{
  "author": "ChronologiaOS editorial guides",
  "date": "2026-10-09",
  "department": "Knowledge Transmission",
  "department_id": "TRANSMISSION",
  "epistemic_label": "Source guide",
  "epistemic_status": "SOURCE_GUIDE",
  "period": "15th century CE",
  "place": "Paris and Toledo",
  "public_sources": [
    {
      "publisher": "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus / Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities",
      "title": "Paris BnF Lat. 7292 \u2014 Euclid Arabic-to-Latin transmission witness",
      "type": "Manuscript database record",
      "url": "https://ptolemaeus.badw.de/jordanus/ms/4475"
    },
    {
      "publisher": "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus / Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities",
      "title": "Ptolemy, Almagesti (tr. Gerard of Cremona)",
      "type": "Manuscript database record",
      "url": "https://ptolemaeus.badw.de/work/3"
    }
  ],
  "publication_state": "PUBLIC",
  "read_time": "3 min read",
  "sections": [
    {
      "body": "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus records Paris BnF Lat. 7292 as a fifteenth-century manuscript witness to a Latin Euclid translated from Arabic. The research record dates the witness, not the translation, and not Euclid.",
      "heading": "Start with the manuscript",
      "source": 0
    },
    {
      "body": "The Latin translation has often been attributed to Gerard of Cremona, whose Toledo Almagest translation the same database documents between about 1140 and 1175. The record declines to make the Euclid attribution canonical until a translation-work object exists with its own evidence.",
      "heading": "An attribution waiting for its object",
      "source": 1
    },
    {
      "body": "A translator's name on a later copy is a claim made by that copy. Before accepting it, look for the translation's earliest witnesses and whether their style matches the translator's known work.",
      "heading": "Try the research habit"
    },
    {
      "body": "Euclid composed in Greek around 300 BCE; this copy is Latin from Arabic, some 1,700 years later. Which features of the text would you expect to survive that journey intact, and which would you expect to drift?",
      "heading": "A question to carry forward"
    }
  ],
  "short_title": "Who translated Euclid, and how would we know?",
  "slug": "euclid-in-latin-a-fifteenth-century-witness",
  "summary": "A Paris manuscript carries a Latin Euclid made from Arabic. Learn why the record dates the copy, declines to name the translator, and keeps Euclid's own date far away from both.",
  "tags": [
    "Euclid",
    "Gerard of Cremona",
    "Latin translation",
    "Manuscripts",
    "Transmission"
  ],
  "title": "Euclid in Latin: a fifteenth-century witness."
}