Al-Khwarizmi not only invented algebra, his book "Al-Khwarizmi on the Indian number system" was translated and transliterated as "Algoritmi de numero Indorum", introducing decimal numbers and the number zero to Europe and resulting in "algorithm" becoming a word. Yes, all algorithms are essentially named after him.
Ah yes, from the legendary studio that brought you the Great Library of Alexandria comes the second lost library of ancient times. If you thought that the Great Library was great, then you'll love watching the House of Wisdom become just as cool, only to fall as well. Truly, you won't want to miss this new iteration in everyone's favorite genre: history repeating itself. The House of Wisdom, coming to ancient theaters near you.
as a native of the arabic speaking nation of egypt, i must again commend you for putting in the effort to ACTUALLY write the arabic script properly. you'd be surprised how often i'd find it written disjointed, backwards, or even both AT ONCE
I've made that very mistake before. When I didn't know what I was looking at, I just hit copy and paste thinking it was fine, but everything was written disjointed and backwards. Since then I've learned to screenshot the text, so my Photoshop text processor doesn't have an opportunity to screw it up! -B
@@OverlySarcasticProductions hell yes! i love when ppl learn from their mistakes, and i also love being able to actually read the arabic names written, thank you
As a Hebrew speaker, I can say that I have seen a lot of Hebrew text just written backwards and it’s annoying. I imagine being used to how Arabic letters are connected would make it even more annoying to read.
@@giladmachluf3663 yea, if the letters are disconnected, it's straight up just gibberish: i've heard hebrew also has distinct forms for letters in different parts of the word (disjointed, at the start of a word, middle of the word, and end of a word), and seeing a jumble of disjointed forms is also not helpful i've also seen some using the correct forms, but leaving an unconnected gap between each, which i also don't like very much
How much Muslim scholars and dynasties contributed to modern art philosophy mathematics cartography is insane and fascinating! Unfortunately for much to be lost since the beginning of the early modern age.
Islam is the last big thing holding the people of that region back. So much time and IQ wasted on that... I mean it had it's time when the world was much more savage. But the fact that i was indoctrinated into a cult in the 20th century is still mind-boggling.
@@aziouss2863 I don’t think that Islam itself is the issue. The turmoil currently afflicting the Middle East is an effect of decisions and events that occurred throughout the 20th century. Many of the “problems” people see in Islam have roots in policies set by the waning Ottoman Empire. Economic woes in the region stem from national economies based on a mix of agarian pastoralism and singular resource extraction, mainly hydrocarbons, rather than the broader manufacturing industrial base and trade economies developed in the west.
The coolest part of this is the idea that information and knowledge was shared around instead of concentrated in one place like the Library of Alexandria. Having to travel to one place in the world to get a copy of a scroll you wanted is very impractical. Instead, having resources among the mosques and libraries in a city is the smarter move. It's like people saw what happened in Alexandria, and after they were done mourning the great loss, decided that should never happen again at that scale.
People saw the library become irrelevant as more center of learning started to appear? Because the fires didn't really contribute much to the destruction of the library.
Unfortunately, at a time of manual by-hand copying, most written knowledge just has to be centralized to some extent because of the immense manhours required to copy them, especially if translations were also needed. That being said, a network even across a single city is much more robust and much less prone to monopolization than a single building.
Guess what? What you're describing is exactly the modus operandi of the Great Library of Alexandria XD First, we're not even sure it was one building. It probably shifted through the centuries, but we know of several temples (yeah the Libary was a temple ˆˆ) that would have been refered to as the Great Library at the same time. Second, Alexandria was far from the only library of the greek-roman world, even if it was the biggest, and didn't aimed to preserve all the knowledge of the world without sharing them, in fact one of the main occupation of the librarians would have been to copy scrolls, to preserve them of course, but most importantly to export them. Remember when Caesar burned the Library? He was besieged in the harbour, why would the Library be there? Because he didn't burned the Library itself, he burned a storehouse containting hundreds of scrolls copied and reay to be exported to other center of knowledge ˆˆ Oh and people probably didn't mourned the Great Library of Alexandria. Because contrary to Bagdad who went with a catastrophic invasion, the most likely scenario for the end of the Great Library is simply that it had been so forgotten and mismanaged that everyone stopped using it. It just slowly fade out of memory, just as Alexandria itself, which was just a shadow of itself by the end of Antiquity....
And we must add the contribution of the free movement of people around the large Muslim world, from what ius now Portugal to India scholars could move and share and debate their ideas. No wonder so many advancements were made in that era.
Ah man, I’ve been working on the same idea of “study as a form of worship” for a while now! Raised Catholic, so it felt right to me! I never understood why God would give us such a wide, wild, DENSE world to live in and not want us to explore it. What greater worship of the Big Guy Upstairs than dedicating one’s life to admiring His craft?
There are a whole lot of Catholic priests who agree with you. I got to talk with some folks doing really fascinating astronomical research in Italy and Vatican City some years ago, and it's fascinating to see just how much emphasis there is on cross-cultural scientific study. Jesuits are lovers of knowledge
The man who first discovered the Big Bang was a catholic priest, and I know that one jesuit priest often came up in french anthropology ˆˆ The vision of a Church being profundly anti-science is a modern one, people often point to Galileo, but his main patron was the Pope itself XD
My Lutheran parents who are both retired pastors would agree with you. I am a hyper-curious, insatiable, mega bookworm for a reason thanks to them. I also learned far more from just parking by bum in a library and reading obsessively than I ever have in a classroom. Mostly because grew up in small towns with teachers who knew the bare minimum about the subject they taught at best. If I wanted to answer the eternally burning questions of 'Why, Where, When, and How' bursting from the core of my soul then I had only the library - usually the bit with the encyclopedias - to turn to for satisfaction. Because internet search engines were in their infancy back then and Google wasn't an option. On the one hand, learning new things is so much easier these days because all I need is a question, a search bar, and the patience to sort through the junk to find the gold. On the other, the aforementioned junk clutters up the results so much that misinformation has more of an influence than it did when I was growing up. So there are both pros and cons to how information sharing has progressed on the interwebs. Neither side is really significant enough for me to take a stance as to whether it is a good or bad thing, so I regarded merely as something that is. It exists. I can say no more about it because it defies classification much like many things in this universe. It cares not for humanity's love of convenient little boxes for things to be sorted into. Perhaps this is intentional and is meant to teach us a lesson. Perhaps it isn't. I don't know. I can't know. Puny mortal brain is mortal and cannot comprehend the infinite or the nature of the divine in its entirety. All I can do is poke things, observe what happens when I poke the thing, and try to draw conclusions based on that result as my ancestors did all the way back until the time that predates conscious cognition. Whenever that is.
@@krankarvolund7771it was less thry were anti-science...its just that the science that agreed with them or if discovered something that DIDN'T keep it a tight tight secret. And the those were the minority too I am afraid. Most priests were dogmatic as hell.
i love every single time a historian goes "You know about the lost library already but WHAT IF I TOLD YOU there was another library that may have been even better?!" and i'm ALL for it. every single time. GIVE ME MORE AWESOME HISTORICAL LIBRARIES they're usually shining beacons of positivity throughout history and i love every single one of them
Abbasids: If you don't want us to kill you, you must give- Byzantines: Yeah yeah, we get it. Here's our gold. Abbasids: What- No! we want your books, why would we want your gold?
And the fact that caliphate was richer than the greeks at that time probably played a role. Like: If you don’t have money to pay you pay with your books.(Laughs villainishly) 😂
Blue has such infectious energy, you can't help but get sucked into whatever topic he covers. I've never even heard of the House of Wisdom, and yet now I'm *_fascinated_* by it.
I'm glad you gave Hunayn ibn Ishaq a mention. I really wish more people were aware of the Church of the East's accomplishments. Most people don't even know they existed! Their missionaries planted seeds of Christianity as far as China and invented alphabets for translating the Bible centuries before Catholic and Protestant missionaries would do the same in Asia and Africa. It's sad to see how far they have fallen.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I've been doing a lot of research into specifically the Chinese mission, or the Luminous Religion and it's absolutely fascinating to see how these Persian missionaries tried to translate Christian concepts into Tang Dynasty Chinese using concepts from Buddhism and Taoism to make them comprehensible. It's just a pity (from the point of view of a believer) that it got so Buddhist/Taoist it sort of lost its Christian-ness. Still, to see a cross on an 8th Century Chinese monument, or to hear a Trinitarian sutra in a Buddhist style is mind bending. I must try and find out about the Indian Church; that looks equally enthralling.
According to certain estimations, the Eastern church was a bigger church than the Catholic one in the middle-ages. That means that during that time, there were more christians in the Mddle-East and Asia than in Europe ˆˆ'
@@kingofcards9516 They were decimated by Tamerlane and reduced back to the Middle East and India. Those communities were then split by Catholic infiltration.
The thing I liked most about AC Mirage is how it brought so much back to light that was lost, seeing everything about the lost portions of Baghdad astounded me. Seeing the library was excellent, loved going through it
I am a baghdadi and i got so so happy when i saw my fav channel on youtube posting about baghdad and its culture and history. my parents always talk about the old glory days of how baghdad was the "new york city" or "london" of the world and, even now, with everything, it still has traces of that incredibly rich heritage. i have a love hate rlshp w that city, but there is no denying it was a treasure of the old world. thank you so much for sharing that
Being a librarian, and having to take a course on the history and practice of librarianship during grad school, one of the most important phrases I try to impress on people (regarding any fandom or subject they choose to study) is "Know thy history. It prevents you from repeating mistakes and enables you to make smart decisions for the future."
"Habibi, start building shelves!" tickled me. Awesome video. Would honestly love to hear more about Baghdad and aspects of other Islamic cities that were inspired by it or helped inspire aspects of it in turn.
I was really looking forward to this one. To say the importance of the Islamic world in our modern age is downplayed if not outright ignored is something of an understatement. So to highlight the scholars, historians, scientists etc without whom we would lack much of our modern concepts of maths, algebray, astrology, and whom preserved the works of the Ancient Greek Philosophers we so adore... Okay I am rambling, thats for the vid Blue, fascinating that its possibly not one specific place but a metaphour for the collective wisdom of an entire people.
The Abbasid Cailaphate is the guy who reminds the teacher there's homework, the teacher's pet, and the guy who loves/gets excited over tests and exams.
I've heard that when the Mongolians sacked Baghdad they threw all the books and scrolls into the Tigris, which caused the river to turn black with the ink.
There are a lot of stories like this about the Mongols, most need to be taken well salted. Like there are stories of them killing a million people in one day yet given the likely forces available this requires like several hundred kills per Mongol.
@@thenablade858 They hated every single part of you if you didn't want to surrender. Except your religion, Genghis was a very progressive man for the 1300s apparently.
4:38 I love hearing about how other religions believe that studying the world does not and should not detract from religion. After all it's really hard to properly worship and follow someone/something you don't understand.
That's the neat part in Islam, we are obliged to seek out most sorts of knowledge ("most" because of course becoming an expert in black magic isn't the most Islamic thing ever) And you're right. I learned how some electrical measurements devices work on a physical level (eng school) and just looking at some of them makes me smile nowadays. They're just pieces of art where the brush is literally the physics of the universe. Absolutely blows my mind every time
Studying science as a form of studying God and his creation is very much a Christian idea too. The idea that science and religion are opposing was an enlightenment era invention
Scholastic theology was a major part of Catholicism and later passed down to the Protestant Denomination via the Early Reformation. The Orthodox Church was not scholastic but that was more that the East was more educated and was largely untouched by social and Technological decline after the Fall of the Western Empire and Orthodox Theologians being ahead of the Latin West during the golden ages of ERE even during the Times Eastern Europe and the Balkans were having a multiple civil war or being invaded by nomadic horse Archers. The Enlightenment is generally scarred with propaganda and attained many insecurities against "Eastern" Culture and the Achievements of past Eras and the Church.
There’s an alternate timeline where the Hagia Sofia became the New House of Wisdom after it was taken by the Ottoman Empire, and I’m only a little sad that it wasn’t our timeline.
To be fair Mehmet the Conqueror was a rabid scholar and both invited many scholars from around the world and built a LOT of libraries in Istanbul...its just that he was the only scholarly Padişah....yeahhh
I love this topic I love this part of Arabic history This was my favorite paper to write about in the university. The Baghdad house of wisdom was one of the most unique libraries in our world history and it's a shame that not many people know about it. I had to compare it with the library of Alexandria and I found that I liked the house of wisdom more.
That wonderful moment when an OSP video perfectly lines up not only with a relevent assassin's creed release but also a ck3 dlc release. Nothing quite like watching one of these videos and then being able to go "Okay, Imma do that now too"
As a history nerd who loves to learn more about different cultures, i love this (also I'm a genshin player, who is a history and mythology nerd and i always like learning more about what inspired things in the game)
and your gonna tell me that he caused the Sack of Constantinople and disguised himself as a venetian merchants to "preserve" those books? Or He conspired with the Holy roman Emperor to invade Italy and to simply Redecorate the Vatican?
As a proud Tunisian with roots deeply embedded in Kairouan, the joy I feel is immeasurable. There's a profound resonance when history, once learned as a child, is eloquently echoed by someone from a distant land. It adds a layer of significance that words can scarcely capture
To get properly into the Arabic connections between governance and wisdom - the word "Hikma" (حكمة) that is used in the 'Bait Al-Hikma' name has the same root (h-k-m / حكم) as the word for leader/ruler, 'Haakim' (حاكم). The versatility of the Arabic language is almost definitely our proudest accomplishment ❤ Amazing video as usual!!
This is how I was told Islam worked when I was a little kid in school We're all so proud if that period of history, even if we don't fully know it Which is why it breaks my heart when I see the way modern Muslims act towards science theses day "We're aaaall for it. We have a surrat in the quoran named after it" Right until science says something they don't agree with, suddenly they start acting like they work in a Catholic school
I feel the exact same way. And it's also heartbreaking to see Catholics in some cases so resistant to scientific consensus. Like, these religious traditions laid down the structure that built the base for current scientific achievement! You should be willing to trust that you can accept the results of that achievement and that it will further your religious understanding, not detract from it
My grandad thought we were descendants of the Umayyads and he made up our last name to sound like it My dad likes to make tshirts and drinking glasses and other stuff with our last name printed on them. He is really proud of his dad and his name and I think its really cute Idk if we really do descend from the Umayyads but my grandad was Pakistani
Doubtful. I think the best way would be to take a DNA test. The Umayyads were mass slaughtered by the Abbasids when they took over. The only remaining member was the Hawk of Quraysh who fled to Iberia. Seeing as they are from the opposite end of the globe, I don’t think Umayyad progeny would be in Pakistan
I applaud the people who worked on this videos Arabic translations, all accurate, and good pronunciation. Fun fact: the Abbasids made it a rule to collect books from other nations or traders as a tax, then to be translated, ten copies made, then sent a copy to the next house of wisdom, madrasah or minaret, each in turn had to make ten copies to be distributed to the next faculty.
Thanks for talking about this 🙏 I had heard the name in passing, and knew prosper talked about it in the same breath as The Library of Alexandria, but I was shaky on the details. This was a wonderful sum up! 📚😁
It’s amazing looking at this from a slightly different lense. As a muslim, I’ve gone through all of this for religious regions, but going over it again from this side is nice. Alhamdulillah, I was brought up with study of all kind still being a part of piety. (Surah Fussilat, Verse 53: “We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth”)
I'd love to see videos continuing about the intellectual traditions of medieval religous traditions. You have a video on Maimonodes. I hope you'll make videos on Averroes and Thomas Aquinas.
4:50 _Well,_ actually, there was some pretty sick beef between the Greek Philosophy-leaning 'Falsafa'-ists (Neoplatonic philosophers of the Islamic world) and the more orthodox Islamic theologians (Mutakallimun) - of particular note was the somewhat hilarious treatise exchange between Abu Ali Ibn Sina (known to the West as Avicenna) and a guy called Al-Ghazali (his real name is very long and I'll put it at the bottom). Ibn Sina was strongly influenced by Neoplatonic ideas about a thing called "the One"; now, I'm not gonna up and explain 800 years of philosophical convention, so I'm just gonna say: if you've seen FMAB, you've got a reasonable idea of what it is. For the rest of you, it's basically a Spiritual person's conception of divinity. So, Sina applied these ideas to the Abrahamic Creator, also describing the idea of "cogito ergo sum" a good 1000 years before Descartes learned how to write. Then, al-Ghazali wrote the equivalent of a diss-track, in "The Incoherence of the Philosophers", where he basically just cracked down on every point Ibn Sina made and showed how it didn't fit in with Qur'anic teachings
Great little video! I loved the emphasis on the Mongol impact. Too easy for North Atlantic folk to forget. Humble suggestion: you would really enjoy looking into the culture of "medieval" Timbuktu. That would make one hell of a video.
On the mention of Kairouan and how similar it must've looked like to Baghdad, you're absolutely right about it! And sincerely thank you for making that observation Blue! For the anecdote, Kairouan was under the Ummeyyads however showed some sort of resistance, by resisting, Kairouan offered refuge to the orphaned Abu Jaafar Al Mansur, the soon-to-be founding father of Baghdad during his younger years, and as he lived there, he met his wife, Arwa Al Himyari a daughter of a rich Kairouanese merchant who hosted Abu Jaafar Al Mansur in his home, as they lived together, he wanted to get married to her and she accepted to the condition of getting married according to kairouanese customs and the Kairouanese Sadak, which is a type of prenup that granted women a whole set of rights and autonomy, Abu Jaafar accepted the deal after some convincing (it's actually a really good love story and could be featured in your upcoming Valentine's Day video ;)))) and eventually got married. Abu Jaafar and Arwa left Kairouan together and actually build Baghdad together, Abou Jaafar was heavily inspired by his host city while building Baghdad, and even ordered the city of Kairouan to be protected by a massive wall (that you can still visit today btw). Anyways, back to Arwa, she gave birth to Al Mahdi who will eventually finish building Baghdad to his father's vision, and have a kid named Haroun Al Rashid. Now who might his kid turn out to be you may ask? He's none other than the man who ordered building the Baghdad House Of Wisdom (which was inspired by Abu Jaafar and Arwa's own private library in the earliest days of the Abbasid Caliphate) and thus boosting the Islamic Golden Age! I hope this piece of info reaches you :) and I absolutely loved the video, great work!
Hey Blue, there's a typo in your arabic for "al-Ma'mun" at 5:18. It should be "المأمون". You typed "aaamun" (or maybe "al-amun" with the connecting line between the first two letters missing)
8:16 Pope Sylvester II (before becoming pontiff known as Gerbert of Aurillac) is my favorite Medieval pope. Absolutely fascinating guy. You could make a video about him, or make a video about the "Ottonian Renaissance" and include Sylvester in it, alongside other interesting people, like Emperor Otto II.
2:40 Persian "round cities." excuse me, what? You're telling me they're not only where Assassins come from (on the opposite side of the region), but also where the circle city concept comes from? What next, it's also where {insert just about any other wildly foundational part of western mythology} comes from? Yeah, probably.
Fantastic episode. Minor fact check, though. Al Qarawayyin is the world's oldest university in continuous operation, but the *first* university (defined as a multi-disciplinary learning institution) is arguably Taxila (Takshashila) in the Indian subcontinent, dating back to around 300-500 BCE.
Hate to disappoint, because while today's University of al-Qarawiyyin is indeed the oldest continually operating higher learning institution in the world, it was considered a madrasa until 1957, when it actually adapted to be called a university. That last point is also why the University of Bologna is generally named as the first of it's kind, since it uses the Latin term "universitas", making it effectively a distinct European concept and also part of the definition.
@@_jpgThis is why it should be called the oldest continuous higher education institution, rather than simply a university. While universities were influenced by madrasas, they differ in a few ways.
@@_jpg sure, but Bologna is still younger than Taxila? I'm not sure what you believe my disappointment here is, but I'm simply pointing out that multi-disciplinary "higher" - what an odd term, I hope you can see - education didn't have it's first start in Europe. This doesn't take away from the accomplishments of Bologna! It doesn't confer secularity on al -Qarawayyin! But if you think there's some sort of adversarial conversation to be had here that's all you, mate.
Heh... this is useful information for one of my D&D characters, who ended up in the greater multiverse thanks to hiding in the House Of Wisdom... and accidentally winding up in L-Space, Discworld's dimension of absolute knowledge.
Loved the video!! Although at 8:12 you mentioned The University of al Qarawiyyin as the world's first university? Wasn't the university of Nalanda established centuries before this one?
nalanda as we know it today is an emulated version of the ancient one, and that one stopped existing in the 12th or 13th century. al quarawiyyin is considered the oldest university that still exists today.
My beautiful city 🤍 As much as i hate the Abbasid caliphs for religious reasons, but the way Baghdad flourished in every sense of the word at their time is truly awe-inspiring.
How are things in your city? All we hear about are the bombings, & the protests, & fires, & drone-strikes. Someone below even said, is a h'hole. But for the average people, living everyday life. Are things normal? That may be insensitive. Are things okay?
@@zero95lucky Where did you get this from? Oh, I forgot. You listen to the Western media 😂 It’s normal, brother. We live like you live in your country
4:49 - I mean, it was the same for Christianity too; lead to the Renaissance. It’s a shame when religious institutions turn on scientific pursuits instead of embracing them.
I was only slightly disappointed when you didn't shout "arches" but I guess a quality video teaching me something fascinating is ok too. I can't be mad at Blue.
Sounds like the House of Wisdom could've been the name for a huge literary organization, with public and private installations located all over. But like modern organizations & businesses, they went under.
Thank you for covering Islamic history on its own terms! Things aren't as bad as they used to be with regard to Western respect for Islamic contributions to science, etc., but the fact that you're so enthusiastic about it still feels special. ...yeah, I'm probably making it obvious how infuriating I find all that "Europeans invented everything" crap. EDIT - I wrote that a minute into the video, and I shouldn't be so overjoyed by you doing a basic action like citing the Hijri calendar in addition to the Gregorian or whichever it is, but considering that you were under no formal obligation (other than honesty, responsible historiography, and general historical fidelity), I must salute you. EDIT 2 - 4:37 - YES THANK YOU FINALLY A NON-MUSLIM GETS IT!
A board game called Scholars of the South Tigris has recently come out about this, and features managing chains of translators to get scrolls from any language into Arabic 😁
Would love to see Blue cover the history of Palestine, just like he did with Hong-Kong & Ukraine. I always love learning about more about the history of the Middle East since it tends to be barely mentioned in western history books (so dumb) & it’s more relevant than ever right now. Free Palestine 🇵🇸
I'd love to see that too. However, knowing how recent events have made the discourse surrounding Palestine very tense, it might be for the best to wait a while and let the intensity die down before tackling the subject. I wouldn't want them to be a target for mass harassment by Zionists.
As much as I'd like to see them to that, since Ifeel like the history of that region after the Crusades up until the modern times isn't something people generally know or have cared about, but considering how much more grey (or black-on-black rather than black and white) the current conflict is, it's probably a better idea to steer around that for at least a bit, with a video that doesn't directly take a side.
I hear you, but I think the zionists & their propaganda that’s everywhere is all the more reason to speak up about Palestine especially when there is an active genocide happening to Palestinians. Gaza is essentially a concentration camp right now. Also the “conflict” has always been pretty simple, it’s just that Israel’s propaganda has been working until the last decade where social media has allowed people to actually see what’s going on. The “conflict” is literally that the Palestinians are native to their land & Israel has been trying to exterminate them since its inception so they could have that land (look up Plan Dalet). With the platform that OSP has it would be amazing to see them talk about it. Obviously we can’t force them, but it would be nice to see them do the right thing just as they did with Hong-Kong & Ukraine.
