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Meta note: Al-Kāshī was not a "medieval astronomer", the Middle Ages are related to European history and Al-Kāshī lived in Iran during the Islamic Golden Age.
by KhalilK 12y ago
Meta note:
Al-Kāshī was not a "medieval astronomer", the Middle Ages are related to European history and Al-Kāshī lived in Iran during the Islamic Golden Age.
- m-photonic 12y agoBut "ancient" astronomers would have been even less accurate, and headlines need words that people can instantly recognize.
- michael_fine 12y agoYeah, post-classical would have been the more accurate term, thought I'm not sure it would've had the same comprehensibility.
- vacri 12y agoThe "Classical" world is as limited as "the middle ages" (perhaps even moreso); it mostly deals with the Mediterranean civilisations - and Iran is a long way from there.
- michael_fine 12y agoAccording to my AP World textbook, at least, classical refers to a lot of geographically diverse civilizations, from the Byzantines to the Song Chinese to the Aztecs
- nichtich 12y agoWhat's wrong with 14th century then?
- Someone 12y agoChristianism. The man probably thought he lived around the year 800.
- acqq 12y agoMeta meta note: "The metaphor of a golden age begins to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context of the western cultural fashion of Orientalism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age It seems nobody named any period of Islamic history "golden age" before (apparently Muslim scholars after 12th century had a different value system). Anyway, the same western cultural circles also use "middle ages" to denote approximately the time period between 5th and 15th century. Moreover, Islamic Golden Age refers to "the 9th to 12th centuries, and (is) sometimes extended to include parts of the 8th and 13th centuries" but Al-Kāshī was born in 1380, died in 1429 (born in 14th, died in 15th century!). So "medieval" matches the time when Al-Kāshī lived, "Islamic Golden Age" (note, the term also invented by the western intellectuals for their own purposes) simply doesn't.
- KhalilK 12y agoMy whole point is that medieval gives the false impression that he was a European astronomer.
- acqq 12y agoWhat do you suggest as the proper (for the purposes of the title, western-known) name of the period when al-Kāshī lived then? He obviously hasn't lived in the western-named and western-bound "Islamic Golden Age", being born a century later. Note that the goal is to convey the time period, not the geographical location. Edit: see also how Wikipedia names that period of Persian history (my next answer for links): "Middle Ages."
- KhalilK 12y agothen? It is not by the process of elimination that we'd get the precise era in which Al-Kāshi lived. If either of us is to tolerate a certain degree of imprecision (for me that medieval concerns not only Europe and for you that the Islamic Golden Age is not a fixed time interval) then we'll come to a understanding, other than that, I think there is not a proper name of that period. Edit: Note that the goal is to convey the time period, not the geographical location. When it comes to history those two are inter-dependent you cannot make a random choice of words.