Ctesias of Cnidus

Ctesias was a Greek physician who stayed at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II Mnemon from 404 to 398/397.

He was born sometime after the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. in the city of Cnidus in Asia Minor where he was born into the family of the Asclepiads and studied medicine. He was the son of either Ctesiarchos or Ctesiochos, who was himself also probably a doctor as his father before him.

Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who lived in the last half of the fifth century and into the fourth century B.C.E. He seems to have studied, and possibly practiced medicine at Cnidus.

He served as royal physician to king Artaxerxes II of Persia until 398/397 B.C.E. at which point he returned to Greece where he composed works on the Persian Empire and India.

For seventeen years he resided at the Persian court as royal physician; and among the extraordinary privileges which were enjoyed by that favored class - the court physicians - Ctesias had the opportunity to search the royal archives, the records of the ancient kings; a privilege never accorded to any other Greek.

The works of Ctesias, which do not survive in their original form but only in fragments related by later authors, continue to be of vital importance for the study of the Near East and the western view of India before Alexander.

He stays until the Battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.E.) where he was a doctor in the army of Artaxerxes II. At the battle he successfully treated the wound of Artaxerxes.

Ctesias must have served Artaxerxes’ interests well, because in 397 BC he was sent (via Cyprus and Cnidus) to negotiate with Sparta. He seems to have been captured by the locals in Rhodes, where he was tried for serving the interests of Persia; he was acquitted, however, and returned home to Cnidus later in the same year.

At the beginning of the fourth century BCE Ctesias of Cnidus wrote his twenty-three book History of Persia. Ctesias’ Persica, or History of Persia, is one of the most enticing yet most baffling of all literary works from Greek antiquity. Books I–VI included a history of Assyria and the Medes, and the last 10 books were a more detailed account from the death of Xerxes.
Ctesias of Cnidus

Scylax of Caryanda

Scylax of Caryanda (in Caria), Greek historian, lived in the time of Darius Hystaspis (521‑485 B.C.), who commissioned him to explore the course of the Indus. He was engaged to sail, explore and describe the shore of the Indian Ocean for the needs of the Persian.

Scylax of Caryanda was a pioneer in two ways; he wrote the first Indian logos in Greek, and he was rumored to have visited India.

He started from Caspatyrus and is said by Herodotus to have reached the sea, whence he sailed west through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. The exploration of the Persian gulf and Indian ocean lasted for two years and it was finished around 515 BC.

 An account of Scylax’s voyage may have been written and transmitted to later writer. Direct evidence of a written account of Scylax’s explorations comes from Aristotle. In the Politics,the philosopher quotes Scylaxas the source of the statement that in India “the kings are physically very different from their subjects, etc.”

Scylax allegedly completed some books after this voyage: the Periplous, the Periodos Gês, and the Events in the Time of Heracleides King of Mylasa. Few fragments of his Periplous about India remain. They discuss its landscape, plants, political constitution and peoples.
Scylax of Caryanda

Abū Bakr ibn Muḥammad ibn al Ḥusayn al-Karajī (980-1030)

Abū Bakr ibn Muḥammad ibn al Ḥusayn al-Karajī was a Persian mathematician and engineer. He made a great contribution to algebra by first treating numbers independently of geometry.

He held an official position in Baghdad during which time he wrote his three main works: Al-Badi' fi'l-hisab (Wonderful on calculation), Al-Fakhri fi'l-jabr wa'l-muqabala (Glorious on algebra), and Al-Kafi fi'l-hisab (Sufficient on calculation).

He was able to develop many of the basic algebraic properties of rational and irrational numbers, and therefore represents an important step in the evolution of algebraic calculus.

Al-Karaji is known as the first author of the algebra of polynomials. Al-Karaji work holds an especially important place in the history of mathematics. Woepcke (historian, Orientalist and mathematician) in 1853 remarked that “it offers the most complete or rather the only theory of algebraic calculus among the Arabs known to us to the present time”.

Al-Karaji employed an entirely new approach in the tradition of the Arab algebraist –al-Khwarizmi, Ibn al-Fath, Abu Kamil commencing with an exposition of the theory of algebraic calculus.
Abū Bakr ibn Muḥammad ibn al Ḥusayn al-Karajī (980-1030)

Xenophon

Xenophon, the son of Gryllus, and Athenian citizen was a native of the Attic demus Ercheia.

Xenophon was born about 444 BC. He distinguished himself as a philosopher, a general and an historian. Xenophon came from and aristocratic family and was born a citizen of the cultural center of the Greek world.
He was a good family and moderate estate, and became in youth a pupil of Socrates. Xenophon took down notes of Socrates talk, which he afterward wrote out in Memorabilia of Socrates.

He left Greece after the Peloponnesian War to become one of 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the service of Cyrus the younger against his older brother King Artaxerses II of Persia.

His writings including:
*Anabasis
*Hellenika
*Memorabilia
*Symposium
*Apology
*Kyropaideia
*Agesilaus
*On hunting
Xenophon eventually became the commander of all forces under King Seuthes II of Thrace in fighting against Persia during 400-399.

Sparta gave him land and property in Scillus, where he lived for many years before having to move once more, to settle in Corinth. Xenophon died sometime e after 354 BC.
Xenophon