In my post, The
story around Alexander’s copy of the Iliad, I briefly mentioned how
the Abbasid Caliphs in Persia largely
contributed to preserving the knowledge of the ancient Greeks.
A few years ago,
my attention was drawn to the glory days of Baghdad around 1000 AD, a city built inside a circle surrounding the central Abbasid Palace, a symbol of power and unity.
More amazing than its shape was the fact that its Caliphs invested in hiring scholars
to translate ancient Greek documents into Arabic.
Baghdad was built along
the Tigris River in 762 AD, as the residence of Caliph Al-Mansur, the founder of the Abbasid
Caliphate. The Abbasid Dynasty was named after the uncle of Prophet Muhammad. A Caliph was the title
of the civil and religious leader of a Muslim state, seen as
representing Allah on earth.
Al-Mansur was the first Caliph
to honor astrologers. The most famous astrologer was Mash’allah from Basra, who served the
Caliphs from 762 to 809 AD. Al-Mansur
was convinced that it was written in the stars that the Abbasids were the
legitimate successors of the Persian Sassanid Empire. They had been in power
from 224 until 651 AD, when they were conquered by the Muslims. Since astrology
did not exist in Arabic, Al-Mansur needed
to revert to Persian and Greek astrological texts. As a result, he needed these
ancient texts to be translated into Arabic.
By 786 AD, Caliph Harun al-Rashid established the House
of Wisdom in Baghdad,
which originally may have been a Library, where scholars from across the Muslim
world would organize their translations. The idea caught on, and other centers
flourished a few centuries later in Cordoba and Granada in Spain, as well as in Cairo, Egypt.
In the western Roman
world, we saw our ancient knowledge and know-how disappear into the dark Middle Ages soon after the Fall of Rome in 476
AD. In the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire,
however, the science of Antiquity survived despite the rise of
Christianity. Constantine the Great had
made it the official religion, renaming
its capital Byzantium after himself, Constantinople.
When Islam
entered the stage in the 7th century AD, the Abbasid Caliphate, established
in Damascus, was
a serious competitor to Constantinople.
In about 750 AD, the Caliphate was transferred from Damascus to Baghdad,
meaning that the center of power moved east from a Greek-speaking region to a
non-Greek-speaking area. Followed a series of wars between the Caliphate and
the Byzantine Empire that lasted until the 11th century.
All that time,
the knowledge from Antiquity flowed into Baghdad,
where a vast translation project was set up, and top translators were highly
rewarded in gold. They concentrated on matters like astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and even music theory. Aristotle was
still held in high esteem, his works as well as his comments. Later translations included Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest, a mathematical and astronomical treatise on the motions of the stars and planets; Euclid's book on geometry; the medical works of Hippocrates and Galen; and Plato’s Republic and Laws. Many other ancient books were translated
from Greek, Pahlavi, Neo-Persian, and Syriac into Arabic.
Simultaneously
with this translation movement, Islamic science developed, involving philosophers
and scientists alike. A name that stands out is that of Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna (980-1037), the Father of Early Medicine, whose work was standard in Europe for centuries. Another figure was Al-Khwarizmi (780-860), the Father of Algebra, who introduced the algorithms.
By the mid-11th
century, the ideas of antiquity reached Europe in Arabic, traveling to Sicily and Muslim Spain.
Over time, they had been enriched with the knowledge that the Caliphs in the Middle East had acquired and developed. We owe it to the
Abbasids that the knowledge from classical antiquity reached Europe,
where it was generally translated into Latin.
The Abbasid
Caliphate ended in 1258 when Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols. The city was looted and thoroughly destroyed. The
invaders burned piles of books, including those that were held in the House
of Wisdom.
Without Baghdad and
its western expansion, we would have remained stuck in the dark Middle Ages, and there would not have been a Renaissance.
