Middle East and Egypt (6th–10th c.)Science and technology

The House of Wisdom and the translation movement in Baghdad

In 9th-century Baghdad, supported by the Abbasid caliphs and their courtiers, scholars translated into Arabic — often by way of Syriac — much of the philosophy, medicine, mathematics and astronomy of the Greeks, together with Persian and Indian works, and built on them. The caliphs’ palace library, the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), became the symbol of this movement, which created the scientific language of Arabic and preserved Greek works that later reached Europe.

Date: c. 800 – c. 900year known, approximate · duration: ≈ 100 years
Place: Baghdadtoday: Baghdad, Iraq · Middle East and Egypt
Participants: Al-Ma'mun, Harun al-Rashid, Abbasid Caliphate, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Al-Kindi, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Threads: Middle East and Egypt (6th–10th c.)
Also known as: Bayt al-Hikma; Khizanat al-Hikma; Graeco-Arabic translation movement; Translation Movement; Байт аль-хикма; Переводческое движение; Греко-арабское переводческое движение

The movement began under al-Mansur in the mid-8th century, when Persian and Indian astronomy were put into Arabic, and lasted until the late 10th century, but it reached its height in the 9th. Its patrons were the caliphs — Harun al-Rashid and, above all, al-Ma'mun (813–833) — and also viziers such as the Barmakids and other members of the elite, while the cheap paper now made in Baghdad helped books to multiply. Most translators were Christians who knew Syriac and Greek; the greatest of them, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873), with his son and pupils rendered much of Galen as well as Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the Sabian Thabit ibn Qurra of Harran translated Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius and Ptolemy. Greek literature such as Homer was hardly translated: historians explain the choice of texts by practical needs — medicine, astronomy and astrology, calculation — and by the demands of theological debate. Later tradition told that al-Ma'mun had seen Aristotle in a dream.

Harun’s palace library, which the historian al-Qifti calls the ‘storehouse of the books of wisdom’, flourished under al-Ma'mun as the House of Wisdom; the Persian poet and scholar Sahl ibn Harun is named as its librarian, and al-Khwarizmi is said to have worked there. Astronomers in al-Ma'mun’s service observed at al-Shammasiyya in Baghdad (from 828 or 829) and on Mount Qasiyun near Damascus, compiled the ‘Verified Tables’ and measured a degree of the meridian to find the size of the Earth. Under al-Mutawakkil (847–861), who turned away from the rationalist Mu'tazila, the House of Wisdom declined. What it really was is debated: Dimitri Gutas notes that it is rarely named in the sources and that no translator of Greek works, Hunayn included, mentions it, and he sees in it a palace library on the Sasanian model whose recorded translations were from Persian; the image of an ‘academy’ or ‘university’ was largely built up by modern scholars.

The translations gave Arabic a vocabulary for philosophy and the sciences and laid the foundation on which al-Kindi, al-Khwarizmi and later al-Farabi and Ibn Sina built. Some Greek works, such as seven books of Galen’s anatomy, survive only in Arabic. From the 12th century Latin translators, above all in Toledo, rendered many of these Arabic texts and brought them to Western Europe, although historians debate how much the West owed to Arabic intermediaries rather than to direct translations from Greek, especially for Aristotle.

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Indian astronomy in Arabic: the Zij al-Sindhindbetween 771 and 773 · Middle East and Egyptthe Arabic Sindhind of the early 770s was one of the first scientific translations made for the Abbasid court
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