For most of history, different peoples,
cultures and religious groups have lived according to their own calendars.
Then, in the 11th century, a Persian scholar attempted to create a single,
universal timeline for all humanity.
The baptism of Christ, from The Chronology of Ancient Nations, 1307. (Edinburgh University Library/Bridgeman Images)
Today,
it is taken for granted that ‘World History’ exists. Muslims, Jews and
Chinese each have their own calendars and celebrate their own New Year’s
Day. But for most practical matters, including government, commerce and
science, the world employs a single common calendar. Thanks to this, it
is possible to readily translate dates from the Chinese calendar, or
from the Roman, Greek or Mayan, into the same chronological system that
underlies the histories of, say, Vietnam or Australia.
This single global calendar enables us to place events everywhere on a
single timeline. Without it, temporal comparisons across cultures and
traditions would be impossible. It is no exaggeration to say that this
common understanding of time and our common calendar system are the keys
to world history.
It was not always the case. Most countries, cultures or religious
groups have lived according to their own calendars. Each designated its
own starting point for historical time, be it the Creation, Adam and Eve
or some later event, such as the biblical Flood. Even when they
acknowledged a common point in time, as did both Greeks and Persians
with the birth of Alexander the Great, they differed about when that
event took place.
The ancient Greeks pioneered the systematic study of history
and, even today, Herodotus (c.484-425 BC) stands out for his omnivorous
curiosity about other peoples and cultures. Throughout his Histories he
regales his readers with exotica gleaned from his extensive travels and
enquiries. He explains how each culture preserves and protects its own
history. He reports admiringly on how the Egyptians maintained lists of
their kings dating back 341 generations. His implication is that all
customs and traditions are relative. Yet for two reasons the
broad-minded Herodotus, whom Cicero called ‘the Father of History’,
stopped short of asking how one might coordinate or integrate the
Egyptian and Greek systems of time and history, or those of any other
peoples.
A map of the world illustrating a 14th-century manuscript of al-Biruni's 'Elements of Astrology'.
For all his interest in diverse peoples and cultures, Herodotus wrote for a Greek audience. The structure of his Histories
allowed ample space for digressions that would inform or amuse his
readers, but differing concepts of time were not among them. Herodotus
and other Greeks of the Classical age were curious about the larger
world, but ultimately their subject was Greece and they remained content
to view the world through their own calendar. The same could be said
for the other peoples of the ancient world. Each was so immersed in the
particularities of its own culture that it would never have occurred to
them to enquire into how other peoples might view historical time.
Herodotus had come closer to perceiving the need for a world history
than anyone before him.
Other ancient thinkers came as far as Herodotus, but no further. The
Roman historian Polybius (200-118 BC) penned what he called a Universal History,
embracing much of the Middle East, but he passed over differing
concepts of history and time. Instead he shoehorned all dates into the
four-year units of the Olympiads. This made his dates intelligible to
Romans and Greeks but unintelligible to everyone else. Similarly, the
Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37-100) took as his subject the
interaction of Jews and Romans, two peoples with markedly different
understandings of time. Having himself defected to the Roman side, he
employed Roman chronology throughout his The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews and felt no need to correlate that system with the calendar of the Jews.
This, then, was the situation in the year 1000, when a largely
unknown Central Asian scholar from Kath in the far west of modern
Uzbekistan confronted the problem of history and time. Abu Rayhan
Muhammad al-Biruni (973-1039) was an unlikely figure to take up so
abstruse a task. Just 29 years old, he had written half a dozen papers
on astronomy and geodesics. He was also involved in a vitriolic exchange
in Bukhara with the young Ibn Sina, who later gained fame for his Canon of Medicine. But
Biruni was a stranger to history and had never studied the many foreign
cultures that had developed their own systems of time. Worse, he had
lost several years fleeing a wave of civil unrest that swept the region.
Fortunately for him, an exiled ruler from Gorgan near the Caspian Sea
had been able to reclaim his throne and invited the promising young
scientist to come and adorn his court. When that ruler, Qabus, asked
Biruni to provide an explanation ‘regarding the eras used by different
nations, and regarding the differences of their roots, i.e., … of the
months and years on which they are based’, Biruni was not in a position
to say no.
Biruni soon amassed religious and historical texts of the ancient
Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans and then gathered information on
Muslims, Christians and Jews. His account of the Jewish calendar and
festivals anticipated those of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides by more
than a century. He also assembled evidence on the measurement of time
and history from lesser-known peoples and sects from Central Asia,
including his own Khwarazmians, a Persianate people with its own
calendar system. In his research he called on his knowledge of
languages, including Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as his native
Khwarazmian. For others he relied on translations or native informants.
In a decision that made his book as inaccessible to the general
reader as it is valuable to specialists, Biruni included an overwhelming
mass of detail on all known histories and calendar systems. The only
ones excluded were those of India and China, about which he confessed he
lacked sufficient written data. So thorough was Biruni that his Chronology of Ancient Peoples
remains the sole source for much invaluable data on peoples as diverse
as pre-Muslim Arabs, followers of various ‘false prophets’ and even
Persians and Jews.
Biruni could have made it easier for his reader had he presented
everything from just one perspective: his own. But this was not his way.
Unlike Herodotus, who in the end adhered to a Greek perspective, or
Persian writers who applied their own cultural measure to everyone else,
Biruni began with the assumption that all cultures were equal. A
relativist’s relativist, he surpassed all who preceded him in the
breadth of his perspective. Who but Biruni would make a point of telling
readers that he interviewed heretics?
It is not surprising, given his background. Khwarezm today is all but
unknown. Yet 1,000 years ago it was a land of irrigated oases and
thriving cities, which had grown rich on direct trade with India, the
Middle East and China. Biruni’s home town of Kath was populated by
Muslims, Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews, as well as traders from
every part of Eurasia, including Hindus from the Indus Valley. It is
unlikely that any part of the Eurasian land mass at the time spawned
more people who accepted pluralism as a fact than Central Asia in
general and Khwarezm in particular.
Had Biruni made only this affirmation, it is doubtful we would remember his Chronology today. But he did not and for an important reason. Qabus had made clear that he wanted a single,
simple system of time, so that henceforth he would not have to consult
multiple books. He also wanted one that could be applied to business and
commerce, as well as national history and lore. For his part, Biruni
was glad to acknowledge that different peoples view time differently,
but he insisted that there exists an objective basis for evaluating each
system, namely the precise duration of a day, month and year as
measured by science. An astronomer and mathematician, Biruni
meticulously presented the best scientific evidence on the length of the
main units of time and recalculated every date recorded in every system
in terms of his new, autonomous measure.
Bewildering mess
No sooner did he launch into this monumental project than he found
himself in a bewildering mess. ‘Every nation has its own [system of]
eras’, he wrote, and none coincide. The confusion begins, he
demonstrated, with the failure of some peoples –notably the Arabs – to
understand that the only precise way to measure a day is when the sun is
at the meridian: at noon or midnight. Errors in measuring a day in
different cultures create months and then years of differing length. The
result is a hopeless muddle.
Biruni seethed at the sheer incompetence he encountered on this
crucial point. He then turned to the manner in which different peoples
date the beginning of historic time and his anger turns to apoplexy.
‘Everything’, he thunders, ‘the knowledge of which is connected with the
beginning of creation and with the history of bygone generations, is
mixed up with falsification and myths.’ How can different peoples date
creation as 3,000, 8,000 or 12,000 years ago? Even the Jews and
Christians are at odds, with both of them following systems of time that
are ‘obscurity itself’.
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In a stunning aside, Biruni
suggests that some of the errors may be traced to differences among
biblical texts. Towards the Jews he is forgiving: ‘It cannot be thought
strange that you should find discrepancies with people who have several
times suffered so much from captivity and war as the Jews.’ But
Christians, by trying to blend the Jewish and Greek systems, came up
with an inexcusable chaos.
Biruni is no more kind to Arabs and Muslims. But while Muslims,
Christians and Jews debate their differing dates for Adam and Eve and
the biblical Flood, the Persians, deemed no less intelligent, deny that
the Flood ever took place. Biruni concedes that pre-Muslim Arabs at
least based their calendar on the seasons, but their system fell
short of the Zoroastrian Persians. When he came across an Arab writer
‘Who was … very verbose … on the superiority of the Arabs to the
Persians’, he opined: ‘I don’t know if he was really ignorant or only
pretended to be.’
Such ridicule permeates Biruni’s Chronology. Sometimes it is
direct, though even more scathing when indirect. In chart after chart
he lists the intervals between major world events according to the
various religions and peoples. Typical is his chart for dating the lives
of Adam and Eve, which no one could perceive as anything but pure
foolishness. Everywhere, he concludes, ‘History is mixed with lies’, as
are all the cultures of mankind. In a damning passage, Biruni lists what
each religion and people prohibits, indicating the capriciousness and
outright foolishness of most of the laws by which people seek to order
their lives.
Reasoned knowledge
Seeking the cause of such nonsense, Biruni points to the almost
universal refusal to base knowledge on reason. It is not just the
unreason of the astrologer, ‘who is so proud of his ingenuity’, but of
all the peoples and cultures of the world. The only ones to escape
Biruni’s wrath are the Greeks, whom he describes as ‘deeply imbued with,
and so clever in geometry and astronomy, and they adhere so strictly to
logical arguments that they are far from having recourse to the
theories of those who derive the basis of their knowledge from divine
inspiration’.
Biruni’s mechanical calendar,13th-century manuscript. (akg-images)
Biruni pushed his query to its logical conclusion. A chief difference
among competing calendar systems is the way they account – or fail to
account – for the fact that an astronomical year is 365 days and six
hours long. To assume any other length – to fail, for example, to add in
that extra quarter of a day – causes all feasts and holidays to migrate
in time gradually through the year. This is why the pre-Muslim Arabs’
month of fasting was fixed in the calendar, while Ramadan now moves
throughout the year. Both problems can be rectified by adding to the
calendar of 365 days an extra day every fourth year, or ‘leap year’.
Called ‘intercalation’, this simple process became a litmus test by
which Biruni measured the intellectual seriousness of all cultures. He
praised the Egyptians, Greeks, Chaldeans and Syrians for the precision
of their intercalations, which came down to seconds. He was less
generous towards the Jews and Nestorian Christians, even though their
systems of intercalation were widely copied. He noted that in order to
fix their market dates and holidays, the pre-Muslim Arabs had adopted
from the Jews their primitive system of intercalation. Muhammad rejected
this, saying that ‘Intercalation is only an increase of infidelity, by
which the infidels lead people astray’. With astonishing bluntness,
Biruni made known his view that it was simply a mistake for the Prophet
Muhammad to have rejected the adjustment of the year to reflect
astronomical reality. Carefully hiding behind the words of another
author, Biruni concluded that this decision by Muhammad, based on the
Quran itself, ‘did much harm to the people’. Some later adjustments were
made, but they failed to address the core problem. ‘It is
astonishing’, he fulminated, ‘that our masters, the family of the
Prophet, listened to such doctrines.’
Directions of prayer
This was but one of Biruni’s ventures onto extremely sensitive
ground. In another aside, he considers the Islamic custom of addressing
prayers to the location of Mecca, termed the Kibla. After
noting that Muslims had initially prayed to Jerusalem, he laconically
observed that Manicheans pray towards the North Pole and Harranians to
the South Pole. Thus armed, Biruni offered his conclusion by favourably
quoting a Manichean who argued that ‘a man who prays to God does not
need any Kibla at all’.
After these diversions, Biruni returned to his central task. He knew
that commercial interchange requires a common system of dating events
and that all interactions among peoples require a common system with
which to reckon the passage of time. Moving from description to
prescription, he set down steps by which the mess created by religion
and national mythologies could be corrected, or at least alleviated. His
method was to create a means of converting dates from one system to
another. Biruni presented it in the form of a large circular graph or
chart, which he termed a ‘chessboard’, showing the eras, dates and
intervals according to each culture. Anyone who was ‘more than a
beginner in mathematics’ could manipulate the chessboard so as to
translate from one system to another. The method, he boasted, would be
useful to both historians and astronomers.
Biruni was as impatient as he was hyperactive. Scarcely had he
finished his assignment than he rushed back to his native Khwarezm in
order to measure further eclipses and seek funding for even bigger
projects.
We do not know if Biruni managed to keep a copy of his Chronology
and the calculator for all human history. The originals doubtless
remained with Qabus. There is no reason to think that it gained wide
dissemination, even in the Islamic world. If a copy reached the West
before the 19th century, it remained unknown to scholarship and
untranslated. Until a Leipzig scholar named Edward Sachau found a copy
and translated it into English in 1879, Biruni’s Chronology was
largely forgotten. Today, three slightly differing copies are known,
one in Istanbul, one in Leiden and a third, profusely illustrated, in
the library of Edinburgh University. Efforts are underway in both
Britain and Uzbekistan to combine all three in a modern edition.
Before the appearance of Biruni’s Chronology there had been
no universal history. Nor could it have been written, because there
existed no unified matrix for measuring time that extended across
religions and civilisations. Biruni’s was the first global calendar
system and hence the essential tool for the construction of an
integrated global history.
By grounding his concept of human history on the solid firmament of
astronomy and reason, Biruni gave all peoples of the world a simple
method for fixing dates on a single calendar system. Not until recent
decades have thinkers applied the concept of a universal history
to which Biruni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations opened the path.
The Prophet Muhammad prohibits intercalation, from The Chronology of Ancient Nations, 1307. (Edinburgh University Library/Bridgeman Images)
The Cambridge scientist C.P. Snow delivered his celebrated Rede
lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959. His critique of modern
learning called attention to what he saw as the breakdown of
communication between science and the humanities. In spite of several
generations of historians seeking to ground their work more solidly on
scientific method, the rift persists.
Abu Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni, writing a thousand years ago, issued the same cri de coeur.
Yet, unlike Snow, this 29-year-old thinker from Central Asia not only
decried the total absence of rational and scientific thought in history
and the social sciences, but did more than anyone before him to correct
this omission. Along with Pythagoras, he believed that ‘Things are
numbers’. In applying this maxim, he opened the way to a concept of
universal history that had before been impossible and combined the ‘Two
Cultures’ in a way that still deserves our admiration.
S. Frederick Starr is Research Professor at the Paul
H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University. This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of History Today.
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