifies Nasir al-Din Mahmud, ruler of Amid, as its commissioner 2 3. TDV says little is known of his life beyond the book's introduction 2. This is work and patronage. The records read give no schooling or training for him, and the museum does not fill the gap by guessing.
How do we know?
The record's account of al-Jazari draws mostly on one reference entry, Sadettin Ökten's in the TDV encyclopaedia 2. The picture it cites for the elephant clock is not a machine either: the clock survives in a later manuscript folio at the Met, dated 715/1315, not an original working machine 3. Ask which parts of his career you know from his own book and which from a later summary of it.
Think about it
TDV says little is known of al-Jazari's life beyond his book's introduction. If you could read only one thing to write about his career, the introduction itself or an encyclopaedia's summary of it, which would you choose, and what would you lose by leaving the other unread?
Into the museum
- Al-Jazari: what the records say of his work and his patron, and what they leave unanswered.
- The castle clock: the first chapter of the clock division of his book.
- The double-piston pump: an example from the water-raising division.
- The elephant clock: the machine whose picture survives on the Met's folio.
Try this
Read the record of al-Jazari. Write two lists: what the record tells you about his work, and what you would still need to find out to describe the education and training behind it.
4 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Al-Jazari, Ismail ibn al-Razzaz have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
An engineer at the Artuqid court. Al-Jazari was an engineer and an author on mechanical devices. The record, following the TDV encyclopedia, notes his service to the Artuqids at Amid in 1181–1206 and a book commissioned by Nasir al-Din Mahmud, completed in 1205 according to the entry. It adds that little is known of his life beyond the book's introduction, so his training is not supplied from conjecture. What would you need to know to describe it?
I can now