The magic squares of Manuel Moschopoulos (Q1277235)

The importance of this article is not limited to the edition and the analysis of the Greek text of Manuel Moschopoulos on magic squares, a genre of writing hitherto thought to have been unknown to the Greeks, but bypasses that in what it says about the transmission of science from the Arabic/Islamic culture to that of Byzantium towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. When taken together with the works of Otto Neugebauer on the transmission of astronomical ideas between the two cultures during the same period, and more recently the works of David Pingree, Anne Tihon, and Raymond Mercier, to name only those, dealing with the same episode, the present evidence demonstrating also the transmission of magic squares makes the study of the transmission of science from Arabic into Byzantine Greek much more pressing than it has ever been thought before. The same transmission in other disciplines is yet to be documented.