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A painting on paper in color and gold leaf from al-Jazari's <i>Kitab fi marifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya</i> (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices).<br/><br/> Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–1206) was a polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia, who worked in service of the Artuqid dynasty in Diyarbakır, Asia Minor. He is best known for writing the <i>Kitáb fí ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya</i> (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices along with instructions on how to construct them.
A painting on paper in color and gold leaf from al-Jazari's <i>Kitab fi marifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya</i> (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices).<br/><br/> Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–1206) was a polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia, who worked in service of the Artuqid dynasty in Diyarbakır, Asia Minor. He is best known for writing the <i>Kitáb fí ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya</i> (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices along with instructions on how to construct them.
The Old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) was a complex of three large gardens. It was built during the Qing dynasty for Emperor Qianlong (1711 - 1799). The palace and gardens were seriously damaged by Anglo-French troops in 1860 after the Second Opium War, and again during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Little is left today.
The Old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) was a complex of three large gardens. It was built during the Qing dynasty for Emperor Qianlong (1711 - 1799). The palace and gardens were seriously damaged by Anglo-French troops in 1860 after the Second Opium War, and again during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Little is left today.
A water clock or clepsydra (Greek) is any timepiece in which time is measured by the regulated flow of liquid into (inflow type) or out from (outflow type) a vessel where the amount is then measured.<br/><br/> Water clocks, along with sundials, are likely to be the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the only exceptions being the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally stick. Where and when they were first invented is not known, and given their great antiquity it may never be. The bowl-shaped outflow is the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in Babylon and in Egypt around the 16th century BCE.<br/><br/> Other regions of the world, including India and China, also have early evidence of water clocks, but the earliest dates are less certain. Some authors, however, claim that water clocks appeared in China as early as 4000 BCE.
Little is known about Al-Jazari, and most of that comes from the introduction to his ‘Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices’ (Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya). He was named after the area in which he was born, Al-Jazira, the traditional Arabic name for what was northern Mesopotamia and what is now northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria, between the Tigris and the Euphrates.