William Dalrymple and The Golden Road
My younger son, John, recently (31 October 2024) took me to a lecture by the historian William Dalrymple, who was promoting his most recent book, The Golden Road. He tells the story of India’s role as a cultural and scientific superpower of the ancient world and as a major trader with Europe, more than a millennium before the Spice Road existed.
John is studying history at Sydney University. He will be a third generation history graduate—my mother is a graduate from Hull University and my wife from London. In the modern world where vocational study is so highly prized over the liberal arts I am quite pleased to see his interest.
History has almost been the main topic of conversation in our family. We talk about ancient and modern history and current affairs very often through an historical lens.
My personal fascination has always been about the inter-connectedness of early civilisations and how their cultures intertwined. As a biologist, I have always known humans as great wanderers. Evolutionarily we all trace our ancestry to the legendary Lucy, the mother of us all, who lived in eastern Africa, and whose children, eventually populated Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific. A good many of our ancestors were adventurers who did not think that they would fall off the edge of the world if they left the Mediterranean. So …
Dalrymple tells “the story of how, from 250BC to 1200AD, India transformed the world: exporting religion, art, science, medicine, and language along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific, creating a vast and profoundly important empire of ideas”. His narrative demonstrates this amazing “ancient” interconnectedness between Asia and Europe.
Brahmagupta and Aryabhata
Dalrymple is a scholar of British imperialism in India and is critical of Britain’s dismissiveness of Indian culture. As a word enthusiast I picked up an etymological thread that epitomises Dalyrmple’s thesis.
The early Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) the follower of an earlier Indian mathematician, Aryabhata (476–550) defined the concept of zero. With the other nine Indian characters, zero allowed any number to be described. They grew into what we now call, erroneously, the Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9).
The ideas of these two men, travelled first to the Arab world. The viziers of Baghdad sent missions to India in search of scientific texts. They took Brahmagupta and Aryabhata works to Baghdad in 773.
Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi (Mr Algorithm and Algebra)
A generation later, the mathematical texts were summarised by the scholar, Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. He gave his name to “algorithm” and his book title gave us “algebra”.
Al-Kharizmi’s name meant native of Khwarazm, which is the modern Khiva in Uzbekistan. His work was translated into Latin in the 12th century and introduced the Arabic numerals to the West. Referring to the method of computation, it became “algorisme” in old French and “algorismus” in Medieval Latin. It morphed into “algorithm” as a mash-up with Greek “arithmos” for number (the basis of ari.
His book, in Arabic “al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala”, means the compendium on calculation by restoring and balancing. Its short name in Arabic is “al jabr’ (meaning the reunion of broken parts) which was sometimes pronounced “al-jebr“. Thus we get from his book title our modern word “algebra”.
The wrong person
In summary, our use of the words “algorithm” and “algebra” for systems of mathematics symbolises what Dalrymple describes as our lack of understanding or appreciation of the intellectual and cultural importance of Ancient India on western civilisation. By the use of these words, the great steps forward in mathematics (for instance, the definition of the concept of zero) by the Indian scholars, Brahmagupta and Aryabhata, the authors, have been attributed to al-Khwarizmi, their translator.