In 1206 the engineer Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, working at the Artuqid court in Diyarbakir, completed a treatise usually translated as “The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices” (Kitab fi Ma’rifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiyya). It describes and illustrates roughly fifty machines, from water clocks and fountains to hand-washing devices and humanoid figures, with enough construction detail that several have since been reconstructed. Al-Jazari died in 1206, and the earliest surviving manuscript copy dates to that year.
The device most often singled out by historians of robotics is a boat carrying four mechanical musicians, designed to float on a pool and entertain guests. The figures were driven by a rotating drum studded with pegs that struck levers, so that moving the pegs changed the rhythm the drummers played. In modern terms the peg-and-drum arrangement is a primitive read-only program: the same mechanism, the same energy source, but a different output depending on how the pegs are set.
That separation of a fixed machine from a changeable pattern of instructions is why al-Jazari’s work belongs in the prehistory of artificial intelligence rather than only in the history of clockwork. Long before electronic computers, builders were already exploring the idea that behavior could be encoded and altered without rebuilding the device. The primary source used here is the Internet Archive scan of the treatise.
For a business reader, the lesson is that the deep idea behind programmable machines is old: the boundary between hardware that does the work and a stored pattern that directs it has been recognized and exploited for over eight centuries.