The treatise ‛Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt, written in Arabic by Zakarīyyā Muhammad al-Qazwīnī in the 2nd half of the 7th/13th century, i.e. during the turbulent times that followed the Mongol raids and the fall of Baghdad, goes beyond the ‛ajā’ib tradition (narrative of wonders) and marks an apparently late genre of the Arabic (scientific) literature, usually characterised as cosmography. The large spectre of subjects of the celestial and terrestrial domains treated there has been a challenge for scholar studies concerned with tracing the origins of the treatise, as well as the transmission paths of knowledge conferred and its various representation forms. The common assertion of Greek-Aristotelian influence, however, does not explain the structure of the treatise, and does not elucidate the specific interests of the author as they are reflected in the contents of the treatise (e.g. in treating such subjects as planets, angels, curiosities, and monsters).

The present study proposes a network of multiple paths through which classical Greek (peripatetic) and early Christian cosmological concepts, as well as geographical and paradoxographical traditions of the late antiquity – presumably rearranged in new narrative patterns through Persian scholars – met Arabic/Islamic cosmological traditions documented or reflected in tafsīr and hadīth, and, by the end of the 6th/12th century, formed a conspicuous background of narrative and imagery for the emerging of Qazwīnī’s cosmography. The focus of the study lies upon tracing the intermediate stages, both inside the Arabic/Islamic tradition (e.g. the integration of descriptions of marvels and monsters from the Greek paradoxographical and geographical texts into the Arabic genre of ‛ajā’ib) and outside it. The latter category comprises the Nestorian/Christian traditions of cosmological concepts and their affinities to a treatise which can be considered as the mediator between Arabic and Persian cosmographies, the ‛Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt written in Persian by Muhammad b. Mahmūd Tūsī during the 2nd half of the 6th/12th century, i.e. one century before al-Qazwīnī. Precisely in the Persian literature of the early 6th/12th century we can trace a textual restructuring and abridging of the Aristotelian cosmological model towards a narrative intended for a popular understanding of physics and of the imagery of the universe. Perhaps it is due to this deliberate Persian “modulation” towards a popular form of cosmography that the Arabic cosmography of al-Qazwīnī could combine the popular topics of the Arabic/Islamic ‛ajā’ib tradition with the Aristotelian vision of nature and universe, thus establishing in Arabic a heritage continuance based on Greek, Persian and Arabic lineages.