Once they have gathered the best writing material they could find, on which their sciences could be saved, they sought for them a building in a place on Earth that had the best soil and clay, least likely to cause decay, and farthest from earthquakes and mudslides. They searched the regions of the kingdom, and did not find any place under the sky that had most of those qualities other than Iṣfahān. Then they searched within that region and could not find better than the encampment (rustāq) of Jayy. Nor could they find within Jayy a place that had more of those qualities than the place where the city of Jayy was built much later on.
They came to Quhunduz, which was inside the city of Jayy, and deposited their sciences there. It is still standing till our own days, and is now called Sārūyah. And because of this building, people knew who first built it. And that is because many years ago, a section of that construction fell, which revealed a vault constructed of very hard clay (Siftah). There they found a great variety of the sciences of the ancients, preserved on bark of tūz, and written in ancient Persian. One of those books was brought to someone who could understand it. He read it and found in it a letter written by one of the ancient kings of Persia. In it he related[91] that when king Ṭahmūrath, who loved the sciences and the scientists, had learned about the climatic event that was to take place in the west, where rain would fall continuously and would become overabundant and bypass the usual limits, and that a period of two hundred and thirty two years and three hundred days would separate his first day of reign from the said event—according to the astrologers who warned him at the beginning of his reign that this event was going to pass from the west to the east—he ordered the engineers to find the best place in the kingdom in terms of soil and air. It was them who selected for him the structure known as Sārūyah, which is still standing inside the city of Jayy. He then ordered that this solid building be erected. When it was finished he transported to it many of the various sciences from his own library, and they were all transferred to the tūz bark. He placed them in one side of the house in order that they would be preserved after the passage of the climactic event.
Among the (treasure books) was a book attributed to one of the ancient sages, which contained specific years and revolutions from which one could extract the mean motions of the planets and the causes of their motions. The people who lived at the time of Ṭahmūrath, and those who came before them of the Persians, used to call those revolutions the cycles of hazārāt (Thousands). Most of the scientists of India, as well as all of their kings who ruled over the face of the Earth, and the ancient Persians and Chaldeans, who dwelt in tents in ancient Babylonia, used to extract the mean motions of the seven planets from these years and revolutions. People who lived at the time dated [the mean motions] according to [the zīj] which they found to be the most correct according to the test and the most concise of all the zījes that were known at the time. Astrologers extracted from it then a zīj that they called the Shahriyār, which means the king of zījes. This is the end of Abū Mā'shar's statement.[92]
At this point al-Nadīm inserts his own corroborating report from the stories that were obviously circulating in his own time. The text adds:
Muḥammad b. Isḥāq [i.e. Al-Nadīm] says: A trustworthy person reported to me that in the year three hundred and fifty of the hijra [= 961 A.D.] another vault collapsed as well, whose location was not detected because its roof was thought to be solid until it collapsed, and thus revealed many books that no one could read. What I saw with my own eyes were the fragments of books which were found around the year forty [that is, around 950] in boxes laid in Iṣfahān's ramparts and were sent by Abū al-Faḍl Ibn al-'Amīd [Muḥammad b. Al-Ḥusain d. 970]. The books were in Greek, and were therefore entrusted to people like Yūḥannā who could decipher them. They turned out to be names of soldiers and their salaries. But they were extremely putrefied, and smelled so horribly as if they had been just taken out of the tannery. After being held in Baghdad for a year or so, they dried out and smelled no more. Some of them are still held with our teacher Abū Sulaimān.
It is said that Sārūyah is one of the old and well executed marvelous buildings, in the east, compared, to the Pyramids in the land of Egypt, in the west, in terms of its glorious and marvelous construction.[93]
The intent of the story is to demonstrate the Persian Kings' love for learning and the efforts they spent to protect science. It was on account of them, that mean motions of the planets were preserved for the astrologers who could use such values for their casting of horoscopes and the like. The detailed account regarding the kind of material on which they were written and the places where they were kept, and the extra care spent to preserve them all indicate that such mean motions were trustworthy, and astrologers such as Abū Mā'shar himself should opt to use them. This obviously gave Abū Mā'shar an advantage over others, on account of his intimate knowledge of such parameters.
On the other hand, the story also stresses the fact that it was the astrologers who predicted the climactic disaster that was to come from the west, and it was they who urged the preservation of books, thereby acting as the guardians of the intellectual legacy. The morale of the story is that the astrologers' knowledge is to be trusted and appreciated on account of their ability to predict future events as they have done, apparently successfully according to the story, with the climactic disaster.
Other sources from a century later, as in the case of Bīrūnī (d. ca. 1050),[94] seem to corroborate the intention of the story: to highlight the care with which Persian kings attempted to preserve and treasure books in the land of Persia. The fact that such stories kept being repeated could only mean that they must have been circulated widely in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Their purpose however, as can be seen from this one, is to stress not only the antiquity of the science of astrology, but that its sources had been secured and well preserved across the ages, a major requirement for a discipline that had to depend for its validity on repeated events that by their very nature took centuries to recur.
I read these stories less as historical sources, than as desperate attempts by astrologers to validate their discipline in the face of the severe attacks they must have been facing at this time, as is so well documented in the major surviving work of the same Abū Mā'shar: his Introduction to Astrology, which comes from the same period.[95]
Such stories regarding the transmission of science could not have a historical validity of their own. Their only worth is that they symbolically signal the existence of books in the libraries of Persian kings, but they all concur that no one could know then what kind of books they really were. All this can be easily detected from the occasional treasure-hunt trope in which these stories were cast. The books that al-Nadīm came in contact with, like those reported by al-Bīrūnī a century later, were indeed very fragmentary, stinky as al-Nadīm spares no pain in telling us (and thus apparently not so well preserved as the story intended to imply), were above all still in Greek. Only specialists could read them, and when they were finally deciphered they turned out to contain only names of soldiers and their salaries. They may have contained, however, some tables of mean motions that one could use for the construction of a zīj such as the Shahriyār zīj. But that is all these stories could say.
95
For Abū Mā'shar's defense of astrology against the enemies of his day, see G. Saliba, "Islamic Astronomy in Context: Attacks on Astrology and the Rise of the