ABSTRACT
AFTER THE SO-CALLED GOLDEN AGE of Islamic science, various regional schools of astronomy with very distinctive traditions and interests developed and flourished in each of the main areas of Islamic civilization. In Mamluk Egypt and Syria there was considerable scholarly activity in astronomy; indeed, Cairo in the late thirteenth century was one of the major centers of astronomy in the Islamic world, and Damascus in the mid-fourteenth century was the leading center of astronomy in the Islamic world, and perhaps in the world in general. Mamluk astronomers worked in each of the major branches of astronomy: theoretical and computational planetary astronomy, spherical astronomy and timekeeping, instrumentation, and folk astronomy and astrology. No overview of the activities of these regional scholars exists in the modern literature. The manuscripts and instruments that constitute the main sources for our knowledge of Mamluk astronomy have been investigated only in the past twenty-five years, and, in some cases, only in the past ten years. 1 Thus the time 318is ripe for a survey of Mamluk contributions in this field, and that is the purpose of this paper.
