what was the purpose of the house of wisdom
House of Wisdom The House of Wisdom (Arabic: بيت الحكمة‎; Bayt al-Hikma) refers either to a major Abbasid public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad or to a large private library belonging to the Abbasid Caliphs during the Islamic Golden Age.[1][2] The House of Wisdom is the subject of an active dispute over its functions and existence as a formal academy, an issue complicated by a lack of physical evidence following the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate and a reliance on corroboration of literary sources to construct a narrative. The House of Wisdom was founded either as a library for the collections of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the late 8th century and later turned into a public academy during the reign of Al-Ma'mun or was a private collection created by Al-Mansur (reign 754–775) to house rare books and collections of poetry in both Arabic and Persian.[1][3] Regardless, the House of Wisdom existed as a part of the major Translation Movement taking place during the Abbasid Era, translating works from Greek and Syriac to Arabic, but it is unlikely that The House of Wisdom existed as the sole center of such work, as major translation efforts arose in Cairo and Damascus even earlier than the proposed establishment of the House of Wisdom.[4] This translation movement lent momentum to a great deal of original research occurring in the Islamicate world, which had access to texts from Greek, Persian and Indian sources, as opposed to the "Bookshelf Thesis" that reduces the contributions of Islamicate scholars to mere translation and preservation of Greek texts.[4]
Meritocracy Both Plato and Aristotle advocated meritocracy, Plato in his The Republic, arguing that the most wise should rule, and hence the rulers should be philosopher kings.[29]