Baghdad’s House of Wisdom: The Ancient Silicon Valley

Baghdad wasn’t just the capital of an empire—it was the motherboard of a civilization. In this episode, Armchair Archaeology uncovers how the Abbasid Golden Age turned Baghdad into the world’s brain, fusing Greek logic, Indian numerals, and Persian administration into a living operating system for knowledge. From the House of Wisdom to paper mills and algebra, discover how a city became the engine that powered global science, medicine, and philosophy.

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You’ll explore how Baghdad’s Round City worked like a processor, how caliphs funded translators like venture capitalists, and how paper’s arrival created a data revolution centuries before the digital age. Follow the rise of Al-Khwarizmi’s algorithms, the first hospitals, public debates, and markets for knowledge that made Baghdad the intellectual capital of its time.

🧭 Chapters & Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
1:27 The Circular City: Engineering a Brain
3:57 Caliphs as VCs: Patronage That Scaled
6:42 The Translation Engine: Building Technical Arabic
9:19 The Paper Disruption: Speed as a Feature
11:47 Algebra & Algorithms: Al-Khwārizmī’s Operating System
14:40 Medicine & Hospitals: From Text to Clinic
17:20 Philosophy & Theology: The Debate Machine
20:12 Engineering Wonders: The Banū Mūsā & Useful Gizmos
22:50 Global Pipelines: Trade, Pilgrimage, and Polyglot Teams
25:43 The Book Market: A Knowledge Economy
28:02 Conclusion

In the finale, we uncover a forgotten frontier encounter that quietly unleashed Baghdad’s copy-speed revolution — a turning point that changed how knowledge moved across the world. What began as a clash of cultures became the spark for a new information age.

💬 Tell us in the comments: was Talas a spark or a symbol of something bigger?
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