Zij al-Sindhind
An Indian astronomical text reaches al-Manṣūr's Baghdad court
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The supposed arrival of zero survives not as a dated glyph but as reports about a lost Sanskrit book and a set of lost Arabic tables.
A mission, and two dates for it
According to Ibn al-Qifṭī's later account, an Indian mission including the scholar Kanka arrived at Baghdad in AH 156 — 772/773. Al-Bīrūnī instead dated the mission to AH 154, or 770/771.
The visitor brought a Sanskrit astronomical work related to, but apparently not identical with, Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta.
Modern scholarly summaries prudently say the early 770s, or soon after 770.
What was actually translated
Caliph al-Manṣūr requested an Arabic translation. Al-Fazārī collaborated with the Indian astronomer and based his Great Sindhind astronomical tables on the imported work.
Indian parameters and computational methods entered the developing Baghdad astronomical tradition by that route. The episode is known through later writers, because al-Fazārī's works and the original Arabic translation do not survive intact.
Al-Fazārī's identity is itself uncertain: medieval biographers may have turned one astronomer into a father-and-son pair.
Zero is not what the record shows
The surviving evidence describes the arrival and translation of an astronomical handbook. It does not document a ceremony or a day on which the number 0 was introduced to Baghdad.
Zero has separate histories as a placeholder, a numeral glyph, a number, a name and a set of arithmetic rules, and no consulted source shows them arriving together in one datable event.
Al-Khwārizmī's systematic arithmetic using the nine Hindu digits and zero came later, around 825; the earliest universally accepted dated Indian inscription using a zero symbol is from 876.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed
How this was checked
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Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The year is not independently secure: Ibn al-Qifṭī gives 772/773, al-Bīrūnī gives 770/771, and modern scholarly summaries prudently say 'early 770s' or 'soon after 770.'
- The episode is known through later writers because al-Fazārī's works and the original Arabic translation do not survive intact.
- It is uncertain exactly which Sanskrit work arrived. Scholars describe it as related to Brahmagupta's tradition rather than confidently identifying it as the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta itself.
- No consulted scholarly source demonstrates that a particular zero glyph, zero as a number, and the complete decimal positional system all arrived in Baghdad in one datable 773 event.