Wonder, Sorcery, and Technology: Contribute to the History of Medieval Robotics - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 17

and copied, so that today, dispersed in many European libraries, we have respectively
more than 100 copies in Greek language, and 13 translated into Latin [1]. Another
well-known author of a treatise about Pneumatics is also Philo of Byzantium [2-3]:
his work, though less widespread than Hero's, was, however, read and studied during
the Middle Ages and today we have 15 manuscripts of Latin translations, mostly
entitled De spiritualibus ingeniis (About devices dealing with fluids).
2 The “Thauma Connection”: From Alexandria to Baghdad, and
Byzantium
When these works came into the hands of Arabic and Byzantine scholars, they were
not only subject to a thorough theoretical study, but they also brought to the actual
implementation of devices. While in the Byzantine empire no translation of these
texts was required, in the 9 th century, Qusta ibn Luqa, author of many translations of
scientific works from Greek into Arabic, provided Arabic scholars with a version of
Hero's Mechanics .
The social structure of the Byzantine and the Arabic empires was fundamentally
identical to the Alexandrian one: the king (emperor or caliph) was the undisputed
arbiter of cultural life; for his impressive palace, wonderful automata were con-
structed for the double purpose of amusing the king and his court, and of arousing the
admiration of the audience, mainly ambassadors of foreign peoples.
2.1 Arabic World
In the Arabic world, the most famous scholars in this field were the brothers Banu
Musa, who lived in the 9 th century in Baghdad, and al-Jazari, who flourished between
the 12 th and 13 th centuries [4-5]. Their works titles are all connected with the idea of
surprising the audience, and their actual achievements were exactly in that direction,
although by different paths: they tried to reproduce scenes of wildlife (birds singing
on a tree), or men and women performing some actions (e.g., an orchestra of musi-
cians playing a song on a boat floating in a pool of the royal garden; a drink-serving
waitress). Some of these automata had however a practical purpose, such as a medical
equipment, like the device for measuring the amount of blood drawn with the phle-
botomy, or liturgical objects, such as a peacock-shaped basin for ritual ablutions.
2.2 Byzantine Empire
At the magnificent court of Byzantium, the natural heir of Hellenistic tradition, but
also of the splendour of the Eastern world, automatic devices seem to have been ex-
clusively used in the imperial Great Palace, in the Magnaura. Interestingly, in this
case, the sources are not technical and no name of architect or engineer, that made
automata in Byzantium, was handed down.
The emperor Constantinus VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959) composed the Ἔ κθεσις
τ ῆ ς βασιλείου τάξεως (Ceremonies at the Imperial Court), a compilative work. The
main content is a detailed description of the ceremonies from the court's point of
view; in II,15, he relates what usually happened during a typical audience granted by
the emperor: after the ritual bowing, the postulant heard a roar coming from the lions