It’s well known that Christopher Columbus misunderstood India, and consequently ‘discovered’ the Americas. He found the New World after failing to locate India. But six hundred years prior to him, an Uzbek scholar who spent most of his life sitting under the stars in Afghanistan, managed to do the same job better.
Al-Biruni thoroughly understood India – and was the first to theorize that the Americas exist.
Al-Biruni is considered the first Indologist – a person who studied India with the intent of understanding its languages, people and beliefs. Accompanying Mahmud of Ghazni in the first campaigns into India, Al-Biruni brought a host of knowledge and learning into the world. A mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, Al-Biruni could also translate Sanskrit to Arabic and vice versa. Among his most significant findings was the theorizing of a large land mass on the other side of the world.
For, one day, likely sitting before a makeshift globe (that the world was round was no big discovery to scholars of Biruni’s calibre), the learned Uzbek decided to plot out the known locations of every land whose existence he had verified. He found a huge gap in contemporary knowledge of the earth – more than three-fifths of this globe were empty.
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