The Academy of Jundishapur

Jundishapur (Gundeshapur), a city of Khuzistan in south-western Persia, had been since the time of the Sasanian kings a great centre of learning and especially of medicine, where the works of the Greek physicians had been translated and studied alongside the medical wisdom of Persia and India, and where scholars of many languages and faiths, among them Syriac-speaking Christian physicians, taught and healed. It is remembered above all for its hospital and medical school, an early model of the institution in which the sick were treated and physicians were trained together, a model that the Islamic world would take up, develop and spread across its lands as the bimaristan. After the rise of Islam and especially under the early Abbasid caliphs, the learning of Jundishapur was drawn into the service of the new civilisation: its physicians were summoned to the caliphal court, most famously the family of Bukhtishu, who served as chief physicians to the caliphs at Baghdad for generations, and its store of translated Greek and other learning helped to feed the great movement of translation and science that flowered in the new capital. Jundishapur thus stands as one of the channels through which the medical and scientific inheritance of the ancient world passed into Islam, there to be preserved, corrected and greatly enlarged. This scene depicts the academy and hospital of Jundishapur in the early Abbasid age, with its physicians and books, at the moment its learning is being drawn toward Baghdad. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.