Between the years 633 and 651, the Rashidun Caliphate (under Abū Bakr 632-634, Umar 634-644, and Uthmān 644-656) executed one of the most rapid imperial expansions in recorded history. The Sasanian Empire, which at its 7th-century extent still covered approximately 3.5 million km² from Mesopotamia to Central Asia was systematically dismantled.
Simultaneously, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire lost Syria-Palestine (Damascus 634/5, Jerusalem 637), Egypt (Alexandria surrendered 642), and large parts of North Africa and Armenia and more than two-thirds of its pre-conquest territory and tax base according to the consensus in modern historiography.
These conquests immediately incorporated the two most sophisticated bureaucratic and scholarly ecumenes of late antiquity. The Sasanians had preserved and extended Hellenistic astronomy, mathematics, and medicine (via the Academy of Gondēshāpūr and the translation of Indian and Greek works into Middle Persian).
The Byzantines controlled the great libraries and academies of Alexandria, Antioch, and Edessa, where Greek philosophical and medical corpora had been copied for centuries, often via Syriac intermediaries by Miaphysite and Nestorian Christians.
Later on, Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb adopted the Sasanian dīwān (fiscal register) system wholesale by 640-642, creating the first Islamic bureaucracy.
Local Persian and Greek-speaking administrators, physicians, and astronomers were retained en masse because the Arabs lacked the personnel to govern 10-15 million new subjects (rough combined population estimates for the conquered core territories).
The intellectual payoff, however, was not instantaneous. Systematic Graeco-Arabic (and Perso-Arabic) translation began under the Umayyads in Damascus (700-750) but exploded under the Abbasids after 750. Baghdad was founded 762, the Bayt al-Ḥikma (“House of Wisdom”) proper was institutionalised under al-Maʾmūn (813-833).
Explorer_of__History on
Pulling up to Ctisphon. Baghdad wasn’t founded until the Abbasid dynasty.
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Inb4 ‘wrong style of turban’
Between the years 633 and 651, the Rashidun Caliphate (under Abū Bakr 632-634, Umar 634-644, and Uthmān 644-656) executed one of the most rapid imperial expansions in recorded history. The Sasanian Empire, which at its 7th-century extent still covered approximately 3.5 million km² from Mesopotamia to Central Asia was systematically dismantled.
Simultaneously, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire lost Syria-Palestine (Damascus 634/5, Jerusalem 637), Egypt (Alexandria surrendered 642), and large parts of North Africa and Armenia and more than two-thirds of its pre-conquest territory and tax base according to the consensus in modern historiography.
These conquests immediately incorporated the two most sophisticated bureaucratic and scholarly ecumenes of late antiquity. The Sasanians had preserved and extended Hellenistic astronomy, mathematics, and medicine (via the Academy of Gondēshāpūr and the translation of Indian and Greek works into Middle Persian).
The Byzantines controlled the great libraries and academies of Alexandria, Antioch, and Edessa, where Greek philosophical and medical corpora had been copied for centuries, often via Syriac intermediaries by Miaphysite and Nestorian Christians.
Later on, Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb adopted the Sasanian dīwān (fiscal register) system wholesale by 640-642, creating the first Islamic bureaucracy.
Local Persian and Greek-speaking administrators, physicians, and astronomers were retained en masse because the Arabs lacked the personnel to govern 10-15 million new subjects (rough combined population estimates for the conquered core territories).
The intellectual payoff, however, was not instantaneous. Systematic Graeco-Arabic (and Perso-Arabic) translation began under the Umayyads in Damascus (700-750) but exploded under the Abbasids after 750. Baghdad was founded 762, the Bayt al-Ḥikma (“House of Wisdom”) proper was institutionalised under al-Maʾmūn (813-833).
Pulling up to Ctisphon. Baghdad wasn’t founded until the Abbasid dynasty.
I’m never get tired of this template lol