) and an English one by Aage Gerhardt Drachmann (1963) were then published after this edition. The new critical edition, with a full presentation of all the manuscript sources for the work, is the consequence of the unexpected discovery of four Persian manuscripts, all concerning the second book of this important treatise on mechanics, which opened an unexplored field of research and offered new perspectives, both philological and scientific, in interpreting the text. At the same time, analysis of the work has revealed passages very similar to corresponding passages in works by Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei, advancing the possibility that Italian scientists of the Renaissance may have been familiar with all or at least part of Heron’s Mechanics.