The Arab engineer al-Jazari, a prominent polymath, describes fifty mechanical devices in his book (title translated to English) The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, along with instructions on how to construct them.

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 northwestern 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 Diyarbakir branch of the Turkish Artuqid dynasty which ruled across eastern Anatolia as vassals of the Zengid rulers of Mosul and later Ayyubid general Saladin.

While many of al-Jazari's inventions may now appear to be trivial, the most significant aspect of al-Jazari's machines are the mechanisms, components, ideas, methods, and design features which they employ.