Paper reaches Samarkand

The story

A city of roads and merchants

Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan, stood in Central Asia, in a place where the caravans crossing the continent met. Passing through, travellers and merchants exchanged goods, news and techniques. It was here, according to the accounts, that the Islamic world learned to make paper. In this entry we talk about that step and about what happened afterwards, in the Arab cities: China and the long journey to Europe are dealt with in the entry on paper in the Middle Ages.

An account and a doubt

The best-known account is this. In AD 751, after the battle of the river Talas, the Arabs took prisoner some Chinese craftsmen expert in paper. These taught the process at Samarkand, which had been conquered by the Arabs. The account appears in some Arabic sources, but very late, and for this reason historians today are cautious: paper, perhaps, was already known in Central Asia. According to some sources, the Arabs came to know paper as early as 637, on entering Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persians, but they learned its secret only in the following century.

What we know for certain is that Samarkand became famous for its paper. It was made with hemp and flax fibres, and its Arabic name, kaghad, came to mean paper in general. Then the craftsmen of Samarkand discovered that using cotton fibres produced a thinner and finer sheet. It was a better paper, lighter and easier to carry.

From the city to the capital

Paper, at this point, was ready to arrive where it was needed most: at Baghdad. It was the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, the dynasty that ruled after the fall of the Umayyads in 750. In the chanceries and offices of the state a great deal was written: orders, letters, tax registers, contracts. Until then papyrus or parchment had been used, materials that were expensive and hard to find in large quantities.

Around 794-795, in the time of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, the sources place the first paper mills at Baghdad (some date it to 793, others to 794). The Barmakids contributed to their birth, a Persian family of ministers who governed on behalf of the caliph. According to historians, within a short time the offices of the state gave up papyrus and parchment and used paper to record their acts.

A paper that travels

After Baghdad, the craft spread. Already in the 8th century production reached Egypt and, in the following centuries, North Africa. In Syria, the paper mills of the city of Manbij produced a paper that in Europe was called “bombycine paper”. In Sicily, in 972, a traveller named Ibn Hawqal reported having seen paper among the goods at Palermo, and today it is thought that there too a production existed, supervised by the authorities.

The House of Wisdom

With paper it became easier to copy and keep books. In the same period at Baghdad the Bayt al-Hikma, the “House of Wisdom”, was very famous. It began as the private library of the caliph Harun al-Rashid; from 832 his son al-Maʾmun greatly enlarged it. It was a library, but also a translation centre: here works in Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic, Middle Persian and Sanskrit were translated into Arabic. It also served as a higher school, a hospital open to all the sick and an astronomical observatory. It is said that at its best it was an enormous library, although some scholars, such as Dimitri Gutas, doubt its size and even its existence as a great institution. For this reason it is best to speak of it with caution.

Among the scholars who worked there were al-Khwarizmi (about 780-850), the philosopher al-Kindi (801-873), the translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808-873), who translated Galen and Hippocrates, the mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra (826-901) and the brothers Banu Musa, mathematicians and engineers. It was a world in which the knowledge of the Greeks, Persians and Indians met and was discussed in Arabic.

In 1258, when the Mongols led by Hulagu took Baghdad, the House of Wisdom was destroyed. How many books were lost cannot be said precisely.

Why it matters today

Paper changed the way people wrote and governed. It made it cheaper to pass on orders, easier to keep registers, simpler to copy works of science and literature. In an immense empire, where different languages were spoken, paper was a fundamental tool for holding together offices, cities and schools.