Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit, Series A v2.c10.191

v2.c10.191

But later Arabic writers slowly developed an elaborate mythology concerning Kankah’s role in the history of astronomy. Abū Maʿshar in his Kitāb al-ulūf, which was written between 840 and 860, states that Kankah was an authority on astronomy among Indian scientists “in ancient times” (see D. Pingree [1968a] 16). Ibn al-Adamī in his Niẓām al-ʿiqd (ca. 920) associates the Arabic translation of the Zij al-Sindhind (in 773) with an unnamed member of an embassy sent from Sind to Baghdād (see D. Pingree [A2. 1970a] 105–106). The passage from Ibn al-Adamī is quoted by Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī of Toledo in his Kitāb ṭabaqāt al-umam (ed. pp. 49–50, trans. p. 102) in 1067/68; his successor, Ibn al-Qifṭī, who died in Aleppo in 1248/49, quotes some of Ibn al-Adamī’s story in the article on Kankah in his Taʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ (ed. pp. 265–267), but without actually connecting Kankah with the unnamed scholar responsible for the Zij-al-Sindhind. The first to do this was evidently Abraham ben Ezra (ca. 1090–1167) in the preface to his translation of Ibn al-Muthannā’s Fī ʿilal zīj al-Khwārizmī (see B. R. Goldstein [A2. 1967] 148 and D. Pingree [1968b] 101–102) and his Liber de rationibus tabularum (p. 92). There is no real basis for this identification.