The House of Wisdom

From the late eighth century, under the Abbasid caliphs, Baghdad became the centre of a translation effort that moved the bulk of surviving Greek scientific and philosophical literature into Arabic. The institution associated with it, the Bayt al-Hikma, has attracted a good deal of romanticising, and the sober scholarship, notably Dimitri Gutas's, has spent effort trimming it back.

The trimming matters, because the sober version is more useful. The House of Wisdom was probably a library and administrative body rather than a great academy with faculty and students. The translation movement was larger than any single institution and ran for well over two centuries, funded by caliphs, but also by court officials, physicians and wealthy families who commissioned work privately.

The motives were mixed and mostly practical, which is the part usually left out. Astronomy was needed for the calendar, for determining prayer times and for finding the direction of Mecca from anywhere in an expanding empire. Medicine was needed. Mathematics was needed for inheritance law, which under Islamic jurisprudence generates genuinely intricate division problems. Aristotelian logic was useful in theological dispute.

Knowledge that gets funded is knowledge somebody needs. That is not a cynical observation; it is the ordinary condition under which research happens, and it applies equally to every other episode in this archive.

The method was unusually rigorous. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian physician who led much of the medical translation, described his own procedure: collecting multiple Greek manuscripts of a text, collating them to establish a better reading, and only then translating. That is textual criticism, several centuries before the discipline had a name in Europe.

The workforce is worth noticing too. Hunayn was a Christian. Thabit ibn Qurra, who translated Archimedes and Apollonius and did original work in mathematics, belonged to the Sabians of Harran, a community whose religious identity is still argued over. Jewish, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars worked alongside Muslim ones. The translation movement was not a project of one confession.

What survived by this route is not marginal. Substantial parts of Galen, Ptolemy's Almagest, much of Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius reached the modern world through Arabic. In several cases the Arabic is the only surviving version: books of Apollonius on conic sections and of Diophantus survive in Arabic and not in Greek.

The end of the movement is instructive. It did not stop because of a hostile decree. It slowed as the available Greek material was exhausted, as Arabic scholarship became productive enough to prefer its own work, and as political fragmentation reduced the funding. Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258, which did enormous damage, but the translation movement had already wound down.

It is a rare case in this archive of a knowledge programme ending without suppression. It simply finished the task it was funded for and the funding went elsewhere.

Two hundred years of state and private money, spent on translating a dead empire's science, on the correct assumption that it would be useful.