In October 2024, ASTRA postdoctoral fellow Dr Hamid Bohloul came across a reference to a copy of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’s The Book of Constellations (c. 964), an important work in the history of Islamicate astral sciences, which was previously held in the al-Awqāf al-ʿĀmma Library in Mosul, Iraq. However, the reference did not mention anything about the scribe or date of transcription of that manuscript.
Hamid Bohloul, source: Sandra Prengel, 2025.
If a manuscript is preserved in a European, North American, Iranian, Turkish, Indian, or North African library, for example, there are usually ways to get scans or images of it. Sometimes it is not easy, but in most cases it works after a while. But if a manuscript is kept in Aleppo, Mosul, Kabul, or other places affected by war, it is much more difficult. The al-Awqāf al-ʿĀmma Library held more than 5,000 Islamic manuscripts, but all of it was burned and destroyed by ISIS during their occupation of Mosul from 2014 to 2017. How could Bohloul obtain the manuscript and what secrets might it hold?
Luckily for Bohloul, a catalog of the manuscripts from the library, including al-Ṣūfī’s The Book of Constellations, still exists. In another stroke of luck, the author of the catalog had provided some basic information about the copy of The Book of Constellations in addition to the image of the last page of the book, containing the colophon, a little note added to the end of books usually by authors and scribes of the medieval books. From this information, Bohloul was not only able to identify the scribe of the manuscript but also could discover interesting information about the history of bookmaking for the treasury of Ulugh Beg, a fifteenth-century Timurid sultan, astronomer, and mathematician, who ruled over an important part of Central Asia and Iran.
Located on the ancient Silk Road in Samarqand in Central Asia, Ulugh Beg’s observatory still stands today as a testimony to the significance of the role of astronomy for Timurid rulers. What secrets might the observatory, and the books compiled or transcribed around it, still hold for the history of astral sciences in Islamicate societies?
Ulugh Begh's observatory in Samarqand. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Reading the Margins: The Case of Jamshīd al-Kāshī
In pursuit of these secrets, Bohloul takes a novel approach and examines not just the manuscript texts but also closely reads marginalia and colophons. By doing so, Bohloul discovered that not only did Jamshīd al-Kāshī (d. 1429) but also his family members play an important role in preparing Ulugh Beg’s astronomical book (Zīj). Reading in the margin, Bohloul argues, provides valuable astronomical and mathematical information but also, more importantly, contextualizes the books. In fact, marginalia may offer information about where texts were written and read, they may provide insight into local events and conditions at the time, for example information about earthquakes or plagues, and they may reveal new information about authors, scribes, their families, and patrons.
Examining such marginalia, Bohloul’s research explores exactly these often-overlooked issues: the families and networks of astrologers at Timurid courts—and he has discovered some remarkable new connections that change how we see astral pursuits in the courts. The case of Jamshīd al-Kāshī is particularly illuminating.
Ulugh Beg invited Jamshīd to Samarqand around 1422. Prior to that, Jamshīd had served Kamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, a local governor, a relationship that did not end well. We know this, Bohloul explains, from a marginal note added by the scribe of the earliest extant copy of the work, Muʿīn al-Dīn al-Kāshī. By 1409, Jamshīd had moved on to the court of Prince Iskander in Shiraz, where his rivalry with two other court astrologers continued until the end of his sovereign in Isfahan in 1414. When Jamshīd eventually arrived in Samarqand, Ulugh Beg also invited other scholars. But who else were invited and how did they work together?
The colophon and its marginalia reveal that Jamshīd al-Kāshī had a namesake grandson, Jamshīd, born in Ardistan near Kashan. The grandson translated a summary of Ulugh Beg’s Zīj into Arabic and emigrated to Cairo, most probably after Ulugh Beg’s murder in 1449.
Astrologer Families in Service to Timurid Rulers
Bohloul’s careful reading of marginalia and manuscripts reveals that familial relationship played a role in the invitation process. This explains how scholars were selected and how networks were created.
We, with our modern categories, split the sky into astronomy and astrology. In the fifteenth century, there was no such dividing line. The same hands that measured declinations also read destinies. That unity comes into focus in Bohloul’s work. In a set of rarely studied Persian manuscripts, his careful reading shows that many members of these families were—perhaps primarily—court astrologers. Titles and tables sit side by side with horoscopic calculations, suggesting a scholarly world where prediction and precision belonged to the same craft.
The manuscripts also hint at a culture of birth and fate: nearly every significant figure—royal or courtier—kept a nativity book, recording the positions of planets and constellations at the exact moment of birth. Long overlooked by modern scholars, reading the marginalia of these treatises invite us to revisit the astral sciences not as divided disciplines, but as a single, practiced way of knowing the heavens.
The colophon notes that in 1589, Jamshīd al-Kāshī’s great-great-great-grandson copied his ancestor’s major textbook, the Miftāḥ al-ḥisāb (Key of Arithmetic), more than 160 years after al-Kāshī’s death, MS London, British Library, Add 7470.
Reading from the Margin to the Center
What happens when we read the edges as carefully as the lines? In the quiet margins of Persian manuscripts—names, dates, quick calculations—another history of the astral sciences comes into view. The glosses and side notes do not merely comment on texts; they record practice.
As Bohloul shows, marginalia and rarely studied copies open new ways of reading that explain how astrology became more widely practiced at Timurid courts. Between tables and horoscopes, we glimpse working scholars, court routines, and the everyday uses of celestial knowledge that formal treatises tend to smooth away.
Beyond these few volumes, shelves in libraries and museums still hold many treatises that remain unstudied—materials essential for understanding past societies. And there is a quiet irony here: thanks to the painstaking work of historians like Bohloul, the farther we move from that world in time, the more closely its details come into focus.