Ibn Sina and the Bukhara Library
The Islamic Golden AgeA Boy in the Samanid Capital
He was born around 980 at Afshana, a village outside Bukhara, though the year is not firmly fixed — some scholars have argued for a date as early as the 960s. His father, Abd Allah, had come from Balkh and served the Persian Samanid dynasty as a local administrator, which set the family down inside a capital where books and argument were part of the working currency. By his own account Ibn Sina knew the Quran by heart at ten. A visiting scholar, al-Natili, was engaged to teach him logic; they worked through Porphyry's Isagoge, then Euclid and Ptolemy's Almagest, until al-Natili told the boy he had nothing more to give him. Nearly everything known about that childhood comes from Ibn Sina himself.
A Mansion of Many Chambers
Around 997 the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur fell ill and his physicians could not shift the illness. Ibn Sina, roughly seventeen, was brought in and joined the group that treated him successfully. He then asked for the payment he actually wanted: permission to use the palace library. He described walking into a mansion of many chambers, each chamber holding chests of books stacked one upon another — one room for Arabic language and poetry, another for jurisprudence, a subject to a room, with catalogues of the ancient authors to order from. He found works there, he says, that he never encountered again anywhere else. The Avicenna scholar Dimitri Gutas has warned that the autobiography is a shaped argument about how knowledge is won, not a neutral diary.
The Fire, and Who Actually Says He Set It
Then, the story runs, the library burned, and his rivals said he had set it alight to keep his sources to himself. Almost every popular account repeats this. Its provenance is the more interesting fact: neither the fire nor the accusation appears in the autobiography he dictated to his student al-Juzjani, and the standard modern reference works on his life carry neither. The wording everyone quotes appears, with no source given, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica article of 1911, and the popular versions have been copied outward from there ever since. What is solidly attested is duller and heavier. In 999 the Qarakhanids took Bukhara and the Samanid state collapsed. Ibn Sina, whose standing rested entirely on that dynasty, eventually left for good, and spent the rest of his life attached to a succession of smaller courts — a turbulent vizierate at Hamadan, then some thirteen years at Isfahan.
A Million Words, Written on the Move
He began the Canon of Medicine at Gurganj, carried it west through Rayy, and finished it at Hamadan around 1025, writing between court appointments, a spell in prison and periods in hiding. It runs to something in the order of a million words across five books: principles and physiology; roughly 800 simple drugs listed alphabetically; diseases taken organ by organ; conditions affecting the whole body; and a formulary of some 650 compound recipes. That last book is candid about its own descent, crediting Greek, Persian, Indian and Arabic sources by name. The Canon's real power was organisation. Galen and Hippocrates had been available in Arabic for over a century and a half; Ibn Sina made them findable.
Six Centuries of Examinations
He died in 1037 at Hamadan, of a colic he could not treat in himself, while travelling with his last patron — in his late fifties on the usual dating, and older if the earlier birth date is right. The book kept going without him. Gerard of Cremona translated it into Latin at Toledo in the twelfth century; it was among the most frequently printed medical books of the incunable age, with a dozen or more Latin editions before 1500 and many more across the sixteenth century — the counts vary with whether partial editions are included. In 1593 the Medici Oriental Press in Rome printed the Arabic text, and no other Arabic edition followed until Cairo in 1877. Montpellier and Louvain are widely reported to have still taught from it around 1650, and Padua to have kept it as background reading into the 1700s — end-dates repeated far more often than they are checked.
Key Dates to Remember
- c. 980 — Born at Afshana near Bukhara, into a Samanid administrator's household; the birth year is disputed, with some scholars arguing for the 960s.
- c. 997 — Helps treat the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur and asks for access to the palace library as his reward.
- 999 — The Qarakhanids take Bukhara and the Samanid state falls; Ibn Sina leaves and spends the rest of his life moving between patrons.
- c. 1025 — Finishes the Canon of Medicine at Hamadan, having begun it at Gurganj and continued it at Rayy.
- 1593 — The Medici Oriental Press in Rome prints the Arabic text of the Canon; no further Arabic edition appears until Cairo in 1877.