According to historian Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, during the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, the Mamluks used a cannon against the Mongols. He claims that this was "the first cannon in history" and used a gunpowder formula almost identical to the ideal composition for explosive gunpowder. He also argues that this was not known in China or Europe until much later. Hassan further claims that the earliest textual evidence of cannon is from the Middle East, based on earlier originals which report hand-held cannon being used by the Mamluks at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. However, Hassan's claims contradict earlier claims from the historians David Ayalon, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Joseph Needham, Tonio Andrade and Gabor Ágoston. Khan (1996) argued that it was the Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world, and believed cannon only reached Mamluk Egypt in the 1370s. According to Needham (1986), the term "midfa", dated to textual sources from 1342 to 1352, did not refer to true hand-guns or bombards, and contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365 Similarly, Andrade dates the textual appearance of cannon in middle eastern sources to the 1360s. Gabor Ágoston and David Ayalon believed the Mamluks had certainly used siege cannon by the 1360s, but earlier uses of cannon in the Islamic World are vague with a possible appearance in the Emirate of Granada by the 1320s and 1330s, however evidence is inconclusive.