The House of Wisdom
The Tigris ran black with ink, and then red.
- EXISTED
- 8th century, 1258
- WHERE
- Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate
- LOST
- 1258
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- The Mongol sack of Baghdad
At the height of the Islamic Golden Age, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom was the greatest centre of learning on earth. Scholars there translated and preserved the philosophy, mathematics, medicine and astronomy of the Greeks, Persians and Indians, and pushed each forward, algebra took its name and much of its shape from work done in the city. For centuries the knowledge of half the world was gathered and guarded there.
In 1258 the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan took Baghdad and put it to the sword. The libraries were emptied into the Tigris; the survivors recorded that the river turned black with the ink of countless drowned books and red with the blood of the slain. Whatever the exact toll, an immeasurable inheritance of human thought went into the water in a few days, and the Golden Age was over.
When the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, so many books were thrown into the Tigris that, the chroniclers say, the river ran black with their ink for days, and red with the blood of the scholars who had written and kept them.