Latest / The Story of Uzbekistan: Silk Road Kingdoms and Soviet Legacy — Fexingo History / The Khan's Library: Books That Survived the Mongols
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Silk Road cities—Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva—and the great buildings that survived. But today I want to talk about something more fragile: the books. The libraries of Central Asia, and what happened to them when the Mongols came. Luna: Oh, that's a great angle. I've always wondered how much was actually lost. Lucas: Right. We tend to think of the Mongol conquest as this catastrophic event, and it was. But the story of the libraries is more complicated. Let's start with the Samanid library in Bukhara, which was legendary. It's where a young Ibn Sina—you know him as Avicenna—read Aristotle and probably wrote his early works. He described it as a building with many rooms, each filled with manuscripts, and he read so much that he'd finished them all by the time he was eighteen. Luna: That's wild. He read the whole library? Lucas: That's what he said. But the Samanid library was destroyed long before the Mongols—probably in the Karakhanid conquest around 999. So the Mongols didn't get that one. But they did get the Khwarezmian capital, Gurganj, in 1221. That city had a library that al-Biruni worked in, and it was sacked. The historian Ibn al-Athir wrote that the Mongols took so many books that they used them as fuel for their fires. Luna: That's horrific. But some survived, right? Lucas: Some did, surprisingly. The story is complex. For example, when Tolui took Merv in 1221, a lot of manuscripts were supposedly thrown into the river, but some were saved by scholars who fled. And in Nishapur, which was also destroyed, there's a famous account of a poet who hid his books in a well—and they survived. So it's not total erasure, but the loss is staggering. Lucas: And here's the thing: some libraries continued to be built after the Mongols. The Ilkhanids, who ruled Persia, were not just destroyers. They built the observatory at Maragheh, and their scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi had a huge library there. He collected manuscripts from across the empire, including from Central Asia. So there was a kind of salvage operation going on. Luna: So it's not just loss—there's also a story of recovery. Lucas: Exactly. And the Timurids, who came later, were great patrons of books. Ulugh Beg, the astronomer-king of Samarkand, had a library attached to his observatory. He collected works in Persian, Arabic, even Greek. He himself wrote a star catalogue, the Zij-i Sultani, that was based on his observations, and he would have used those manuscripts. So by the 15th century, Samarkand was again a place where scholars could study. Lucas: But here's a question: how much of the ancient world's learning was actually lost? We know that many Greek works were translated into Arabic in the Abbasid period, and those translations were in Central Asian libraries. When the Mongols destroyed cities, some of those unique copies vanished. But sometimes there were other copies elsewhere. So the loss might have been more about local traditions than global knowledge. Luna: That's a good distinction. But what about the works that were only in those libraries? Lucas: That's the tragedy. We'll never know. But we do have some works that survived because they were copied in multiple places. For example, Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine was copied widely, so it reached Europe. But his commentary on Aristotle, which might have been only in Gurganj, is lost. So the loss is real, but it's uneven. Lucas: And there's another layer: the Mongols themselves weren't uniformly anti-intellectual. Some of them, like the Ilkhanids, valued scholars. But the initial invasions, especially under Genghis, were brutal. Yet even in that chaos, some manuscripts were saved by ordinary people—hiding them in walls, in wells, in the desert. It's like a seed bank for knowledge. Luna: That's a beautiful image. So what's the lesson we can draw from all this? Lucas: Maybe that knowledge is always fragile, but also resilient. And that libraries are not just buildings—they're networks of copies, of people who remember, of scholars who carry ideas across borders. Central Asia was a crossroads, and its books traveled far. Even when a library was destroyed, the ideas often lived on elsewhere. Lucas: And if today's conversation has given you a new angle on that—maybe it's something you can share with a friend. That's the kind of thing that keeps this podcast ad-free: listener support. If you find these histories useful, you can help us continue by buying us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep these conversations going, and it really makes a difference. Lucas: So back to the books. One more story: when the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, they destroyed the House of Wisdom. But some Central Asian scholars had already carried copies of Greek works to Maragheh, and from there they eventually reached Europe. So even from the ashes, there was a path forward. Luna: That's actually hopeful. I mean, not for the people who died, but for the knowledge. Lucas: Right. And that's the thread we want to leave you with. The libraries of Central Asia were more than just storehouses—they were living things, shaped by trade, war, and curiosity. And their legacy is still with us, in the texts we read and the stars we map.