at today’s mega celebrities and athletes receive. It is therefore safe to say those scholars were sort of the celebrities of their era.
- Caliph al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, is credited with achieving many things, including the founding of the House of Wisdom, a grand library, in Baghdad, Iraq. Inspired by the Academy of Gondishapur in Iran, the House of Wisdom was founded around 825.
- Had it not been for the tireless works of these scholars, many works from Classical Greece, Persia, Syria, and India would most likely have been lost. The scholars translated from Greek, Persian, and even Sanskrit into Arabic and Aramaic. Those works were then translated to Hebrew and later Latin.
- The scholars of this era benefited a lot from the Assyrian Christians and physicians, most famous among them Hunayn ibn Ishaq.
- Physicians of the Islamic Golden Age were inspired by the works of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and Claudius Ptolemy from Alexandria.
- A scholar known as Al-Biruni (973-1048) is said to have produced the best estimate of the radius of the earth at the time. The scientist proposed that the radius was 6339.6 km. To put into perspective, modern scientist put the figure at around 6371 km. therefore, Al-Biruni came pretty close.
- There were many cultural and intellectual hubs of the Golden Age; however, the city of Baghdad in Iraq was perhaps the world’s largest city by then. People from different parts of the known world trooped into Baghdad to bask in the cosmopolitan nature of the city.