The 13th-century Islamic cosmography — Ottoman, Persian, and French editions spanning 1553–1866, with AI-translated English layer.
Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th-century Arabic encyclopedia catalogued everything the medieval Islamic world understood about the cosmos -- the movements of the stars, the nature of angels and jinn, the properties of minerals, plants, and the strange creatures believed to inhabit distant lands. It was copied, translated, and illustrated for centuries across the Islamic world, and the manuscripts gathered here -- an illuminated 1553 Ottoman Turkish copy, two Persian editions two centuries apart -- show how the same text kept getting reinterpreted by different scribes and artists, each adding their own illustrations of wonders they'd never seen and couldn't have.