Al-Jaghmını’s Short Tract on the Volumes of the Planetary and Stellar Bodies: Editio princeps and Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines and provides an Arabic critical edition and English translation of the short tract attributed to Mahmūd al-Jaghmīnī (fl. 600/1200) that deals with the volumes of the celestial bodies and that may have been intended as a supplement to al-Mulakhkhas, his introduction to Ptolemaic theoretical astronomy. The work focuses on the sizes of the planetary bodies without addressing distances. The reader is provided with various lists such as which planetary bodies are above and below the Sun, the rounded volumes of bodies compared to the Earth, their sizes in descending order according to these volumes, and the body size of each measured in cubic parasangs (this being a mathematical calculation based on a derived parasang value for the Earth’s volume and the stated relative volume for each body). No sources are mentioned in the witnesses; however, Jaghmīnī evidently chose modified Ptolemaic values, despite the availability of both the Almagest and Planetary Hypotheses in the 13th century. Whether Jaghmīnī considered intermediary sources to be authentic Ptolemaic values or not is unclear. Three of the four manuscript witnesses used for the edition also include a brief additional section on measurement, which is an excerpt from Sinān Pāshā’s 15th-century gloss on Qāḍīzāde’s commentary on al-Mulakhkhas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".