The Zīj al-Sindhind

In the early 770s an embassy reached the court of the caliph al-Manṣūr in Baghdad carrying a Sanskrit astronomical treatise. It was translated into Arabic, and the resulting work is known as the Zīj al-Sindhind, from siddhānta, the Sanskrit term for a systematic astronomical treatise. Its compiler is named as al-Fazārī, whose surviving fragments were collected and analysed by Pingree ^{1 pp. 103-123}.

Why it matters here

This site’s account of astrology runs through the Arabic-speaking world, because that is where a great deal of Greek technical material was preserved, extended, and later passed to Latin Europe; see The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement for the movement that made this possible. The Arabic zīj tradition is part of that account.

That tradition has Indian input at its foundation. The parameters and computational methods of the Sindhind underlie al-Khwārizmī’s zīj, and it is a recension of al-Khwārizmī, in Maslama al-Majrīṭī’s revision, that Adelard of Bath translated into Latin in the twelfth century; see The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement for that later stage. An Indian astronomer named Kanaka is recorded at the court of Hārūn al-Rashīd ².

What travelled

Computational astronomy: methods for calculating planetary positions, tables, and the parameters behind them. This is a separate matter from horoscopic doctrine. Material moved in both directions across several centuries and in different registers, and the mathematical transmission documented here does not by itself establish anything about the movement of interpretive technique.