مجتمع مغاير: بغداد نحو ٩٠٠م
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
The round city
Founded in 762 CE, Baghdad was built as a planned circular city and within a century may have been the largest city on earth, with several hundred thousand people. It had paved streets, public baths, hospitals with trained physicians, and paper mills using a technique that had travelled from China.
Britain at the same moment
In 900 CE, London was a modest town, most people in Britain lived in villages of timber and thatch, and Alfred was defending Wessex against Viking armies. Setting the two side by side is the point of this unit: 'the past' was not the same everywhere, and Europe was not its centre.
How knowledge moved
Baghdad's scholars translated Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, argued with them and extended them. Al-Khwarizmi's work on algebra, Ibn al-Haytham's on optics and Ibn Sina's medical Canon all travelled onward into Europe through Muslim Spain and Sicily. Ideas move along trade routes, and they rarely move in only one direction.
BAGHDAD: several hundred thousand people, a paper industry, public hospitals with separate wards, a translation movement rendering Greek and Indian science into Arabic, and mathematicians developing algebra. LONDON: perhaps ten thousand people, recently sacked by Vikings, largely wooden, with learning kept alive in a handful of monasteries. Same decade. Any account that calls this period 'dark' is describing one corner of one continent.