The House of Wisdom

In the early centuries of the Abbasid caliphate, and at its height under the caliph al-Ma'mun around 830, Baghdad became the centre of one of the great intellectual enterprises of human history: the movement to gather, translate into Arabic and build upon the learning of the ancient world. Scholars sought out the works of the Greeks in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine, of the Persians, and of the Indians (from whom came, among much else, the numerals and the decimal system), and translated and studied them with the support of the caliphs, wealthy patrons and the great libraries, the most famous associated with the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom of Baghdad. The Muslim scholars did not merely preserve this inheritance but corrected, extended and transformed it: it was here and in this age that algebra was founded by al-Khwarizmi, that astronomy, optics, medicine and many other sciences were advanced, and that Arabic became the international language of science for centuries, the language in which much of the ancient learning would later pass to Europe. This scene depicts that world: a great library and study hall in the brick city by the Tigris, shelves and chests of bound books and scrolls, copyists and scholars at work over manuscripts, an astrolabe and a celestial globe among their instruments, under the high windows of the caliphal capital. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance; the scene is the library and the labour of knowledge.