EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis). After Christian (Byzantine) Emperors Theodosius and Justinian (yes the one who built Hagia Sophia!) destroyed (yes, destroyed!!) every sign of Hellenic civilization in the Eastern Roman Empire, including the Academy of Athens, whatever manuscripts the Greek philosophers could save was loaded on a ship and was transferred to Syria, where it was given to the Persians to be preserved. They placed it in their most excellent library, and they later passed it on to the Arabs… The Arabs translated it and about a century later, this preservation gave rise to the Banu Musa brothers…
From the vibrant crossroads of ancient knowledge in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, three extraordinary minds stood at the frontier of science in the 9th century: the Banu Musa brothers — Muhammad, Ahmad, and al-Hasan ibn Musa. Born into Persia and schooled amidst the great Greco-Arabic translation movement, they didn’t merely absorb the wisdom of the ancients — they transformed it.
Drawing deeply on the works of Greek masters like Euclid, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria, the brothers studied, translated, and expanded upon geometric principles and mechanical ingenuity. Their Book of the Measurement of Plane and Spherical Figures revived and extended Archimedean geometry. At the same time, the Book of Ingenious Devices unveiled hundreds of automated machines that drew on Greek inspiration but broke new ground with original inventions.
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