for harmonic interpolation. This enabled very high accuracy in angle mea- surements, thus explaining also the instrumental basis of the precise early Indo-Arabic estimates of the size of the globe, and determination of local latitude and longitude.
III
Transmission of the Calculus to Europe
6 Models of Information Transmission
267
General historiographic considerations and the nature and standards of evidence to
decide transmission
We re-examine and reject the racist model that all (or most) scientific
knowledge, especially of mathematics and astronomy, has a White origin either in post-renaissance Europe or in early Greece, from where others obtained it by transmission. Alexander obtained a huge booty of books from Persia and Egypt, some of which were translated into Greek. The conjectured scientific knowledge of early Greeks could not grow in Athens, but could grow only in Alexandria, on African soil, since it derived from transmission of knowledge from Black Egypt and other non-White sources. Since the actual evidence for the conjectured Greek knowledge in Alexandria comes almost wholly from very late Arabic sources, or even later Byzan- tine Greek sources, later-day world knowledge up to the 10th c. CE has also been anachronistically attributed to early Greeks, and is incompatible with the crudeness of Greek and Roman knowledge of mathematics and astronomy exhibited in non-textual sources. As an example, we consider the evidence that significant portions of the current Almagest text attributed to Ptolemy, derived by such transmission from India via Jundishapur and Baghdad. The cases of Copernicus and the rock edicts of Ashoka the Great are used to show how much and how systematically the standard of evi- dence varies with the direction of transmission. To avoid this racist double standard of evidence, often masked by an appeal to authority, we propose a new standard of evidence for transmission, involving opportunity and motivation, together with circumstantial, documentary, and epistemological evidence.
7 How and Why the Calculus was Imported into Europe
321
The European navigational problem and its solution available in Indian books
easily accessible to Jesuits
At the beginning of the 16th c. CE, European navigators on the high
seas could not determine any of the three "ells"--latitude, longitude and loxodromes--since their peculiar navigational technique was adapted to the Mediterranean. However, trade with India, China, and colonization of Amer- icas was becoming the major source of wealth in Europe. This required good knowledge of navigation, to acquire which European governments took nu- merous big initiatives. Celestial navigation required accurate trigonometric values, and astronomical data, including an accurate calendar, all of which