2-737-507 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Peacock-shaped Hand Washing Device (recto); Text Page, Arabic Prose (verso), 1315. This leaf from a 1315 Syrian copy of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices , written in 1206, depicts a peacock basin automaton for ritual hand washing. There are 15 surviving manuscript copies of al-Jazari’s work, ranging from the early 13th to the late 19th century. An engineer from upper Mesopotamia, al-Jazari was in the service of King Nasri al-Din when he completed his masterwork, an anthology of automated devices including clocks, trick vessels for drinking sessions, devices for washing, fountains, water-raising machines, and measuring instruments. His designs clearly illustrate that automata were not innovations from Western Europe, but they stemmed from a tradition known in the ancient, Islamic, and Byzantine worlds. We do not know with certainty that al-Jazari’s device was ever actually constructed.