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10. Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques
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Rašīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh. Tārīḫ-e Čīn History of China and Cathay. Y. Wang, ed., Tehran, PUI, 2000, 284 p., index.

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noms/names:

Tusi, Nasir al-Din Tusi

Personnes citées:

Y. Wang
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1As a part of the voluminous work of the universal history Jāmi‘ al-Tavārīḫ (“The Collection of Histories”) by Rašīd al-Dīn Faḍl-Allāh Hamadānī (1247-1318), the famous Persian statesman and historian living in the Il-khan dynasty (1256-1353), the volume of The History of China and Cathay, compiled in 1304, contains a selected record of events covering a long history of China, from the earliest ancestor Pangu to the downfall of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), including 36 dynasties and 267 emperors and rulers in the history of China up to Rašīd al-Dīn’s time. It is the first general history of China written by a foreign scholar from the Western Regions (Xiyu). What is of particular significance to the history of science is the “Introduction” to the History of China, in which Rašīd al-Dīn told us about the activities of Chinese scholars living in Persia especially about the cooperation of the Chinese sage Qūmīḥī (?) with the Persian mathematician and astronomer Ḫvāja Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (1201-1274) in compiling Zīj-i Īl-ḫānī (“The Astronomical Tables of Il-khan”). After that, Rašīd al-Dīn gave a description of some features of Chinese culture and made an appropriate evaluation on the characteristic of Chinese writing and the Chinese calendar system, the advantages of the Chinese characters that denote amounts in contracts and laws, the technique of Chinese wood block printing, the official tradition of the composition of history in China, etc. His work reflects the exact knowledge and highest achievements of a non-Chinese scholar in the field of Chinese culture studies by that time, and provides us with valuable historical materials for the study of Sino-Iranian cultural communications and confluence in the 13th-14th centuries.

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Rédaction, “Rašīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh. Tārīḫ-e Čīn History of China and Cathay. Y. Wang, ed., Tehran, PUI, 2000, 284 p., index.”Abstracta Iranica [Online], Volume 27 | 2006, document 290, Online since 02 January 2007, connection on 06 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abstractairanica/6317; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abstractairanica.6317

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