Al-Biruni measured the Earth by climbing a hill.
Comparing the dip of the horizon from its top and from the plain in today's Pakistan, he got the planet's radius right to within about 2%, by one estimate.
More amazing facts
- 1005 The first known European born in the Americas, Greenland aside, was the Icelander Snorri, in Vinland around 1005.
- 1010 Legend says Sultan Mahmud promised Ferdowsi a gold coin per couplet of the Shahnameh, then paid in silver.
- 1010 Around 1010, at opposite ends of Asia, two summits of world literature appeared almost at once: Ferdowsi's Persian epic, the Shahnameh, and The Tale of Genji by the Japanese court lady Murasaki.
- 1014 · 1016 While Basil II was finishing off Bulgaria at Kleidion (1014), Rus' was getting its first law code, the Russkaya Pravda (1016).
- 1016 · 1035 King Cnut ordered back the tide not out of arrogance but to expose it. In Henry of Huntingdon's 12th-century tale he sat before the rising sea, got his feet wet and told his courtiers that the power of kings is empty.
- 1024 · 1661 China had government paper money 637 years before Europe's first banknotes.