مشخصات پژوهش

The Mongolian conquest of the vast lands of eastern and western Asia (China, Iran, Transoxania, etc.) in the thirteenth century linked many cultures and civilizations to each other. So, in addition to the traditional use of the Silk Road for trade between the Orient and Occident of medieval world, it saw the transmission of knowledge, especially astronomy and medicine, from China to Iran, and vice versa. These transfers were even extended to the post-Mongolian periods [Shi 2014]. The observatories founded by the Mongols at the two sides of their immense territory, the one at Beijing and the other at Maragha (northwestern Iran), experienced such intellectual exchanges: the Chinese-Uighur calendar found its way through the Islamic astronomical tables (zījes) [Kennedy 1964; Melville 1994; van Dalen et al. 1997]; the astronomical observations of Mu<.>hyī al-Dīn al-Maghribī (d. 1283 CE), the outstanding practical astronomer at the Maragha observatory, was, quite probably, made with the aid of a mechanical water-clock of some Chinese type [Mozaffari 2018]. In the opposite direction, a professional astronomer named Jamāl al-Dīn Mu<.>hammad <.>Tāhir b. Mu<.>hammad al-Zaydī of Bukharā (now in Uzbekistan) was in the service of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty. In collaboration with other Muslim Persian astronomers in the service of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty of China (1260–1368 AD), he conducted an observational program, and prepared a zīj in Persian which is nowadays lost, but the main results of his observations have been preserved, partly, in a Chinese translation prepared in 1383 CE by a group of Chinese and Muslim scholars, entitled Huihui lifa, “Islamic astronomical system”, and, partly, in the Sanjufīnī zīj compiled by a certain Abū Mu<.>hammad ‘A<.>tā’ b. A<.>hmad b. Mu<.>hammad b. Khwāja Ghāzī al-Samarqandī al-Sanjufīnī in northwestern Tibet in 1366 AD, which has been preserved in a unique manuscript (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 6040). Jamāl al-Dīn’s heritage i