{"product_id":"house-of-wisdom-book-jonathan-lyons-9780747594000","title":"The House of Wisdom","description":"For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward  and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the  time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should be  the guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a result  Europeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming,  where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine,  and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its  own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars -  the Crusades. Arab  culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of  intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of  Adelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of the  scientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose  House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the  best European libraries housed, at most, several dozen. The Arabs could  measure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for  eight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomy  and navigation, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek  scientific and philosophical texts including, importantly, those of  Aristotle; they made paper lenses and mirrors. Without them, and the  knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe  would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last  millennium. In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan  Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores and  reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid  adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid  the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49525313536273,"sku":"GOR002196394","price":13.39,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49547879809297,"sku":"GOR003474942","price":36.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49548960006417,"sku":"GOR005198642","price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585321148689,"sku":"GOR010934913","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49966597767441,"sku":"CIN0747594007G","price":9.21,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0747594007.jpg?v=1750817100","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/house-of-wisdom-book-jonathan-lyons-9780747594000","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}