The Library of Alexandria
The Ptolemies built an institution with one aim: collect every scroll in the known world, copy it, and fund scholars to work beside it.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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Baghdad's House of Wisdom drives a translation century
Under the Abbasids, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic and pushed the sciences far beyond their sources.
Timbuktu's Sankore circle copies and writes
At Saharan trade crossroads, Timbuktu's mosques and the Sankore circle sustained a book trade and scholarship in law, astronomy and medicine; hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive.
Bacon programs the scientific project
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum proposed knowledge as a collective, cumulative enterprise: observation, experiment, tables of instances, organized institutions.
Chronology
The Library of Alexandria
The Ptolemies built an institution with one aim: collect every scroll in the known world, copy it, and fund scholars to work beside it.
Baghdad's House of Wisdom drives a translation century
Under the Abbasids, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic and pushed the sciences far beyond their sources.
Timbuktu's Sankore circle copies and writes
At Saharan trade crossroads, Timbuktu's mosques and the Sankore circle sustained a book trade and scholarship in law, astronomy and medicine; hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive.
Bacon programs the scientific project
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum proposed knowledge as a collective, cumulative enterprise: observation, experiment, tables of instances, organized institutions.