I had been a copyist at the House of Wisdom for sixteen years when the Mongol army appeared on the eastern bank of the Tigris. My work was to make clean copies of texts that scholars had translated or composed — mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, medicine. I worked from morning to midday, in a room with high windows to let in the northern light, alongside twelve other copyists. We sat in rows and we copied, and the scratching of reed pens on paper was the sound that my life was made of, and I had learned not to hear it the way you learn not to hear your own breathing.
The Caliph Al-Musta'sim had been warned for months. Hulagu Khan had sent letters demanding submission. The Caliph had sent letters back containing elaborate insults and poetic threats, which might have served their purpose against a king who respected the Abbasid name. The Mongols did not respect the Abbasid name. They respected armies, and the Caliph had not maintained an army adequate to his situation.
By January, you could see the fires at night across the eastern plain.
The Days of Waiting
The senior scholars debated what to do with the collection. The House of Wisdom had, over five centuries, accumulated manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit, and half a dozen other languages — mathematics from India, astronomy from Greece, philosophy and medicine from everywhere. Some estimated a million volumes. I do not know the true number. I had never tried to count them; counting would have taken years.
The proposal was to move the collection south, to Basra, by boat. The river was navigable. We had the boats. What we did not have was the time — to pack the volumes safely, to load them without damage, to sail them far enough south that they would be beyond the army's likely reach. We began. We packed what we could. I wrapped two hundred volumes in oilcloth myself, working through the night for three nights, hands stained with oil and my back aching, carrying bundles to the dock.
By the time the army crossed the river, we had moved perhaps a tenth of the collection. I do not know what happened to those boats. I have tried for many years to find out. Some say they reached Basra. Some say they were intercepted. Some say a few volumes made it east to Persia, to libraries that survived. I choose to believe some of them survived. It may not be true.
The Sound of the City Ending
The Caliph surrendered on the 10th of February. This was supposed to mean the killing would stop. It did not stop. The terms of surrender were not honored in the way the surrender was meant to be honored, and the killing in the streets began on the same day as the surrender and continued for many days after.
I was in the western quarter, in a house belonging to a colleague's family. We had sealed the shutters and were not opening the door, and we could hear everything through the walls — which is the worst way to hear a thing, hearing without seeing, your mind filling in what your eyes cannot confirm. I heard fire and I heard human sounds and I heard the sound of structures collapsing, which has a specific quality, different from the sound of buildings collapsing in an accident or a storm, a quality I can only describe as deliberate.
After the third day, a man came to the door who said there was a way out through the southern gate if we moved now. We moved. I carried one bundle — a copy of al-Khwarizmi's algebra and three volumes of al-Razi's medical encyclopedia, the ones I happened to have in my room. I had taken them from the library the week before to consult and had not returned them, which is the accident that determined what survived. I was not brave enough or organized enough to make a principled choice. I took what I happened to have.
The River
We passed near the river on our way out. This is what I saw:
Books in the water. Many books, floating or sinking — you could see the pages spreading as they absorbed the water, going from white to grey to brown as they filled. Some had been thrown from the banks. Some had been carried out in the current from farther north, from the docks where the House of Wisdom's collection had been stored. The ink did run — I saw this clearly, in the shallower water near the bank, the water darkened where pages were dissolving. Whether it ran for three days or for an hour I cannot say. I saw it for the minutes it took to walk past.
I did not stop. I kept walking, with my bundle of four books, out of the city and south along the river road, with perhaps two hundred other people who had found the same route out. We were silent. There is a particular silence that comes after witnessing a thing that cannot be undone, a silence that is not peace but the opposite of peace — the space left by a catastrophe that is still too large to fit into language.
What Is Left
I reached Basra. I eventually reached Cairo, where the scholars who had fled Baghdad gathered and tried to remember what they knew, to reconstruct from memory and from the fragments that had survived what had been lost. Some of us had memorized texts completely. Others had pieces. We wrote down what we had.
I have the four books still. The al-Khwarizmi is damaged — the last forty pages are water-stained and some are stuck together — but legible. The three al-Razi volumes are intact. I copied them again, clean copies, and gave the copies to three different libraries in three different cities, because I understood that the thing a library teaches you, if you work in one long enough, is that knowledge is not safe anywhere. It is only safe in many places at once.
They say five hundred years of learning were lost in the Tigris that February. I do not know if five hundred years can be contained in the number of volumes that were lost, or whether numbers like that are meaningful when applied to knowledge. What I know is that my colleagues were gone, my city was gone, and the room with the high windows and the sound of twelve pens was gone, and the work of copying and translating and making clean what was ancient and important was gone with it.
I kept working. What else do you do.
Narrator's note: Ibn Yusuf al-Rashidi is a fictional figure. The siege and sack of Baghdad in February 1258, the fall of the House of Wisdom, and the descriptions of books in the river are drawn from Ibn al-Athir's The Complete History, Bar Hebraeus' Chronography, and Rashid al-Din's Compendium of Chronicles. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's role in preserving some manuscripts is documented. Modern estimates of the death toll range from 90,000 to 200,000.