“When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them".

The Book of Secrets is an extraordinarily important manuscript in the field of the history of science, because it represents one of the earliest written and drawn testimonies about complex ancient machines and has never before been studied or divulged.

The research project was sparked by Leonardo3’s discovery of this important Arab manuscript, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, where the only surviving copy is preserved. It has never before been fully studied or disclosed in all its complexity. It is a unique source for the study of ancient Arab technology, to which reference must be made when studying the inventions of the Renaissance, like those by Leonardo da Vinci.

Thanks to the auspices of the Emir of Qatar, His Highness the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and the competence of the Italian research center Leonardo3, the manuscript has, for the first time ever, been transcribed (in Arabic) and translated (into Italian, English and French), and all its machines have been interpreted and reconstructed.

All the work that has been carried out on the manuscript was presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and was one of the main attractions at the museum’s inauguration on November 22, 2008.

A one-of-a-kind manuscript is preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence: the copy of an 11th-century text completed in 1266 and containing designs for 31 extraordinary machines including water-clocks, mechanical “theaters” and war instruments. A reproduction of the manuscript has been produced for the first time in history and is available in a limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies, 100 of which have already been consigned to various heads of state and dignitaries around the world.

A reproduction of the manuscript has been produced for the first time in history and is available in a limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies whose detail is exactly the same as the original manuscript, using super high resolution photographs made directly from the original.

CONTENTS
A red velvet bag contains: the exclusive, 96-page facsimile, bound in leather, with golden decorations and numbered by hand; certification of limited-edition status; and gloves for consultation. A separate booklet with the entire Arabic text, as well as textual and image-based interpretations of all the machines, is also provided in either Italian and French or English and Arabic.

EDITION
200 numbered copies, 100 of which have already been consigned to various heads of state and dignitaries around the world.

 

 

 

It is worth noting that the text of the manuscript is very organized and is not in any way a series of point or notes, but a final treatise meant to circulate.

The technology we used served us a lot: the 3D animations of the machines helped us verify, on the one hand, what is actually mechanically possible and, on the other hand, what contains errors. All the interpretations of the machines presented in the coming pages were carried out thanks to tridimensional graphics which made them more easily comprehensible. However, our several-year experience in ancient machines taught us that the suggested reconstructive and interpretative solutions are rarely definitive.

In fact, the extreme complexity of these machines and, sometimes, the scarcity and imprecision of the available information, both in the texts and in the drawings, leave room for future modifications, improvements and even full revisions of the project.