House of Wisdom

The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) was a library and translation milieu active in Baghdad during the Abbasid era, where works from Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac were rendered into Arabic. Its origins lie in the court library (Khizanat al-Hikma) of Harun al-Rashid's reign, and it expanded especially under Caliph al-Ma'mun (r. 813–833) to include an observatory. Many historians regard it less as a research academy than as a library at the center of the translation movement. It disappeared with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258.