A History of Agriculture in India v2.c53.s5.2

v2.c53.s5.2

In A.D. 749, Abdus Abbas became the first Abbasid Caliph with his capital at Baghdad. The Abbasids were Shias, the followers of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet. They were more liberal in outlook than their predecessors, the Omayyads. In A.D. 757 the Caliph Al-Mansur founded a new capital at Baghdad on the Tigris. Under Haroun-al-Rashid (A.D. 786-809), a contemporary of Charlemagne, Baghdad became a great trading and literary centre. It attracted Greek, Nestorian Christian and Jewish scholars and philosophers from all over. The Caliph sent scholars to different parts of the Eastern Roman Empire to collect and purchase all the available works of Greek philosophers. It was thus that the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Appolonius, Ptolemy and others became available to them, and they got them translated into Arabic. To the translations they appended erudite commentaries. Thus arose a great Arabic culture, liberal in spirit, which absorbed the best elements of the Persian and Egyptian cultures, and the science of the Greeks and the Hindus. Through Baghdad, the Hindu medical, astronomical and mathematical theories found their way to mediaeval Europe. Caliph Al Mamun (A.D. 813-833) obtained copies of scientific manuscripts from India, which were sometimes collated to establish a sound text. Didactic fables of India, e.g. the Panchatantra, adopted the guise of Kalila and Damna, and later on became popular in Europe as Aesop's fables.