The Occasional Informationist

A new book by Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: how the Arabs transformed Western civilisation, has a few surprising insights on developments in the recording and transmission of knowledge in the period.

Lyons focuses on the contribution of Abbasid rulers of Baghdad, from the founding of the dynasty in 762 to its overthrow by the Mongols in 1258, and on the ways in which Arab knowledge was introduced to the West, by such travelling scholars as Adelard of Bath in the twelfth century. The usual Western image of such transmission portrays the Arabs as faithful and benevolent, if rather unimaginative, guardians and custodians of Greek learning, saving the classic texts by translating them into Arabic, and then returning them to Europe just in time to start the Renaissance. Lyons shows that the Arab contribution was a much more active and creative one, with interpretation and discovery in many fields, from astronomy and physics, to medicine and agriculture.

The ‘House of Wisdom’ of the title was the early mechanism for this process: a combination of library, book depository, and translation bureau, supporting a active community of scholars. Libraries appeared in many environments, the larger ones typically holding tens of thousands of volumes. Elsewhere in the Arab world, the library of the caliphs in Cordoba was generally reckoned to have a collection of nearly half a million volumes, comparable to to a substantial university library today. In general, as Lyons shows the contribution of Arab learning and recording of knowledge is still underestimated in the West.

The position of the Abbasid realms, spreading onto three continents, enabled them to engage on a grand-scale in what would later be termed knowledge transfer. Their links with the Mediterranean world, and in particular the Hellenistic cities which came under their control and with the still-powerful Byzantine empire, gave them access to the classical literature. Their contacts with the civilisations of the Indian sub-continent provided what we still call Arabic numerals, though they are in truth Indian. And their spread into central Asia brought them into contact with the Chinese empire, from which they learnt the making of paper. At a time when Europe was still reliant on parchment for recording information, the Arab world was paper-based. The cheapness, convenience and ease of storage of paper played a great part in the development of a ‘book culture’, which drew the attention of those Europeans who came into contact with it. Intriguingly, and a point which Lyons does not speculate on, the Arabs never adopted that other Chinese innovation, printing. If they had done so, the Arab world might have developed a print-on-paper information environment five hundred years before Europe managed to do so. The consequences of that make intriguing food for thought for those who like to speculate on alternative histories.

Finally, Lyons has a cautionary tale for those who believe the power of collections of recorded information to pass on, by their very existence, the knowledge of a culture or a civilisation. The Arabs, he points out, had, from a very early stage, accurate translations of Ptolemy’s astronomical works. But they lacked understanding of the astronomical concepts, and could make no use of them. It is not, apparently, enough just to store the information; understanding has to kept alive along with it, or painfully rediscovered.

An article in Intelligent Life magazine for summer 2009 tried to decide which was ‘The most important year ever‘. The feature writer, Andrew Marr, argued for 1776, with the American Declaration of Independence, or 1945, with its world changing events; he was duly rebuked for US-centrism by website commentators. His five guests chose arguably more interesting dates:

Web commentators have added some dates of ancient battles, some significant dates for Asia in particular, 1492 (a bit US-centric again), 1919 for the Treaty of Versailles, 1940 for the Battle of Britain; and, interesting, 1958 for the origin of the integrated circuit and the basis of modern computers.

So .. if we discount ‘political’ and ‘military’ dates, whose importance seems to vary dramatically according to your national original and political views, and ‘religious’ dates, important (presumably) only if you are an adherent of the religion in question … then we seem to be left with printing, the telegraph, the integrated circuit… ‘Information dates’ seem to have a stronger hold over the imagination that the dates of, say, medical advances, or developments in transportation or agriculture. Reality or perception, I wonder ?

My vote for most important year ? I suppose I would go with the introduction of printing, since we don’t have a good date for the start of writing. But, more parochially, and as I’ve written in an editorial for the Journal of Documentation (2009, vol. 65, no. 3) , I have a fondness for 1759. Establishment of the British Museum, start-up of Kew Gardens as a serious botanical institution; and, according to Frank McFlynn, when the Brits took over the world [McLynn, F., 1759: The year Britain became master of the world, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004].