the capital of the Caliphs, rapidly developed into a centre of literary and scientific activity. Al Mansur, who reigned from A.D. 754 to 775, was noted as a patron of science, and collected round him learned men both from India and the West. In particular we are told of the arrival at his court in 772 of a scholar from India bearing with him an Indian treatise on astronomy,[1] which was translated into Arabic by order of the Caliph, and remained the standard treatise for nearly half a century. From Al Mansur's time onwards a body of scholars, in the first instance chiefly Syrian Christians, were at work at the court of the Caliphs translating Greek writings, often through the medium of Syriac, into Arabic. The first translations made were of the medical treatises of Hippocrates and Galen; the Aristotelian ideas contained in the latter appear to have stimulated interest in the writings of Aristotle himself, and thus to have enlarged the range of subjects regarded as worthy of study. Astronomy soon followed medicine, and became the favourite science of the Arabians, partly no doubt out of genuine scientific interest, but probably still more for the sake of its practical applications. Certain Mahometan ceremonial observances required a knowledge of the direction of Mecca, and though many worshippers, living anywhere between the Indus and the Straits of Gibraltar, must have satisfied themselves with rough-and-ready solutions of this problem, the assistance which astronomy could give in fixing the true direction was welcome in larger centres of population. The Mahometan calendar, a lunar one, also required some attention in order that fasts and feasts should be kept at the proper times. Moreover the belief in the possibility of predicting the future by means of the stars, which had flourished among the Chaldaeans (chapter i., § 18), but which remained to a great extent in abeyance among the Greeks, now revived rapidly on a congenial oriental soil, and the Caliphs were probably quite as much interested in seeing that the learned men of
- ↑ The data as to Indian astronomy are so uncertain, and the evidence of any important original contributions is so slight, that I have not thought it worth while to enter into the subject in any detail. The chief Indian treatises, including the one referred to in the text, bear strong marks of having been based on Greek writings.
