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,
NOTE XXIII. FIVE NOTABLE ASTRONOMERS ^ 129
published in the Bulletin de FAcademic lyiperiale. You will Me glad to
hear that another M. of al-Biruni's al-Atkdnfl-Bdqiya\&& turned up
and enables us to supply of the
rr^ost gaps in Sachau's edition, irt par-*
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ticular the sections on Zoroaster and Bafdaisan." .
Al-Qifti has no article on ai-Biruni in his " History of the Philoso-
phers," and only once reVets \o him. Ibn Abi Usaybife. gives him a
short notice in his "Lives of the Physicians'* (ii, pp. 20-21). The short
articles consecrated to him by Zahiru'd-Din Abu'l-Hasan ibn Abu'l-Qasim
(wrote about the middle of the twelfth century of our era) and by
d-Din Muhammad ibn Mahrmid ash-Shahrazdri (early thirteenth
:
Sha,msu
century) are quoted in full by Sachau 1 . The're is also a long police of
him in the modern Persian Ndma-i-Ddnishwardn (vol. i, pp. 37-49)
composed in A..H. 1294 (A.D. 3877), which is of little authority and does
not add much to our knowledge.
Abu Ma'shar Ja'far ibn ^Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Balkhi
was one *f the most celebrated astronomers of the third century of the
hijra (ninth of the Christian era), and, according to al-Qifti 2
the , greatest
authority on the history of the ancient Persians. He* dwelt in Baghdad,
i'A the western part, and was originally a traditionist; and his fanaticism
led him to insult and molest Ya'qiib ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, the "Philosopher
of the Arabs," and to stir up the common people against him. Finally
al-Kindi induced some of his friends to draw his attention to, and
arouse his interest in Mathematics and Geometry, so that he came to
seek instruction from al-Kindi, and was reconciled with him. He soon
passed on (at the age of forty-seven) to the study of Astronomy. On
on