A subterranean world of water offers a glimpse of Ramla’s past | Hacker News Reader

A subterranean world of water offers a glimpse of Ramla’s past

bbc.com

77 pointshwayern50 comments

> The Pool of the Arches allows visitors to relive the city’s glorious past. Caliph Harun al Rashid, who commissioned the pool, ruled during the Golden Age of Islam, when economics, science and culture flourished from the western edge of the empire in Spain all the way into Asia. The significance and accomplishments of this period became clear as our boat glided through the dark water under the tall arches, still standing after more than 1,200 years.

I know a cistern is a very neat thing to discover. I personally want to see it now. However, I can't help think that this is blown out of proportions. People were not idiots 1,000 years (and longer) ago. I'm glad the people of Ramla were able to build cisterns - but I fail to see how that confirms this shows "The significance and accomplishments of this period".

edit: Thank you, the click-bait link title has been updated

Yep last time I've checked the Roman aqueducts are still there and well the pyramids are also there (unless you think Stargate is an accurate historic account of events).

People weren't stupid, and building big whilst labor intensive isn't particularly hard.

It's plenty hard in an age before mechanization. You have to:

-source materials and have them delivered

-employ expert engineers and craftsmen

-manage the financial needs of a project without electronic communication

-ensure safety without the sophisticated techniques and supplies we take for granted in construction today (hard hats?)

It's worth noting that the great pyramid of Giza was actually the third attempt, after the first pyramid collapsed under construction and the second had to be "bent" to avoid collapse as well.

So I think it's fair to say that big building was actually quite difficult, even for seemingly simple projects.

We marvel at those aqueducts and pyramids in the same way we marvel at this. WE shouldn't pooh-pah one accomplishment just because another exists that we're culturally more familiar with.

The aqueducts and pyramids are way older than this though.

Compare, for example, the Basilica Cistern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_Cistern

It was built in Constantinople maybe 2 centuries earlier, and one would think that the technology persisted.

My favorite historical place in Istanbul.

It's so obvious, I'm embarrassed to say it, but I can't help myself. The Mines of Moria.

I don't remember anything in my history book about the Roman / Orc wars.

Of course, the winners wrote the history books.

I like this documentary if your are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8HnvuKbAo

I think it's representative of the ability of a civilization at that point in time, to think in the long term, having the capability to join knowledge with economic resources through the will to improve the lives of people. It brings the modern day into stark contrast, where we seem to have many critical areas where we are awash with knowledge that is not meeting up with the economic resources and the will to make progress.

This seems to be a problem both at a grand scale, climate change, and more local scales like the Oroville dam. As a technology alone, the cistern is neat, but the building of it, and later abandonment has maybe more to tell us in the long run.

I didn't see it in a quick search: how did these people 1,000 years ago store water without it becoming contaminated?

We know how to build buildings kilometers tall, but we don't.

We know how to go to the moon, and have gone to the moon, but we don't.

We are not currently idiots, but I hope the future can be referred to as more 'significant and accomplished'

It's not about the tech, it's about society getting together and doing stuff.

This article reminds me of a book written by Kim Stanley Robinson, "The Years of Rice and Salt". It's a historical fiction which explores a history in which the bubonic plague wiped out Europe, precluding Western civilization as we know it. The cultural and religious vacuum left behind is filled by Islam, Buddhism, and the Chinese dynasties. Robinson explores the evolution of humanity over the next 600 years under these influences in beautiful detail -- it's an amazing read!

I second this recommendation. If you're a person who enjoys historical fiction, you'll love this book. I found it a tad difficult at first, but it quickly sucks you in.

To be pedantic, that's not "historical fiction", that's "alternate history fiction".

Historical fiction is like the books by Ken Follett, about medieval Europe. They're set in that time, as we understand it historically, but the characters and events are fictional.

What you're describing is alternate history: it's fictional work that assumes something went very differently at some point in the past, and then attempts to extrapolate from there how history turned out. For instance, suppose the US had never gotten involved in WWI; how would the later 20th century have turned out? Or suppose Al Gore had won in 2000; how would things be different now?

> The cultural and religious vacuum left behind is filled by Islam, Buddhism, and the Chinese dynasties

Sounds like the author assumes Christianity started in Europe and spread to the Middle East. It actually happened the other way around.

In 1258, after the Siege of Baghdad by the mongols, the golden age of Islam ended. Scholars were killed, buildings were sacked, infrastructure was destroyed. Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) survived temporarily.

In Spain, the city of Cordoba in Andalusia was objectively the most advanced in all of Europe. After Al-Andalus was lost to Europeans, the Latin translations of the 12th century occurred.

Those Latin translations, which were carried out in great part by the Toledo School of Translators, were then used by European scholars to establish the next generation of education: the founders of Oxford, Copernicus, etc. would not exist as we know them if it wasn't for such translations.

They did a great job in passing the torch of knowledge to the West. Then, during the Crusades, there was no intention with sympathizing with them, and their contributions to our culture started being erased from history.

Lately there has been a little bit of more justice in the way history is presented, but there is work to do. The translations of the 12th century were necessary for the Renaissance to occur.

Why is this person being downvoted? Let's face it, the West in general does a great job of not giving credit to Muslims as it should. Chemistry, Algebra, Algorithms, Astronomy, the Scientific Method, etc.

Yes, we should be more grateful Muslims attacked and conquered Spain, taking it from those evil colonialist Europeans.

You are mixing politics with cultural/scientific advancements.

What you say is equivalent to saying that Germans and Soviets do not deserve recognition because they were our adversaries.

The Math genealogy project makes it very evident. Start following the tree:

https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=204293

Students of his students include: Copernicus, Leibniz, many of the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, Fourier, Poisson, Dirichlet.. and the list goes on and on...

..and they too in turn should credit the Greeks and Indian cultures whose knowledge they transcribed!

They did. They preserved authorship in all their works. Their additions were in the form of footnotes, comments and original works.

They translated works of Ptolomy, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, Galen for us.

They also produced very important works in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, etc.

I challenge you to find translators for those languages in Medieval Europe when literacy rate was less than 1%. Their contributions were objectively important and critical.

>I challenge you to find translators for those languages in Medieval Europe

This is the Western European point of view I referenced in my other comment. These works were also being preserved in Latin and Greek in Constantinople for the entire duration of the Middle Ages in Western Europe and the rise and fall of the Golden Islamic Age.

The ones that made it to Oxford and Paris first came from Toledo.

Albert Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas studied from Aristotle translations made in Toledo.

Nicolaus Copernicus studied from Ptolomy books translated in Toledo.

Roger Bacon studied from translations made in Toledo.

So, stop trying to imply that translations came from Byzantium and not Al-Andalus.

>Let's face it, the West in general does a great job of overstating Islamic contributions to Chemistry, Algebra, Algorithms, Astronomy, the Scientific Method, etc.

More accurate.

Ironically enough, this born out of a very Western European point of view. While progress had slowed in the West during the Middle Ages, it was continuing on in the Byzantine Empire.

In the past, the Byzantines were not Christian enough to receive credit for their contributions by likes of Edward Gibbon, now it seems to have swung the other way and they are too Christian for contemporaries to go out of their way to praise.

Archive link for UK readers: http://archive.is/juV7w

The title should say "Arabic golden age" the secular attributes alone of the Arab culture created that golden age.

In fact the golden age ENDED for religious reasons (just like the Catholic church did with Galileo for example) before the Mongols invaded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXtTwNvWXc and http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marginoferr/2014/06/05/lets-sto...

Secularism is a modern construct that can't be ahistorically projected to make past societies conform to our notions of modernity.

secularism is what people do despite any religiosity

Its not as simple as that. I will reply later with a more detailed response but a common religion most certainly helped the Islamic empires (whether Arabs or Persians or Mughals) immensely by providing an almost contiguous corridor of co-coreligionists stretching from Anatolia all the way to India; this greatly facilitated trade.

Islam helped drive large projects that wouldn't have been completed in one's life time. One admirable attribute of Islam is that they can plan ahead like the west use to do with tunnels and bridges for example, nowadays projects are not planned to take more than 20 years, in the Muslim world they still are.

Does that have anything to do with Islam or more with autocracy? I'm not being snarky, I live in Saudi Arabia and certainly see the benefits of having an autocratic government for some things. I'm not sure religion plays a bigger role here in planning than it would anywhere else, though.

Good point. I think its a little bit of both. I don't think you need autocracy as much as a strong state: and Islamic states were pretty strong. But the common religion basically meant that a muslim in India could travel to Baghdad and have something in common. It meant that technological advancements in one part of the world would travel faster to the other. That skilled people could travel to different countries...and religious scholars as well. I believe this contributed a lot to the progress in Islamic society during this time.

Note: I'm not taking sides, but just trying to be factual.

This is very misleading. It was, in fact, Islam that was the cause of the 'golden age'. The Arabs existed for centuries with ~nil progress. If you notice, almost 99% of the inventors were Muslims, and based on their writings, dedicated ones.

they did a lot of hostile takeovers and suffered later on from a culture problem.

What about the Persian empires, the Sassanids for instance? They had built huge military and civic structures, and rivalled the Roman Empire in many areas, but weren't as expansionist. Please correct me if I'm wrong, not a historian but it seems to me whatever the 'golden age' was, it would happen regardless of whether the dominant religion was Islam, Arian Christianity or whatever else.

I think it's fairer to say that the conquest of developed (Byzantine) Romans & Farsis by the newly-Islamic Arabs enabled the conquerors to reap the fruits of antiquity.

it should be called "the world's first successful merger"

Hostile takeover, I think.

I think there's a pretty reasonable case to be made that the cultural and political impact of Islam itself was a major factor in creating the conditions for the Golden Age. It established Arabic as a language of learning and philosophy; emphasized community and shared values; catalyzed the development of a unified legal code and judicial framework; explicitly promoted education and the acquisition of knowledge.

We've updated the title from “The hidden underground world of the Golden Age of Islam” to a representative phrase from the article.

Objectively, it's not a "Global golden age", it's a "Islamic golden age". That's very different.

This guy does some heavy time travelling in order to justify his revisionism.

He moves from circa 900-1200 AD (Golden age of Islam), to 1800-2000 AD (Nobel Prize counting). After losing to the Mongols and being razed to the ground, then came the Ottomans, and then the Triple Entente backstabbed them with the Sykes-Picot agreement after World War I. They never came back from losing to the Mongols.

His point is so nonsensical, that is equivalent to saying that the Roman empire was weak because Italy did not win the World War 2, or that Ancient Greece is not worthy of recognition because modern Greece doesn't win Nobel prizes. He is comparing different millenia.

Then he changes subjects to the militaristic side of things. He mentions how they invaded Europe many times. However European nations constantly invaded each other all the time anyways. And that trend only ended in the early 20th century when Americans ended wars of aggression through NATO and the UN.

Follow better authors.

Israeli Jew here. And I think that's a bit unfair. There's a critical difference between Islam and Christianity, and it bears nothing, because without grasping this detail you can't really give Islam a fair understanding.

Secularism in the Christian World is the result of peacemaking after the Wars of Religion. It's 1648, you want Christians to stop killing each other. Since this involves a religion whose followers engaged in near-genocidal wars over the inclusion of the word "filiouque" in one creed, you agree on a peace deal where the two sides agree to avoid all God-talk altogether.

Voila, secularism.

Meanwhile, you have several chapters in Muslim history where Sunni and Shia decide to have peace, for the sake of a prosperous humane existence. You get a lot of the same things: a flowering of art and scholarship. An improvement of daily life. Pluralism. A golden age, if you will. However, Sunni and Shia (and others) have a lot of God-talk in common that has never provoked any dispute. The wording of the daily prayer and so much more. So you get all the benefits that European history associated with secularism, as above, but everyone keeps on with putting inshallah, alhamdullillah, astagfirullah, et cetera in every sentence. That's why there's not really a secular strain in Arabic culture.

> and it bears nothing

and it bears noting?

Whoops.

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