Time travel
8th century AD
Baghdad is founded and immediately begins buying Greek books; Tang poetry reaches a height it will be measured against forever; and a rebellion in China kills more people than any event in recorded history to date.
Mental Worlds: Evidence and Inference
The intellectual centre of gravity moves this century, and the people it moves toward know it. Baghdad is founded in 762 as a deliberate act, a round city on the Tigris positioned where the canal system and the routes to Iran and India meet, and within a generation the caliphal court is systematically buying Greek manuscripts, hiring Syriac Christians who can read them, and paying for translation. The motive is not antiquarian. Astronomy is wanted because the calendar and the direction of prayer depend on it, medicine because people are ill, and logic because theological argument has become technical. What arrives with the Indian astronomical tables turns out to matter more than the tables: a place-value notation with a symbol for nothing in it, which makes calculation something a clerk can do rather than a specialist.
In China the century divides cleanly in two. Before 755 the Tang capital is the largest and most cosmopolitan city on earth, and its poetry is written by men who assume the order around them is permanent even when they are complaining about it. After 755 it is not. The An Lushan rebellion runs eight years, and the census that follows records a fall so large that historians still argue about what it measures - flight and administrative collapse as much as death, but the scale is real either way. Du Fu's later poems are the record: a man walking through requisitioned villages, watching conscription take boys and old men, writing in a plain style because the ornamented one has stopped being adequate.
Byzantium spends the century arguing about images. The iconoclast position is not stupidity; it is a serious reading of the second commandment sharpened by the observation that the empire has been losing to people who do not make images. The counter-argument, worked out at length by John of Damascus writing safely under Muslim rule, is that the Incarnation changed what may be depicted, because God took a depictable form. Whole libraries of images are destroyed and the dispute outlives the century.
The Latin west is doing something modest that will matter. Bede, in a monastery on the Northumbrian coast with a good library and no travel, writes a history of the English church that dates everything from the Incarnation, and because his book is copied widely the convention sticks. Charlemagne, who cannot write fluently himself, gathers scholars from Italy, Spain, Ireland and England, and orders that monasteries teach and that texts be corrected against good exemplars. The clear script the Carolingian scriptoria develop is legible enough that it will be mistaken for Roman lettering seven hundred years later and revived as the basis of printed type.
At the edges of this, two things happen quietly whose consequence no one measures. Paper reaches Samarkand and then Baghdad, reportedly from craftsmen captured at Talas, and an administration that runs on paper can keep records at a volume papyrus never permitted. And in East Asia, blocks are cut to print Buddhist texts in quantity - a million charms in Japan, printed and distributed as an act of merit. Neither is understood as an information technology. They are understood as cheaper writing and as devotion.
What a thoughtful person in 790 would say is that the Abbasid state is the great power, that China has been badly hurt but will recover, and that the Frankish arrangement in the west is a personal achievement unlikely to survive its author. Two of those three judgements are correct.
The political map
Major Polities and Cultural Regions
- Abbasid Caliphate from North Africa to Central Asia after 750, capital founded at Baghdad in 762
- Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba most of the Iberian peninsula, independent of Baghdad from 756
- Tang Empire China, gravely weakened after the An Lushan rebellion of 755 to 763
- Eastern Roman Empire Anatolia and the Balkans, convulsed by the iconoclast controversy
- Carolingian Francia Gaul, the Rhineland, Lombard Italy after 774, and the Saxon marches
- Tibetan Empire the Tibetan plateau and, at its height, the Tarim basin and briefly Chang'an itself in 763
- Nara Japan the Japanese home provinces, governed from a capital laid out on a Chinese grid
Borders are approximate scholarly reconstructions from historical-basemaps (GPL-3). Nearest available basemap anchor year: AD 500.
State of the domains
Texts and Written Culture
Li Bai and Du Fu write within a few years of each other, the one all wine, moonlight and sudden flight, the other watching the state come apart and finding a plain diction adequate to it. Ibn Ishaq compiles the first sustained biography of Muhammad. Bede finishes the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in Northumbria, dating events from the Incarnation and thereby fixing the convention. The Kojiki and then the Nihon Shoki set down Japanese origins in writing for the first time, and the Man'yoshu gathers four thousand poems.
Art
Umayyad desert palaces at Qusayr Amra carry frescoes including a zodiac dome and bathing scenes, painted before figural restraint hardens. The Great Mosque of Damascus receives landscape mosaics without a single human figure. In Northumbria and Ireland the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells apply metalwork interlace to the manuscript page. Tang tomb figures in three-colour glaze depict Central Asian grooms, camels and court women with unembarrassed realism.
Medicine
Syriac-speaking Christian physicians at Gondishapur and then Baghdad carry Greek medicine into Arabic, beginning with Hippocrates and Galen. Chinese state medical administration under the Tang runs examinations and a pharmacopoeia. In the Latin west practical medicine survives mainly in monastic infirmaries and herbals, with Bede writing on bloodletting according to the moon.
Science
Al-Mansur's Baghdad begins acquiring Greek and Indian scientific texts systematically, and Indian astronomical tables reach Arabic as the Sindhind, bringing the decimal place-value numerals with them. Jabir ibn Hayyan's corpus sets out laboratory procedure, distillation and crystallisation, whatever its later accretions. Yi Xing measures a meridian arc across China and builds a water-driven armillary sphere with an escapement.
Military
The Arab advance is checked at Tours in 732 and, more consequentially, at Talas in 751, where Tang and Abbasid armies meet in Central Asia and the Tang are defeated. The An Lushan rebellion from 755 devastates China for eight years and the census afterwards records a catastrophic fall. Charles Martel's heavy cavalry and the Frankish mounted retinue point toward a new military order in the west.
Technology
Papermaking passes from Chinese prisoners taken at Talas into Samarkand and then Baghdad, and paper begins replacing papyrus and parchment for administration and scholarship in the Islamic world. Block printing of Buddhist charms and sutras is in use in China, Korea and Japan, the Hyakumanto darani produced in Japan in the hundreds of thousands. Horizontal-axle windmills and improved irrigation spread across the eastern caliphate.
New this century
- Kojiki
The oldest surviving Japanese book records the age of the gods and the imperial descent from them, written in a strained adaptation of Chinese characters to Japanese sound and syntax.
- Nihon Shoki
An official chronicle in literary Chinese covers the same ground as the Kojiki with dates, foreign relations and variant versions recorded side by side, addressed to readers abroad as much as at home.
- The Reckoning of Time
A treatise on computing the date of Easter becomes the standard medieval textbook of calendar science, and works out the Anno Domini era in the form later centuries adopted.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People
A monk with a good library and no travel writes the English into a single people with a single history, and dates events from the Incarnation so consistently that the convention sticks.
- Fount of Knowledge and On the Divine Images
A monk living under Muslim rule, beyond the reach of the emperor destroying icons, writes both the systematic summary of Greek Christian doctrine and the argument that saved images.
- Collected Poems
Quiet landscape poems in which the human observer is often absent by the final line give Chinese verse its most sustained Buddhist register.
- Kalila wa Dimna
An Indian fable collection is turned into Arabic prose of such quality that it becomes both a model of the language and the version from which the stories reach Europe.
- Great Dharani Sutra of Pure Light
A woodblock-printed scroll sealed inside a stone pagoda is among the earliest surviving printed texts anywhere, recovered intact after twelve centuries.
- Collected Poems
A poet who never sat the examinations writes verse of apparently effortless motion, and becomes the figure against whom Chinese poetic spontaneity is permanently measured.
- Man'yoshu
Four and a half thousand poems gather emperors, courtiers, frontier guards and unnamed provincials into one collection, in a Japanese written phonetically with Chinese characters before any native script existed.
- Collected Poems
A failed official watching the state come apart develops a plain, exact style adequate to conscription, famine and flight, and is later called the poet-historian for it.
- Sirat Rasul Allah
The first sustained biography of Muhammad, preserved only through a later editor who says openly what he has omitted, and the source of nearly everything later tradition narrates about the Prophet's life.
- Al-Muwatta
The earliest surviving compilation of Islamic law arranges prophetic reports and the settled practice of Medina together, treating what the community does as itself a form of evidence.
- Hyakumanto Darani
A million printed Buddhist charms are produced and placed in miniature wooden pagodas as an act of merit, giving the earliest printed texts that survive with a securely documented date.
- Jabirian Corpus
A large body of alchemical writing sets out laboratory procedure, apparatus and classification with a precision its own attribution cannot match, since the corpus accumulated under one name across generations.
- History of the Lombards
A Lombard writing after his people's kingdom has been conquered by Charlemagne gives them a history, drawing on lost sources and on his own family's memory.
- Al-Kitab
The first complete grammar of Arabic derives the whole language from a small set of governing principles, and is so decisive that later grammarians refer to it simply as The Book.
- The Samye Debate and the Imperial Translation Project
A Tibetan court decides between Indian gradualist and Chinese sudden-enlightenment Buddhism, and commits the empire to translating the Indian canon on standardised terms.
The canon by now
- Pyramid Texts
- Royal Inscriptions of Sargon of Akkad
- The Exaltation of Inanna
- The Curse of Agade
- Coffin Texts
- Admonitions of Ipuwer
- Eloquent Peasant
- Code of Hammurabi
- Old Babylonian Gilgamesh (Pennsylvania and Yale Tablets)
- Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld
- Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus
- Book of the Dead
- Rigveda
- Baal Cycle
- Ludlul Bel Nemeqi
- Epic of Gilgamesh
- Instruction of Amenemope
- Gathas
- Book of Songs
- Torah
- I Ching (Book of Changes)
- Mahabharata
- Iliad
- Odyssey