was the wealthiest and, with approximately one million inhabitants, most populous city in the world. It was also the most learned; it is said that every citizen in Baghdad was expected to know how to read and write. While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, a steady stream of scholars and artisans from every corner of the world, of every religion and ethnicity, flowed into Baghdad to study medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts. A corps of royal scribes worked day and night translating the accumulated knowledge of the Western world from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit, and Persian into
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