ABSTRACT
Between 1899 and 1909, Carlo Alfonso Nallino published his monumental study of the Ṣābi’ Zīj, an important Arabic astronomical handbook with tables compiled around AD 900 by Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Battānī. Nallino’s work has remained one of the most important publications on Islamic astronomy up to this time. However, his transliterations of al-Battānī’s tables turn out to be frequently unfaithful to the only source that was available to him, the unique complete manuscript of the Ṣābi’ Zīj in the Escorial library. In this article we explore the reasons for these deviations and present a critical edition of some of al-Battānī’s tables based on a range of Arabic, Castilian and Latin sources.
