The Five Arabic Revisions of Autolycus’ On the Moving Sphere(Proposition VII)

Autolycus’ On the Moving Sphere is among the earliest Greek mathematical works to reach us and was considered a staple of the middle books, to be studied between the Elements and the Almagest. This was among the many mathematical works translated to Arabic in the 3rd/9th century and it was the subject of several translations, redactions, and recensions. Analyzing the available copies of al-Kura al-mutaḥarrika, five different versions were identified. In this paper, we analyze these five versions, with a focus on the seventh proposition, in order to characterize their relations to each other and to the extant Greek text.