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Gunpowder
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<!--The first formulas for gunpowder in Islamdom are found in an untitled and undated Arabic work that may be as early as the 900s or 1000s, perhaps only a century or two after the first record of gunpowder in China. The Kitab al-furusiyya bi rasm al-jihad by al-Hasan al-Rammah, who died in 1294, contains the first description in Arabic of the purification and crystallization of saltpeter as well as seventy formulas for different varieties of gunpowder. Significantly, saltpeter was known as "Chinese snow" in Arabic and as "Chinese salt" in Persian.

al-Hasan al-Rammah not only includes a number of typically Chinese ingredients in his formulas but also describes a weapon like the fire-lance that might easily have originated in China. It is not clear whether firearms per se reached Islam directly from China or indirectly through Europe; because the earliest confirmed use of firearms in Islamdom took place in Egypt, they could have arrived by sea from either the east or the west. Firearms did come to the Maghrib from Spain and to Turkey from the Balkans, however.

Spinning wheel
Mechanical techniques reached a high level of sophistication within the Islamic civilization as well as in China, notably with respect to applications of water-wheels. India presents a different picture, however. We may have a misleading impression because of the vagueness of most available information, which may be due to the destruction of records and equipment during the 'Turkish' conquest of the 1190s. However, it would seem that in India and southern Asia relatively little use was made of machines. There were certainly some water-raising wheels, and rice farmers in Java and Bali at some unknown date developed their own mechanical device for lifting water. (26-29) ... But even in India, there are no reports of machines with gears, pulleys, cams or cranks before 1200 — that is, if it is correct that neither the spinning wheel nor the geared type of water-raising wheel (the 'Persian wheel') was introduced until after that date. (29) ... It is hardly surprising, then, that there was a bigger engineering content in the technology complexes of North China and Iran than in that of South Asia, where large-scale works such as those at Angkor were in some respects an anomaly.(30)

The spinning wheel has long been assumed to have been invented in the Indian subcontinent, perhaps between 500 and 1000 CE.

However, it is now clear that there exists no evidence for the use of the spinning wheel in India prior to the early 14th century and it is likely that the device was introduced into India sometime in the 13th century.

The earliest unambiguous reference to the spinning wheel in India dates from about 1350 whereas the earliest clear illustrations of the spinning wheel come from Baghdad (1237), China (c. 1270) and Europe (c. 1280).

There is some evidence that spinning wheels of some sort may have already come in use in both China and the Islamic world during the 11th century.

According to Irfan Habib, charkha, the most usual word in India for a spinning wheel, derives from the Persian language.

L. White (1960) has subjected the issue of the Indian origins of the spinning wheel to a detailed scrutiny and found that its presence in ancient India is entirely undocumented.

Astronomy
Early astronomical instruments, armillary spheres were three-dimensional models of a skeletonlike celestial globe, usually made of brass, with circles divided into degrees for angular measurement. They were used to measure the positions of the stars and planets and the relationships among the principal celestial circles. Armilla is the Latin word for "ring." Primitive models were most probably invented in either ancient China or Greece in the last centuries B.C.E. or at the beginning of the first millennium C.E. The Chinese astronomer Zhang Hen (ca. 78–ca. 139 C.E.) designed an armillary sphere that contained three rings. One represented the equator, one showed the paths of the Sun, Moon, and planets, and the third delineated the poles of the Earth. The pole of the sphere pointed northward, and a tubelike device was attached at the center through which the astronomer viewed and mapped the stars. For example, using the armillary sphere, it was possible to locate a particular star's direction and distance from the North Pole. The Chinese continued to improve and retool their design of the armillary sphere well into the thirteenth century C.E. The Alexandrine Greeks designed an armillary sphere that contained nine rings, also known as the meteoroskopion, which represented the great circles of the heavens, among them the horizon, meridian, equator, tropics, polar rings, and an ecliptic hoop.

The great astronomer Ptolemy designed several armillary spheres, including the astrolabon, which is considered to be his most important. This instrument consisted of a group of metal rings that were pivoted one with the other, nesting within a larger circle that was affixed to a heavy base. The innermost rings contained an alidade with pinholes through which the astronomer could view celestial bodies. The astrolabon allowed the astronomer to measure angles, such as the ecliptic axis and the polar axis, directly, rather than engage in complicated and lengthy calculations necessary for astronomical theories. Islamic astronomers utilized armillary spheres and the astrolabon extensively. It was their design of these intruments, introduced onto the European continent after the Moorish invasion, that were the models for those used by medieval European scholars and astronomers. (58)

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In 1100 B.C., the Chinese used a gnomon to determine the obliquity of the ecliptic due to the inclination of the earth's axis. -->

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Medieval Persia 1040-1797, David Morgan p72