Paper, and the Century of Translation
The Islamic Golden AgeWhat a Book Cost Before Paper
Around the year 750, writing in the Abbasid lands meant one of two materials. Parchment — animal skin, scraped, stretched and dried — was durable, prestigious and brutally expensive; a single large codex could swallow the hides of dozens of sheep or calves, so the herd came before the book. Papyrus, shipped up from Egypt, was cheaper and carried most of the empire's daily paperwork, but it grew in one province, it aged badly, and it resisted being bound into thick volumes. Neither material rewarded copying a long book on the chance that somebody might want it. Libraries belonged to palaces, mosques and monasteries. They did not belong to shopkeepers.
The Story About the Captured Papermakers
The famous version runs like this: at the Talas river in 751 an Abbasid army defeated a Tang one, and Chinese prisoners who knew how to make paper gave up the secret in Samarkand. It is a marvellous story, and the evidence for it is thin in a specific way worth knowing. The earliest surviving telling comes from al-Tha'alibi in the early eleventh century — roughly 270 years after the battle — and no closer witness mentions it. Paper documents from the Panjikent ruler's archive at Mount Mugh, in the same region, date from the 710s and 720s — a generation before the battle. And Islamic paper was beaten from rags, where Chinese paper used plant bast: a different recipe, not a copied one. Something travelled. One afternoon's interrogation almost certainly did not deliver it.
The Price of Writing Collapses
Later writers place a paper mill in Baghdad around 794-795, under Harun al-Rashid and his Barmakid ministers, and record a decision to move the chancery's files onto it. The reason given is unromantic and convincing: ink sinks into paper's fibres, so a paper document cannot be scraped blank and quietly rewritten, the way parchment can. Forgery-resistance sold it; cheapness did the rest. The oldest dated Arabic books on paper that still exist are not treasures but working copies — one dated 848, found by accident in a library in Alexandria and still awaiting publication, and a battered fragment of a dictionary of rare words from hadith, dated 252 in the Muslim calendar, around 866, now in Leiden.
Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Workshop
The translation movement that paper fed was a trade, and it ran on families. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (c. 809-873), an Arab Christian physician from al-Hira, worked alongside his son Ishaq and his nephew Hubaysh; a thirteenth-century biographer says the wealthy Banu Musa brothers paid that circle some 500 dinars a month — a late figure, and a startling one. In 856 Hunayn audited his own field in writing, listing 129 works of Galen and recording, for each, who had translated it, into Syriac or Arabic, for which patron, and which nobody had touched. He had done about a hundred himself. He also describes chasing one treatise, Galen's On Demonstration, through Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt as far as Alexandria, and recovering only half of it, in Damascus.
The Inheritance, and What the House of Wisdom Was
None of this was made from nothing, and nobody involved pretended otherwise. Greek medicine and philosophy arrived largely through Syriac — a route Christian scholars had opened centuries earlier, though most of the Syriac versions behind the Arabic Galen were freshly made by Hunayn's own circle, from Greek manuscripts. Persian astronomy came out of the Sasanian archive; Sanskrit astronomy is said to have arrived with an Indian embassy in the early 770s, though that account traces back to the tenth-century astronomer Ibn al-Adami, and survives only because the thirteenth-century biographer al-Qifti quoted him. The Bayt al-Hikma, the "House of Wisdom", is where historians now split. Dimitri Gutas argued it was a palace library with a mainly Persian brief, noting that no Greek-to-Arabic translator — Hunayn included — is recorded as working there; others read the same scant evidence more generously. What is not in dispute is the book trade around it: writing around 891, the geographer al-Ya'qubi counted over a hundred booksellers' shops in Baghdad.
Key Dates to Remember
- 751 — Abbasid and Tang armies clash at the Talas river. The claim that captured Chinese papermakers carried the craft west first appears in writing roughly 270 years later.
- c. 794-795 — Later sources report a paper mill at Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid, and the caliphal chancery beginning to move its records onto paper.
- 856 — Hunayn ibn Ishaq writes his letter auditing the Galen translations: 129 titles, with the translator, language and patron of each, and the gaps.
- c. 866 — The date on a surviving fragment of Abu Ubayd's Gharib al-Hadith, long cited as the oldest dated Arabic book on paper; a copy dated 848 has since been reported in Alexandria, and awaits publication.
- c. 891 — The geographer al-Ya'qubi, describing Baghdad, counts more than a hundred booksellers' shops in the city.