This impressive book (over 700 pages, quarto size), is the culmination of over ten years of research carried out on a manuscript that was acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2002. A digital resource was created in 2007, which included high-quality photographs of the whole manuscript and preliminary translations into modern Arabic and English. This printed version supplements and completes the earlier work, by providing, in addition to a facsimile, an edition of the whole Arabic text, a commented English translation, a glossary of all the star-names (over 100 pages of them), and indexes of animals, planets, astronomical and astrological terms, people and tribes and place names. What we are dealing with is a text in two parts, the first part on the heavens, the second part on the earth. It is lavishly illustrated, with celestial spheres, stars, constellations, lunar mansions and comets for the section on the heavens; and seas, rivers, islands, mountains and cities in the terrestrial section. In addition there are whole-page images of the watermelon plant and the Waqwaq tree whose fruit are homunculi (both added later). The work is an illustrated encyclopaedia, rich in detail, but with a bias towards astrology and divination in the first part (there is no mathematical astronomy) and towards maps in the second, with an admixture of monstrous animals and wondrous plants. When the manuscript was bought by the Bodleian (with the help of many different agencies), the work was thought to be unique, but now it has been shown to belong to a tradition, originating in a work written between 1020 and 1050 in Fatimid Egypt, and surviving in several manuscripts from the late twelfth to the mid eighteenth century. The facsimile is of the Bodleian manuscript alone (the oldest manuscript), but all the copies are considered in the establishment of the Arabic edition. This allows the whole work to be reconstructed, with some manuscripts filling lacunae in others (only two chapters in part 2 are entirely missing). Illustrations in the introduction show the differences between the various manuscript versions.

The sources of the work include Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters and Places, the Quran (the “raised up roof and the laid-down bed” of the heavens and earth), al-Farghani, early Arabic Hermetic astrological literature, legends of the Buddha from Indian sources, it betrays extensive use of al-Masʿudi and Ibn Hawqal, but also similarities with Ikhwan al-Safa'. But much of the material is unique to this work (or, at least, not identified elsewhere), such as the “obscure stars having faint lances in the ninth sphere which have immense favorable and malevolent influences” (part 1, chapter 7). One could perhaps add that the information in the sixth chapter of the first part, about comets (pp. 374–6), includes material which is also in Abu Maʿshar, On the Great Conjunctions, part 5, chapter 7 (pp. 307–23). The names of the planets in Ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, Persian and Indian are also given in Pseudo-al-Majriti's Ghayat al-Hakim, III, iii, though the Ghayat does not solve the problems of the distortions of the unrecognizable names, except perhaps that of Saturn: Indian b-sh-n-sh could be a distortion of a-sh-t-sh in the Ghayat.

The text is lavishly supplied with notes, identifying sources and explaining the meaning. As if that is not enough, the authors promise “a full, comprehensive study of the contents of the treatise in the context of eleventh-century Fatimid society and learning” (p. 2). We look forward to seeing a second volume as magisterial as the first!