The House of Wisdom was a library before it was a legend
Long before the stories, Bayt al-Hikma was a working place: shelves, translators and patrons who paid by the page.
In Abbasid Baghdad, a library attached to the caliph’s court grew into one of the great centers of learning. Under the caliph al-Ma’mun, who ruled from 813 to 833, it drew scholars who read Greek, Syriac, Persian and Sanskrit.1
Historians still debate how formal an institution it was; the name covers a library, a translation effort and the circle around them.
The translators
Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a physician from al-Hira, became the most celebrated of them. He and his students rendered Galen and other Greek authors into Syriac and Arabic, comparing manuscripts to settle the best text before translating it.
What came after
The library did not survive the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258. The translations did: copied, carried and studied from Córdoba to Samarkand, and later translated again into Latin.2
Many Latin translations were made in Toledo in the twelfth century.