Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization | Jonathan Lyons
1 post | 4 read | 1 to read
The remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West. For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand. Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning."
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
ravenlee
post image
Pickpick

An interesting look at the debt the West owes to the Arab thinkers from the eighth through thirteenth centuries. The “rediscovery” of Greek science and philosophy in the Middle Ages came courtesy of the Islamic world, and this book details how that happened.

It skips around a bit chronologically, and can be a bit confusing (luckily it dovetails some with A History of God by Armstrong, which I read recently, so that helped)

Cont in comments

ravenlee but it‘s very interesting. Gives me a nice supplement to our homeschool medieval history studies. 5y
16 likes1 stack add1 comment