Al-Jawhari

Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (Arabic: ابو نصرإسماعيل بن حماد الجوهري; birth name Imam Abu Nasr Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari al-Farabi, c. 940 Farab – 1002 or 1008 Nishapur) was a Kazakh lexicographer, writer, and inventor.

Life

Although the exact date is unknown, he was born around 940 in Farab (Otrar). He developed the Arabic he had learned in Farab first in Baghdad and then in the Hijaz. He then came to Khurasan, first settling in Damghan and later in Nishapur, where he wrote his first work, an important Arabic dictionary, al-Ṣiḥāḥ fī al-lughah (الصحاح في اللغة). This work was translated into Turkish in the 16th century by Vankulu Mehmed Efendi under the title Vankulu Lugatı, and in 1729 it earned the distinction of being the first book printed on İbrahim Müteferrika's printing press.

To attempt flight, al-Jawhari strapped wooden wings he had made himself to his two arms and climbed onto the roof of a mosque in Nishapur. To the crowd gathered there he said: "O people, no one until now has made the invention I have made. I shall now fly before your very eyes. The most important thing to be done in the world is to fly to the heavens. And that is what I shall do," then leaped from the mosque roof; but after flying for a short while he fell and lost his life. In the sources this attempt is presented as the earliest flight attempt, made 900 years before the Wright Brothers. It is claimed that he drew inspiration from the first glider of the Berber astronomer Abbas ibn Firnas, who lived in al-Andalus in the 9th century.

Influence

This attempt of al-Jawhari's became a source of inspiration in the 17th century for figures such as Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi and Lagâri Hasan Çelebi.

Related works

Haywood, John A. (1965). Arabic Lexicography: Its History, and Its Place in the General History of Lexicography (in English). Archived from the original on 2 May 2016. Retrieved 6 October 2020.

M. J. L. Young; J. D. Latham; R. B. Serjeant (eds.) (1990). "Arabic biographical writing". Religion, learning and science in the 'Abbasid period. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (in English). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.2277/0521327636. ISBN 978-0-521-32763-3. Archived from the original on 29 April 2016. Retrieved 6 October 2020.

Chisholm, Hugh (ed.) (1911). "Dictionary". Encyclopædia Britannica. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 197.

Sprenger, Aloys (ed.) (1857). A catalogue of the Bibliotheca Orientalis Sprengeriana (in English). Giessen. p. 1400.

Sources

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