Is Science Western in Origin Preview - CK Raju

Preview page 11 of 16The Baghdad House of Wisdom andtransmission TO Greek textsTherefore, while the Arabs valued the “theology ofAristotle”, 10 for arithmetic, they turned to India, not toGreece. Arabs imported various Indian arithmetic texts,notably those of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Mahavira.These were digested and transcreated in the Bayt al Hikma,by al Khwarizmi, and became famous as Algorismus afterhis Latinized name. These “Arabic numerals” use the placevaluesystem. That makes it easy to represent large numbers.It also makes arithmetic very easy through “algorithms”—the elementary techniques of addition, subtraction,multiplication, and division that everyone today learns inschool.Although the Baghdad House of Wisdom was a landmark, itonly accelerated a well-established tradition. From the verybeginning of the Abbasid Caliphate, the legendaryBarmakids (from barmak = pramukh) of Persian-Buddhistorigin, who were vazir-s to the Abbasid Khalifa-s, hadalready instituted this system of importing knowledge fromPersia and India.The Barmakids, in turn, were only continuing the earlierPersian tradition of gathering knowledge, and translating itinto Persian (Pahlavi). This continuity is manifest throughtexts, such as the Indian Pancatantra, which were translatedinto Arabic not from Sanskrit but from Pahlavi, along withother Persian books, such as the “Arabian Nights” and theastronomy text called the Almagest. Noticeably, the Almagestcame to Baghdad from Persia, not Byzantium. Had this text