Secretum Secretorum

to Alexander the Great; this may be related to the identication of Alexander the Great in the Quran and the wider
range of Middle Eastern Alexander romance literature.
As for its date of origin, it cannot be said with certainty
whether the section on physiognomy was circulating in
Arabic before AD 940: A manuscript now in the British
Library (OIOC, MS Or. 12070) supposed to have been
copied in 941 by Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Durustawayh
of Isfahan which contains a physiognomy similar to the
one in the Sirr al-Asrar (Secret of Secrets) is probably a
20th-century forgery. More safely, it may be assumed a
form of the text must have existed after the Encyclopedia
of the Brethren of Purity were composed and before the
time Ibn Juljul was writing, quite surely in the late 10th
century AD.
The Arabic version was translated into Persian (at least
twice), Ottoman Turkish (twice), Hebrew (and from Hebrew into Russian), Spanish and Latin.
There are two Latin translations from the Arabic, the rst
one dating from around 1120 by John of Seville for the a
Portuguese queen (preserved today in some 150 copies),
the second one from circa 1232 by Philippus Tripolitanus
(preserved in more than 350 copies), made in the Near
East (Antiochia). It is this second Latin version that was
translated into English by Robert Copland and printed in
1528.

Two charts for determining whether a person will live or die

based on the numerical value of the patients name. From copy
of a portion of Kitab Sirr al-asrar

The Latin Secretum secretorum was eventually translated into Czech, Russian, Croatian, Dutch, German,
Secretum secretorum is a medieval treatise also known Icelandic, English, Aragonese,[1] Catal, Spanish, Poras Secret of Secrets, or The Book of the Secret of Secrets, tuguese, French, Italian and Welsh.[2]
or in Arabic: ( Kitab sirr al-asrar), or the
There is another book called Kitab al-asrar Book of
Book of the science of government: on the good ordering
Secrets on practical technical recipes, classication of
of statecraft. It is a mid-12th century Latin translation
mineral substances, description of the alchemical laboraof a 10th-century Arabic encyclopedic treatise on a wide
tory, etc. by Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi. A Latin
range of topics, including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy,
translation appears in Europe as Liber secretorum. This
astrology, alchemy, magic and medicine. It was inuenis a completely separate book entirely and is a common
tial in Europe during the High Middle Ages.
source of confusion because of the same names and similar subject matter and time period. In addition it is distinctly dierent from a treatise on physiognomy with the
title Kitab al-rasah attributed to Aristotle and said to
1 Origin
have been translated into Arabic in the 9th century by
Hunayn ibn Ishaq.
The origins of the treatise are uncertain. No Greek original exists, though there are claims in the Arabic treatise
that it was translated from the Greek into Syriac and from
Syriac into Arabic by a well-known 9th century transla- 2 The Secrets
tor, Abu Yahya Ibn al-Batriq. It appears, however, that
the treatise was actually composed originally in Arabic. Secret of Secrets takes the form of a pseudoepigraphical
The treatise also contains supposed letters from Aristotle letter supposedly from Aristotle to Alexander the Great
1

EXTERNAL LINKS

during his campaigns in Seleucid Persia. The text ranged

from ethical questions that faced a ruler to astrology and
magical/medical properties of plants, gems, numbers, and
a strange account of a unied science, of which only a
person with the proper moral and intellectual background
could discover. An enlarged version appearing in the 13th
century includes some alchemical references and an early
version of the Emerald Tablet or tabula smaragdina. The
Arabic treatise is preserved in two forms: a long version
of 10 books and a short version of 7 or 8 books, preserved
in a total of about fty copies.

Regula Forster, Das Geheimnis der Geheimnisse:

die arabischen und deutschen Fassungen des pseudoaristotelischen Sirr al-asrar / Secretum Secretorum,
Wiesbaden, Reichert, 2006, ISBN 3-89500-495-2.

Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: the scholarly career of a pseudo-Aristotelian text in the Latin
Middle Ages, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 2003, ISBN 0-472-11308-9.

Inuences

It was one of the most widely read texts of the High

Middle Ages, or even the most-read.[3] Medieval readers took the ascription to Aristotle as authentic and
treated this work among Aristotles genuine works. Roger
Bacon cited the Secretum in own his works more often than his contemporaries, and even produced one
manuscript with his own introduction and notes, something rather unusual for him to do with others works.
Although it is generally accepted that the Secretum held
a special place in Bacons world, more dashing proposals like that of early 20th century medievalist Robert
Steeleclaiming that Bacons contact with Secretum was
the key event pushing Bacon towards experimentalism
have been regarded with skepticism in more recent
reevaluations.[4]
Scholarly attention to the Secretum waned around 1550
but lay interest has continued to this day in particular with
devotes of the Occult. Scholars today see it as a window
onto medieval intellectual life: it was used in a variety
of scholarly contexts, and had some part to play in the
scholarly controversies of the day.

References
This article incorporates text derived from NLM
Microlm Reel: FILM 48-123 no. 4; online version.

[1] (Spanish) Vicente de Vera, Eduardo: El aragons: Historiografa y Literatura, Zaragoza, Mira editores, 1992. p
83
[2] Kyfrinach y Kyfrinachoedd, Chandler, Kirstie (2002).
Patriarchy and Power in Medieval Welsh Literature.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 22: 8095.
Retrieved 5 April 2014.
[3] Abd al-Ramn Badaw (1987), La transmission de la
philosophie grecque au monde arabe, Paris, Librairie
Philosophique Vrin, p. 11
[4] Steven J. Williams (1997). Roger Bacon and the Secret
of Secrets". In Jeremiah Hackett. Roger Bacon and the

sciences: commemorative essays. BRILL. pp. 365374.

ISBN 978-90-04-10015-2.

Mahmoud Manzalaoui, The pseudo-Aristotelian

Kitab Sirr al-asrar: facts and problems, Oriens, vol.
23-24 (1974), pp. 146257.

Steven J. Williams, The early circulation of the

pseudo-Aristotelian 'Secret of Secrets in the west,
in Micrologus, n2 (1994), pp. 127144.

5 External links
Secretum secretorum of pseudo-Aristotle: e-text (in
English, dated 1528)
Three Late Medieval English Translations of the
Secreta Secretorum, from late medieval manuscripts,
historically valuable for their preservation of late
medieval English.

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

6.1

Text

Secretum Secretorum Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretum%20Secretorum?oldid=627432684 Contributors: Deb, Justin Bacon, Wetman, DNewhall, Ary29, MakeRocketGoNow, Stbalbach, Ogress, Alai, Woohookitty, Marudubshinki, FlaBot, RussBot, DanMS,
Gaius Cornelius, Sicarii, Wiqi55, SmackBot, Jagged 85, Linguiste, Stevenmitchell, Jsl83, Ceoil, JoshuaZ, JoeBot, CmdrObot, Cydebot, Thijs!bot, Kathovo, V8Cougar, AlleborgoBot, Garies, Code of the Sphinx, Seanwal111111, Al-Andalusi, Catalographer, Addbot,
AnomieBOT, ARAGONESE35, Arslan-San, AlexanderVanLoon, Semaphoris, ASCIIn2Bme, Khazar2 and Anonymous: 16

6.2

Images

File:Question_book-new.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/Question_book-new.svg License: Cc-by-sa-3.0

Contributors:
Created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Based on Image:Question book.png created by User:Equazcion Original artist:
Tkgd2007
File:Secret_of_secrets_a.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Secret_of_secrets_a.jpg License: Public
domain Contributors: Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here. Original artist: Original uploader was Stbalbach at
en.wikipedia

6.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0