Database: House of Wisdom
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Constructed on the orders of Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754-775), the House of Wisdom served as the Abbasid royal library, where ancient knowledge was preserved and translated into Arabic. As the workplace of most of the empire's prominent minds, it was an essential institution of ninth-century Baghdad.
The idea of combining an academy of learning with a library was not an Abbasid innovation. The Bayt al-Hikma was actually modelled on similar pre-existing institutions such as the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt or the Gundishapur Academy of Iran. This may have been part of al-Mansur's strategy to portray his dynasty as the legitimate successors of the seventh-century Sasanian Persian kings, whose memory was still held dear by the Iranian elites of the Abbasid empire.
In any case, the House of Wisdom became home to at least 8000 books in Arabic whose names have been transmitted to us via the Kitab al-Fihrist (Catalogue of Books) compiled by Ibn al-Nadim in 987-88. They covered a vast variety of subjects, from astrology to zoology.
It seems that the institution suffered from the caliph's sojourns away from the capital after 836 and mention of it ceases after the reign of al-Mutawakkil (r. 847-861). But it served as a powerful example of caliphal patronage of science, and soon maintaining reading rooms and working spaces for scholars became expected of any ruler in the Muslim world.