Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.2

c9.2

Since the time when astronomy emerged from the obscurity of ancient fable, nothing is better known than its progress through the different nations of the earth. With the era of Nabonassar, regular observations began to be made in Chaldea; the earliest which have merited the attention of succeeding ages. The curiosity of the Greeks was, soon after, directed to the same object; and that ingenious people was the first that endeavoured to explain, or connect by theory, the various phenomena of the heavens. This work was supposed to be so fully accomplished in the Syntaxes of Ptolemy that his system, without opposition or improvement, continued, for more than five hundred years, to direct the astronomers of Egypt, Italy and Greece. After the sciences were banished from Alexandria, his writings made their way into the East, where, under the Caliphs of Bagdat, astronomy was cultivated with diligence and success. The Persian princes followed the example of those of Bagdat, borrowing besides, from Trebisond, whatever mathematical knowledge was still preserved among the ruins of the Grecian empire. The conquests of Gengis, and afterwards of Timour, though they retarded, did not stop the progress of astronomy in the East. The grandsons of these two conquerors were equally renowned for their love of science: Hulagu restored astronomy in Persia, and Ulugh-Beigh, by an effort still more singular, established it in Tartary. In the meantime, having passed with the Arabs into Spain, it likewise found, in Alphonso of Castile, both a disciple and a patron. It was carried, soon after, into the north of Europe, where, after exercising the genius of Copernicus, of Kepler, and of Newton, it has become the most perfect of all the sciences.