Aladdin’s Lamp is the fascinating story of how ancient Greek philosophy and science began in the sixth century B.C. and, during the next millennium, spread across the Greco-Roman world, producing the remarkable discoveries and theories of Thales, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, and many others. John Freely explains how, as the Dark Ages shrouded Europe, scholars in medieval Baghdad translated the works of these Greek thinkers into Arabic, spreading their ideas throughout the Islamic world from Central Asia to Spain, with many Muslim scientists, most notably Avicenna, Alhazen, and Averroës, adding their own interpretations to the philosophy and science they had inherited. Freely goes on to show how, beginning in the twelfth century, these texts by Islamic scholars were then translated from Arabic into Latin, sparking the emergence of modern science at the dawn of the Renaissance, which climaxed in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.
Chapter 1. Ionia: The First Physicists
Chapter 2. Classical Athens: The School of Hellas
Chapter 3. Hellenistic Alexandria: The Museum and the Library
Chapter 4. From Athens to Rome, Constantinople, and Jundishapur
Chapter 5. Baghdad's House of Wisdom: Greek into Arabic
Chapter 6. The Islamic Renaissance
Chapter 8. Al-Andalus, Moorish Spain
Chapter 9. From Toledo to Palermo: Arabic into Latin
Chapter 10. Paris and Oxford I: Reinterpreting Aristotle
Chapter 11. Paris and Oxford II: The Emergence of European Science
Chapter 12. From Byzantium to Italy: Greek into Latin
Chapter 13. The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres
Chapter 14. The Debate over the Two World Systems
Chapter 15. The Scientific Revolution
Chapter 16. Samarkand to Istanbul: The Long Twilight of Islamic Science
Chapter 17. Science Lost and Found
Chapter 18. Harran: The Road to Baghdad