Al-Jazari (1136–1206) was a Mesopotamian engineer at the Artuqid court in Diyarbakir whose Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, completed in 1206, described fifty machines — water clocks, musical automata, fountains and pumps — with detailed construction drawings, earning him the modern title 'father of robotics'.
Unlike most medieval inventors, he wrote for builders: each device comes with step-by-step instructions and illustrations so precise that modern engineers have reconstructed working machines from his 800-year-old diagrams. Donald Hill's 1974 English translation finally brought the book to the wider world.
