Abbasid Culture, Arts and Learning

From 750 to 1258, Abbasid rulers and the cities and provinces connected to their court supported building, craft production, books and scholarship. Al-Mansur, the Abbasid caliph who claimed leadership of the Muslim community, founded Baghdad in 762; in 836, al-Mu‘tasim moved the court to Samarra, a new city on the Tigris in present-day Iraq. The caliphs returned to Baghdad in 892. After the Buyid dynasty took Baghdad in 945 and the Seljuqs entered the city in 1055, political power shifted to regional dynasties while Baghdad remained a center of learning and artistic production. Late caliphs again sponsored major projects, including the Mustansiriyya college completed in 1233.

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Building cities and institutions

The scale of new capitals made architecture a public undertaking. Founding a city or commissioning a mosque required materials: builders used mostly sun-dried brick, with fired brick for some important structures, and plaster to finish walls. The city’s palaces, residential districts and mosques extended along the Tigris. Its Great Mosque, built in 848–852, and Abu Dulaf Mosque, built in 859–861, enclosed large courtyards and covered prayer spaces for congregations. Their dates belong to Samarra’s period as capital, distinct from the later Baghdad buildings.

Baghdad’s original Round City, founded by al-Mansur, is known through written descriptions of its circular walls, gates, palace and congregational mosque. Samarra, by contrast, preserves extensive remains of the ninth-century court city. In 1228–1233, the Mustansiriyya joined teaching rooms, student quarters and a courtyard around a college organized around four Sunni schools, each a tradition for interpreting Islamic law. These projects show building patronage at different moments: first the capital cities and mosques, then a late caliphal college in Baghdad.

Making decorated objects

Samarra’s stucco, or carved plaster, helped make the surfaces of palaces and other buildings part of the city’s artistic program. Carved stucco could organise the surfaces of an interior; the beveled carving cut sloping facets into plaster, while repeating abstract and plant-like forms could be adapted to wood, metal and pottery. A technique developed for one material could thus influence work in several crafts.

Potters also developed lustre painting, which applied metallic oxides over a white glaze and fired the vessel again in a low-oxygen kiln. The process left a reflective surface that changed in the light. A tenth-century Iraqi bowl now at the Metropolitan Museum bears a seated figure on its side and the word baraka, “blessing,” beneath its base. The underside inscription met the hand as the bowl was lifted, given or used for serving, joining decoration to ordinary handling.

Paper, books and readers

Paper connected material preparation with copying and the circulation of texts. Production took hold in Central Asia, including Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan, during the eighth century; Baghdad was making paper by the end of that century. Workers beat rags and other fibers in water into pulp, lifted the wet fibers on a screen, and dried them into sheets. Samarqand paper was known for export, and by the end of the tenth century paper had displaced papyrus and parchment across much of the Islamic world. Book workers copied texts by hand, assembled sheets into volumes and sold books to readers. A warraq was a book professional who might combine copying with selling.

Al-Hariri composed the Maqamat in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries as linked prose episodes featuring the eloquent trickster Abu Zayd and the narrator al-Harith. A manuscript copied and illustrated by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti in Baghdad in 1236–1237 shows how a book could combine writing and image. Al-Wasiti’s illustrations gave readers visual settings for the stories, while the manuscript’s date records a thirteenth-century copy of an earlier composition. Poets and prose writers worked through patronage, but books also circulated through the labor of copyists and sellers beyond a single court commission.

Translating and testing knowledge

Scholarly work could involve several readers and more than one language. In ninth-century Baghdad, the physician and translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq prepared a Syriac version, in the literary language of regional Christian communities, of Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts, a seventeen-book study of bodily structure and function. His nephew Hubaysh translated that Syriac text into Arabic, and Hunayn revised Hubaysh’s Arabic version. The National Library of Medicine notes that the final Arabic version influenced medical writing across a wide region for centuries.

Mathematical scholarship also returned to Greek works with new methods. Euclid’s Elements defined equality between ratios of quantities such as lengths through comparisons of their multiples. The ninth-century Baghdad mathematician al-Mahani proposed another test: repeatedly subtract the smaller quantity from the larger, then continue with each remainder. When the same pattern of subtraction appeared for two pairs of quantities, he treated their ratios as equal. This work translated an abstract definition into a repeatable procedure. Learning included comparing texts and testing their methods against new problems. The later Egyptian astronomer Ali ibn Yunus records a thirteen-year series of al-Mahani’s observations, from 854 to 866.