A magic square is called in Arabic a wafq (harmony, agreement) or wafq al-aʿdād (harmonious disposition of numbers), and ʿilm al-awfāq is the study of such squares; occasionally the more general term for any tabular presentation, jadwal, was used (Günther and Pielow; Hallum).
1. Origins
The earliest recorded magic square was a 3×3 square, having nine cells in which the letter-numera…