“The Elephant Clock” · folio from a 1315 copy of his book · The Met, CC0
Al-Jazari
c. 1136 — 1206
He drew the crank that would one day turn every engine on Earth — then the world forgot his name for seven hundred years.
In April 1206, in a basalt-walled city above the Tigris, an ageing engineer handed his king a book. It described fifty machines — water clocks, fountains, locks, pumps, automatic servants that poured water and played music. And it did something no engineer had done before: it explained, part by part and drawing by drawing, exactly how to build every one of them. Its author signed himself Badīʿ al-Zamān Abū al-ʿIzz Ismāʿīl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī — al-Jazari, "the man from the island," after the land between the two rivers. Within months of finishing it, he was dead.
He had spent twenty-five years as chief engineer to the Artuqid kings, and almost everything we know about him comes from his own preface. Not one of his fifty machines survives. But the drawings do — and inside them, historians would eventually find a crank turning a connecting rod to drive two pistons from a single wheel: the mechanism at the heart of every piston engine since, sketched more than two centuries before it appears in any European machine. His book is the most complete engineering manual to survive from the medieval world. It waited 768 years for a full English translation.
A life between two rivers
The lifeline
c. 1136
Born in the Jazira, upper Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and Euphrates that becomes his name
c. 1181
Enters Artuqid service at Diyarbakır; he will serve three kings of one family, father to sons
1180s–90s
Builds for the palace: clocks that strike, basins that wash the king's hands, musicians made of brass
c. 1201
Nasir al-Din Mahmud inherits the throne — and asks his engineer to write it all down
Apr 1206
The book is finished: fifty devices in six categories, every part drawn and specified
1206
Dies within the year. The book outlives every palace he built in
By the numbers
The measure of him
50
Machines in the book — each one drawn and explained closely enough to rebuild
25
Years as chief engineer to the Artuqid court, by his own account
3.4 m
Height of his castle clock — zodiac, sun and moon, and doors that opened on the hour
768
Years between the finished book (1206) and its first complete English translation (1974)
Fifty machines, in six categories
The work
Cat. I
The Elephant Clock. A perforated bowl sinks in a hidden reservoir; every half hour a ball drops, a dragon swings, a bird turns and the mahout strikes his cymbal. It kept temporal hours — hours that lengthen and shorten with the seasons — and could be reset for any time of year. The elephant is Indian, the dragons Chinese, the phoenix Egyptian, the water mechanism Greek: a machine assembled out of the whole known world.
Cat. I
The Castle Clock. Some 3.4 metres high, showing the zodiac and the orbits of sun and moon, with doors that opened each hour and figures that appeared behind them. Because the length of the day could be reset, some historians of computing call it the first programmable analogue machine.
Cat. III
The washing automata. Basins in which a mechanical servant offers water, then soap, then a towel, in sequence — hospitality made of levers, and the ancestor of every self-flushing fixture.
Cat. IV
The musical boat. Four automatic musicians floating on a palace lake, the drummer's rhythm changed by shifting pegs on a rotating barrel. The roboticist Noel Sharkey has argued it may be the earliest programmable machine we know of.
Cat. V
The twin-cylinder pump. One turning wheel, a crank, a connecting rod, two pistons drawing water by suction. Donald Hill — who translated the book — called this pump a direct ancestor of the steam engine.
Kept by one king, lost to everyone else
Recognition
For seven centuries
Honoured inside one palace — his machines were court marvels, not published science
Not one of the fifty survives; only the drawings, copied by hand
No portrait of him exists. Even his name is a place, not a family
Western histories of engineering long began with Leonardo — born some 250 years after this book was finished
Today
Donald Hill's 1974 translation put the full text before English-speaking engineers for the first time
Historians of technology count him among the founders of mechanical engineering
Working full-size elephant clocks stand in Dubai and in Mardin, Turkey
His folios hang in the Met, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Freer, and Topkapı
The place that made him
Diyarbakır, on the Tigris
The Artuqid capital sat behind walls of black basalt above the Tigris, with the green Hevsel Gardens running down to the water — a city that had been fortified, breached and repaired since Roman times. It was a place where water was engineering, and engineering was power. The walls al-Jazari worked behind are still standing, and still carry the inscriptions of the men who ruled from them.
5.8 km
Of basalt city walls, standing then and standing now
63
Inscriptions carved into the walls and towers, period by period
2015
The year UNESCO listed the fortress and its Tigris gardens as World Heritage
"You have made peerless devices, and through strength have brought them forth as works: so do not lose what you have wearied yourself with and have plainly constructed."
— Nasir al-Din Mahmud, commissioning the book, as al-Jazari records it, 1206
