texts were transferred from ancient scraps of parchment and papyrus onto fresh sheets of paper, made in Baghdad’s very own paper mill (the first paper mill in the world), and placed inside the legendary Library of Baghdad—known in Arabic as bayt al-hakma or “the House of Wisdom”—where they were preserved for future generations. (Were it not for the work of these scribes, the world might well have lost track of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Plotinus, and the rest of the foundation of Western philosophy, much of which was translated into European languages from Arabic.) Algebra was
...more
