This is an interesting form of speculation. So these geographers were employed by the caliphs, for example, to figure out the circumference of the world, to figure out the relationship between land and water in the world.
Geography both of a quantitative kind– measuring, navigation, figuring out to get from place to place– and of a kind of curiosities of the world kind, of different customs, different peoples, different products. And the point of that is not Palermo or anything like that, but just the fascination that the Muslim world had for travel, for geography. There was a contemptuous description of Palermo by a tenth century geographer, Ibn Hawqal. So that the enumeration, the use of zero are from India, but the development of algebra is a unique contribution of this period and of these people. We have talked about the mathematical researches of the Arabs combining Persian, Greek, and Indian mathematics and, of course, with contributions of their own. Ptolemy maps of Western Europe and Arabia / Vatican Library, Creative Commons Yale University Geography and Medicine under the Abbasids Purse lid from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, early 7th century, gold, garnet and millefiori / British Museum, Creative CommonsĬhair, History of Science and Medicine Program
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