Image of Aljazari taken from Muslim Heritage Youtube video

Little is known about Al-Jazari, and most of that comes from the introduction to his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. He was named after the area in which he was born, al-Jazira—the traditional Arabic name for what was northern Mesopotamia and what is now northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Like his father before him, he served as chief engineer at the Artuklu Palace, the residence of the Diyarbakır branch of the Turkish Artuqid dynasty which ruled across eastern Anatolia as vassals of the Zangid rulers of Mosul and later Ayyubid general Saladin.

Al-Jazari was part of a tradition of craftsmen and was thus more of a practical engineer than an inventor who appears to have been “more interested in the craftsmanship necessary to construct the devices than in the technology which lay behind them” and his machines were usually “assembled by trial and error rather than by theoretical calculation.” Some of his devices were also inspired by earlier devices, such as one of his monumental water clocks being based on that of a Pseudo-Archimedes.