MODERN MAN

~ 46 ~ Arabic. This work started under the patronage of the state. In 830 Al-Mamun established in Baghdad his famous Bayt al Hikmah, a combination library, academy and translation bureau, and an astronomical observatory. The work of translation continued with such speed and on such a vast scale that, within eighty years after the establishment of Baghdad, most of the books in Greek had already been rendered into Arabic. During the Abbasid era, paper was being manufactured on a large scale, so there was no dearth of paper for writing books. There were more than 400,000 books in the library of Cordova (Spain) in the tenth century, whereas in Europe at that time, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, the library of Canterbury was at the top of the list of Christian libraries with 1800 books in the 13th century. Al-Mamun’s astronomers performed one of the most delicate geodetic operations—the measuring of the length of a terrestrial degree. The object was to determine the size of the earth and its circumference on the assumption that the earth was round. The measurement, carried out on the plain