In the middle of the 9th century CE, four sets of Arabic astronomical tables reached the court of the Umayyad emir ‘Abd al-Rahman II in Cordoba. One of these was the Sindhind Zij de al-Khwarizmi, which had been composed around the year 830 as a mixture of Indian, Persian and Ptolemaic-Greek materials. Around the year 1000, Maslama al-Majriti reworked this book for use in Cordoba, and in the 12th century it was translated into Latin by Adelard of Bath. Several manuscripts of this translation are extant today, and furthermore many tables from al-Khwarizmi’s Zij were included in the Toledan Tables, which became very popular in all of Europe. This article takes the Sindhind Zij as a focal point for sketching the history of astronomical tables in al-Andalus and provides an overview of research results on the tables in the zij with the aim to categorize them on the basis of their origins.
Al-Andalus, astronomy, astronomical tables, zij, al-Kharizmi, Sindhind Zij, Maslama al-Majriti, Adelard of Bath, Toledan Tables.