Arabic in the Sciences
The Secret of Secrets
سرّ الأسرار
An anonymous Arabic book of advice to kings, rules of health and reading character from the face, put about as a letter from Aristotle to Alexander. Translated into Latin in full around 1230, it survives in some 600 Latin manuscripts. Europeans knew it had reached them from Arabic, yet took it for Aristotle's – the English philosopher Roger Bacon among them.
- Author
- An anonymous Arabic author (probably 10th century)
- Field
- Philosophy
- Arabic title
- سرّ الأسرار (كتاب السياسة في تدبير الرياسة)
- Latin title
- Secretum secretorum
Europe knew it under a name not its author's.
Wellcome Collection, MS.67 · Public Domain Mark
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Sources
- Robert Steele (ed.), Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis (Oxford, 1920), introduction
- U.S. National Library of Medicine, Islamic Medical Manuscripts: Physiognomy – Sirr al-asrar
- Theo Loinaz, «Scientia peregrina…», Medievalismo 21 (2011), 81–136
- Carol Poster, review of S. J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets (2003), The Medieval Review
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