Secretum Secretorum

to Alexander the Great; this may be related to the identifi-

cation 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 He-
brew into Russian), Spanish and Latin.
There are two Latin translations from the Arabic, the first
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
Two charts for determining whether a person will live or die translated into English by Robert Copland and printed in
based on the numerical value of the patient’s name. From copy 1528.
of a portion of Kitab Sirr al-asrar
The Latin Secretum secretorum was eventually trans-
lated into Czech, Russian, Croatian, Dutch, German,
Secretum secretorum is a medieval treatise also known Icelandic, English, Aragonese,[1] Català, Spanish, Por-
as Secret of Secrets, or The Book of the Secret of Secrets, tuguese, French, Italian and Welsh.[2]
or in Arabic: ‫( كتاب سر الأسرار‬Kitab 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, classification of
of statecraft. It is a mid-12th century Latin translation
mineral substances, description of the alchemical labora-
of 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 influen-
is 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 sim-
ilar subject matter and time period. In addition it is dis-
tinctly different from a treatise on physiognomy with the
1 Origin title Kitab fi al-firasah attributed to Aristotle and said to
have been translated into Arabic in the 9th century by
Hunayn ibn Ishaq.
The origins of the treatise are uncertain. No Greek orig-
inal 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
2 5 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 unified 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 fifty copies.
sciences: commemorative essays. BRILL. pp. 365–374.
ISBN 978-90-04-10015-2.
• Regula Forster, Das Geheimnis der Geheimnisse:
die arabischen und deutschen Fassungen des pseudo-
aristotelischen Sirr al-asrar / Secretum Secretorum,
Wiesbaden, Reichert, 2006, ISBN 3-89500-495-2.
• Mahmoud Manzalaoui, “The pseudo-Aristotelian
Kitab Sirr al-asrar: facts and problems”, Oriens, vol.
23-24 (1974), pp. 146–257.

• Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: the schol-

arly career of a pseudo-Aristotelian text in the Latin
3 Influences Middle Ages, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 2003, ISBN 0-472-11308-9.
It was one of the most widely read texts of the High
Middle Ages, or even “the” most-read.[3] Medieval read- • Steven J. Williams, “The early circulation of the
ers took the ascription to Aristotle as authentic and pseudo-Aristotelian 'Secret of Secrets’ in the west”,
treated this work among Aristotle’s genuine works. Roger in Micrologus, n°2 (1994), pp. 127–144.
Bacon cited the Secretum in own his works more of-
ten than his contemporaries, and even produced one
manuscript with his own introduction and notes, some- 5 External links
thing rather unusual for him to do with others’ works.
Although it is generally accepted that the Secretum held • Secretum secretorum of pseudo-Aristotle: e-text (in
a special place in Bacon’s world, more dashing propos- English, dated 1528)
als like that of early 20th century medievalist Robert
Steele—claiming that Bacon’s contact with Secretum was • Three Late Medieval English Translations of the
the key event pushing Bacon towards experimentalism— Secreta Secretorum, from late medieval manuscripts,
have been regarded with skepticism in more recent historically valuable for their preservation of late
reevaluations.[4] medieval English.
Scholarly attention to the Secretum waned around 1550
but lay interest has continued to this day in particular with
devotées 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.

4 References
This article incorporates text derived from NLM
Microfilm Reel: FILM 48-123 no. 4; online ver-
sion.

[1] (Spanish) Vicente de Vera, Eduardo: El aragonés: Histo-

riografía 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: 80–95.
Retrieved 5 April 2014.

[3] ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (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
 3

6 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 Ba-
con, 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, Cyde-
bot, 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