Medieval Islamic conceptions of nature and physical phenomena were partially based upon a translated accumulation of Greek thought. Among the Greek philosophers who had conjectured upon the phenomena of the atmosphere, the most famous was Aristotle (384–322 BCE), whose geoscience treatise in four books called Meteorologica dealt not only with atmospheric phenomena but also with the general terrestrial aspect (including geological, hydrological, and oceanographical ideas) of his systematic cosmology.
Some of the questions pondered were meteorological: whether the Milky Way and comets were of terrestrial or celestial origin, hail forming theories, the origin of wind, the relation of thunder and lightning, and optical theories of the rainbow and the halo.
With the ninth century came a stabilization of the long political turmoil after the Islamic conquests. Also, with the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate at Persian Baghdad, that civilization and India significantly influenced the seminal...
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Mcpeak, W.J. (2008). Meteorology in the Islamic World. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8789
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