Scientific texts provide our main source for understanding the history of science in the ancient and medieval world. The aim of this series is to provide clear and accurate English translations of key scientific texts accompanied by up-to-date commentaries dealing with both textual and scientific aspects of the works and accessible contextual introductions setting the works within the broader history of ancient science. In doing so, the series makes these works accessible to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines including history of science, the sciences, and history (including Classics, Assyriology, East Asian Studies, Near Eastern Studies and Indology).
Texts will be included from all branches of early science including astronomy, mathematics, medicine, biology, and physics, and which are written in a range of ancient languages including Akkadian, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Thus, the series is of use both in the teaching of history and the history of science and for researchers on ancient science. In addition, the series provides a venue for the publication of original research on early scientific texts, in particular through the commentaries.
By Nathan Sidoli, R.S.D. Thomas
July 31, 2023
This book provides the first English translation of the Greek text of the Spherics of Theodosios (2nd-1st century BCE), a canonical mathematical and astronomical text used from as early as the 2nd century CE until the early modern period. Accompanied by an introduction to the life and works of ...
By Christián C. Carman, Rodolfo P. Buzón
May 26, 2023
This book offers the Greek text and an English translation of Aristarchus of Samos’s On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, accompanied by a full introduction, detailed commentary, and relevant scholia. Aristarchus of Samos was active in the third century BC. He was one of the first Greek ...
By Jean Christianidis, Jeffrey Oaks
November 30, 2022
This volume offers an English translation of all ten extant books of Diophantus of Alexandria’s Arithmetica, along with a comprehensive conceptual, historical, and mathematical commentary. Before his work became the inspiration for the emerging field of number theory in the seventeenth century, ...
By Anuj Misra
October 18, 2022
This book provides, for the very first time, a critical edition and an English translation (accompanied by critical notes and technical analyses) of the chapter on spheres (golādhyāya) from Nityānanda’s Sarvasiddhāntarāja, a Sanskrit astronomical text written in seventeenth-century Mughal India. ...
By Christopher Cullen
December 12, 2019
The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning gives the reader direct access to the foundational documents of the tradition of calculation created by astronomers of the early Chinese empire between the late second century BCE and the third century CE. The paradigm they established was to shape East Asian ...
By Yvette Hunt
October 07, 2019
This book presents the first ever English translation of the Medicina Plinii, one of the most influential books of applied medicine and self-medication in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The work, which predates AD 400, was created as a quick reference work for travellers, and became and ...
By Alessandra Petrocchi
March 18, 2019
The Gaṇitatilaka and its Commentary: Two Medieval Sanskrit Mathematical Texts presents the first English annotated translation and analysis of the Gaṇitatilaka by Śrīpati and its Sanskrit commentary by the Jaina monk Siṃhatilakasūri (13th century CE). Siṃhatilakasūri’s commentary upon the ...
By Hermann Hunger, John Steele
July 03, 2018
MUL.APIN, written sometime before the 8th century BC, was the most widely copied astronomical text in ancient Mesopotamia: a compendium including information such as star lists, descriptions of planetary phases, mathematical schemes for the length of day and night, a discussion of the luni-solar ...