The House of Wisdom
Founded in Baghdad in AD 762, the House of Wisdom was the Imperial Library of the Abbasid caliphs. It served as a storehouse of knowledge from the finest minds in the ancient world. It contained works from such geniuses as Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Brahmagupta, Aryabhata, and Al-Khawarizmi, covering topics from philosophy and mathematics to agriculture and astronomy. It was the scholastic and intellectual center of the Islamic Golden Age.
In AD 1258, Baghdad was invaded by the Mongols, and every library in the city was put to the torch. Many of the works in the House of Wisdom were lost forever.
* * *
My name is Israel St. James. I was born in New York City in 1840. When I turned 18, my parents sent me to England to study archaeology at Cambridge University. I worked hard, got good marks, and received a double first in History and Archaeology. I could already tell that the ancient world was the world for me, so I immediately enrolled in the school's post-graduate program in archaeology. Apparently, my diligence and undergraduate performance impressed the faculty, because I received a scholarship to join a prominent field research team.
I had barely been a part of the team for a month when the professor burst into our shared office. The professor at the head of our team was an adamant student of the ancient masters. He was fascinated with the early thinkers of the Classical period: Plato, the founder of the Academy of Athens; Al-Khawarizmi, the inventor of algebra; Archimedes, arguably the finest mathematician in history. He had devoted the bulk of his career to the rediscovery of their ancient works, most of which had been lost to the mists of time. He was an expert on places like the Library of Alexandria and Ashurbanipal, and he had made some of the most detailed studies of their sites, looking for anything that may have survived.
"Students," he said, "we are going on an excursion."
"What excursion is that, sir?" said Samuel, one of the other postgraduate students.
"Baghdad. I have uncovered some exciting evidence that points to a series of rooms of the House of Wisdom that have hitherto gone undiscovered. I have arranged for the Bursar's office to charter us a vessel within a fortnight. Pack your bags, boys. We are bound for Baghdad!"
"Jolly good!" said Clive, another one of my colleagues.
"Fantastic!" I said. I was steadfastly determined not to become too English if I could help it.
The next dozen days flew by in a blur. Our forthcoming voyage was the talk of the school. We spent the time gathering and cataloging every piece of equipment and every book we thought we might need. Our seafaring library grew into a mighty thing to behold. I felt as though I barely had time to pack my own essential belongings.
Before I knew it, the shores of England were behind me and I once again felt the ocean beneath my feet. However, as fast as the last two weeks had gone by, the following four months flowed like toffee as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope on our way to the Persian Gulf. I felt that I knew the entire ship like the back of my hand, so much time did I spend wandering aimlessly. I even had names for some of the portholes. By the time we passed Madagascar, even the professor was growing restless.
We all breathed a sigh of relief as the ship entered the Tigris river, thankful to have the shore so much closer to hand. We made landfall in Baghdad none too soon, and as soon as we stepped off the gangplank, we once again grew excited at the possibilities that lay before us. Each of us was eager to enter the ruins of the House of Wisdom, and if what the professor had learned was accurate, we were soon to enter ancient chambers that had lain untouched since 1258. We were aquiver.
As I stepped off the ship, I immediately realized how poorly I had been advised regarding Mesopotamian weather. It was like stepping into a kiln. Everyone I had spoken to said to wear a hat to guard against the heat, but all I had brought was my favorite bowler. Clearly, the importance of a wide brim had been underemphasized. The professor instructed the captain of the ship to keep her ready to embark, and we made for the site of the House of Wisdom. At the time, it was occupied by a small shop, but a small disbursement to the owner bought us use of the basement for the day. I wondered if a day would be enough, but the professor seemed confident. His new information seemed terribly precise.
Sure enough, once the professor had oriented his map to the basement below the shop, he quickly indicated a section of the floor near the southeast corner. Martin pulled back a rug and moved some crates, which revealed a square of stones and mortar that was clearly newer than the rest of the cellar floor. We set down our expedition packs and got to work.
A few good blows with a sledgehammer reopened the hole in the floor. Clive and I assembled a small tripod from some slotted poles in his pack, which supported a climbing rope over the hole. We lowered Samuel down into the chamber below us with his lantern, and as soon as he said the way was clear, we followed him down. Actually, we drew straws first, which meant that Martin had to stay in the cellar and keep watch over our gear while the rest of us followed Samuel.
The chamber we lowered into bore signs of wear. This was clearly not an undiscovered chamber. The professor held his map up to the light of the lantern and led the way through the refreshingly cool tunnels and compartments. After a few twists and turns, I could see why no one had found this mysterious chamber before. I doubt I would have been able to find my way back to the surface without the professor’s map. My suspicions bore themselves out as I started to see skeletons littering out path. We were obviously not the first explorers who had gone in search of this lost room.
Eventually, the professor signaled a halt and took a small brush from his belt. While Clive held the lantern, the professor studied his information and compared some of the sketches on it to the markings on the floor. He began to brush away some of the gathered sand and dust until he revealed a dent in the floor. At the bottom of the dent was a clay plug. He pushed the clay into the floor until it fell away into the darkness beneath. His breathing beginning to quicken, the professor took from his bag a coil of rope and a metal device like a hinged fishing hook or grapnel. He directed us to assemble another tripod with a block and tackle while he fixed the hook to the end of his rope. Once we had set up the tripod, he ran his rope through the pulleys and inserted the hook into the hole. It fit through into the blackness below and locked in place. He held tight to the tripod and told us to pull.
With a grinding crunch, the block of stone in the floor came loose.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the parts of museums where the artifacts are stored, the parts that aren’t accessible to the public. There’s a smell to the air, as though the age of the relics has its own bouquet. This smelled very much like that, but multiplied a thousandfold. By the light of our lanterns, I could clearly see a brassy glint in the recently uncovered chamber. As I looked closer, I could also see a pair of skeletons with long swords flanking the … well, whatever it was. It looked like some kind of cabinet. Whatever it was, it was clearly important enough to the caliph that he had seen fit to entomb a pair of guards with it.
We drew straws again, and Clive won the dubious honor of going down into the room with a lever to tie up the box so we could haul it up. He worked the box around with the lever to get the rope under it, and Samuel, the professor, and I hauled on the rope to bring it, and then Clive, back out of the hole. It was surprisingly light, actually, which was more than I could say for Clive.
The professor was in love. The box was like a brass jewel, engraved with images of the gods and intricate circular scrollwork. On one side were five sets of nested dials, like some kind of elaborate combination lock.
“Professor,” said Samuel, “there’s an inscription around the top. It’s in Greek.”
“Well, what does it say, Samuel?” said the professor.
“ ‘Ο Αρχιμήδης των Συρακουσών με έκανε,’ I think,” said Samuel.
“Archimedes of Syracuse made me,” said the professor. “Oh, my god. This is Archimedes’ Apothecary.”
“What’s that, Professor?” I said.
“Some kind of vault, as far as anyone knows. It has been theorized to contain copies of his work that have never been seen by modern eyes. Bartlett said that it was possible for the Apothecary to have survived the Siege of Syracuse, and that it found the same purpose for the great Roman thinkers.”
“So, it’s a sort of Classical time capsule?” said Clive.
“Precisely. If it found its way to the House of Wisdom, there can be no telling what treasures may have been kept inside.” The professor was nearly beside himself, and I couldn’t blame him. If even half of what the professor was saying about this Apothecary were true, then this was a find of incalculable academic value. This was bigger than the Rosetta Stone. This was bigger than the Holy Grail, and that was probably mythical.
“Well, there’s no sense in lingering here any longer than necessary,” said the professor. “We’ll hardly glean anything from this find here. Let’s hasten to the ship and return to Cambridge with all speed. We’ve got a lot of work to do in the next four months.”
“Indeed, professor,” said Samuel. “Besides, I think Martin must be getting a bit restless by now.”
“Indeed,” I said.
We manhandled the box back to the first room, and Samuel, Clive, and I climbed back up to help Martin with the hauling. We were fortunate that the owner of the shop still hadn’t returned from whatever sojourn our little bribe might have financed. We were more fortunate still that our little rented cart was big enough to hold down the box, tied down and covered, because as light as it may have been, it was still more than any of us wanted to carry on our shoulders. And of course there was the minor point that none of us wanted to carry a big shiny brass box through a Baghdad market on our way to a Baghdad harbor.
As we loaded the ship back up, it seemed to me that the professor was in a bit of a hurry, more so than if he were simply anxious to examine the find. “Excuse me, professor?” I said. “Is anything the matter?”
“Not at all,” he said. “Why?”
“You’ve been furtive since we left the site. Are … are you expecting some kind of trouble, sir?”
He paused a moment before answering, as though he had a decision to make before he spoke. “I simply can’t risk the caliph taking, shall we say, an unseemly interest in our little find.”
“You know, it could be said that this box is rightly the property of the caliph. It has been in the House of Wisdom for the past 600 years, after all.”
“If anyone has a legitimate claim to Archimedes’ Apothecary, it is certainly Archimedes,” said the professor. “And unless he has a blood relative who is willing to come forward, then the next most likely candidate would be one who can add to the trove, like the House of Wisdom and the Romans before them.”
“So you intend to donate the box to Cambridge, then?”
“Of course. Ours is one of the finest universities in the world. Who better to watch over the Apothecary? The caliph? He’d just set it in his parlor among all the other shiny things, or else send it to Constantinople like a trophy. Now go aboard with the others and help them secure the box. I’ll find out from the captain how near we are to making way.”
Less than an hour later, we were headed back down the Tigris. We had arrived in Baghdad only that morning, and now we were on our way back out to sea with the sun setting in the sky. I was a bit worried about the caliph’s reaction once he learned what we had taken from his city, but everyone else was keen on examining the box, so I joined them in the professor’s cabin.
When I got there, the others were hard at work polishing the brass and documenting every little carving and engraving. Martin had found a panel on the back with a map of the Mediterranean that looked like it could be pried off, but of course that would damage the find. We wouldn’t do that unless all else had failed.
Clive was examining the dials on the side of the box. “Professor, look at this,” he said. “I think there are numbers along here.”
The professor knelt down to see for himself. “Oh, yes, Clive. Ionic numerals. Perhaps they represent some kind of combination.”
“Or possibly a map reference,” said Martin. “The map on the back of the box has more numbers along the border.”
“Do the dials still turn?” I asked.
The professor gave one of them an experimental twist. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Martin, what numbers does the map give as the coordinates for Baghdad?”
“Baghdad actually looks to be right in the middle, coordinated at (0,0).”
“Only two numbers?” said the professor. “There are five sets of dials here. Are there any other places on the map with numbers, some kind of legend?”
“Not a thing, professor,” said Martin.
“How about this?” I said. “How about we simply align all of the dials to zero and see what happens?”
“What, just try various combinations of numbers until one works?” said Samuel.
“Unless one of us is a safe-cracker, yes.” I said. “Does anyone have a single better idea?”
No one said anything.
“Professor?” I said.
“Well,” said the professor, “the dials seem to be in working order. As long as nothing is damaged, I can see no problem with trying a few combinations out. It can’t but give us more information, if only regarding which ones don’t work. Clive, go ahead with Israel’s plan.”
“Very well, professor.” Clive zeroed out all the dials. “All right, now what?”
He had me there. “Um … something should probably be happening now, shouldn’t it?”
“Hold on,” said Samuel. “There’s a little hole that just opened here on the other side.” He bent down to examine this new development. “It says ‘Press me to open’ in Greek.”
“I imagine that it opens the box,” said Clive.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said Martin.
“Well?” said the professor. “Go on, Samuel. Open the box.”
Samuel inserted his finger into the hole, found a small protrusion, and pressed. The door swung open. Inside was a book bound in leather, with a buttoned flap to hold it open. I gently lifted the book from the box and laid it on a table.
“Ah,” said the professor. “Of course. It wouldn’t have been a scroll. The practice of bookbinding had traveled from India to the Holy Land in the time of the House of Wisdom. Open it, then, Israel. Carefully.”
Everyone gathered around me as I gingerly opened the book. On the first page, I saw a diagram of a sphere within a cylinder. Surrounding that was a series of algebraic equations. Looking over the whole was a sketched portrait of a man with a curly beard.
“My god,” said Clive. “That’s Archimedes’ formula for the volume of a cylinder. The stories are true.”
“What are those formulas underneath?” said Martin. “If that’s geometry, then it’s very complicated.”
“It is geometry,” I said, “and it is very complicated. Most geometry only deals with three dimensions.”
“How many dimensions are there here?” said Samuel.
“My best guess? More than three.”
“There aren’t more than three.”
“That Archimedes. What a character.” I pulled out a notebook and started doing some calculations. “Hold on a moment. I think I may have something here.”
“You know maths?” said the professor.
“A little. Some of this looks vaguely familiar. Here, try these numbers on the dials.” I handed the professor a list of numbers. He gave me a look, and he handed the list to Clive. Samuel closed the door, Clive dialed in the numbers, and Samuel opened the door again. Inside the box now was an old scroll.
“Where did that come from?” said Martin.
“Well,” I said, “if I’m reading this right, then this box must be some kind of multidimensional storage chest. These equation here describe the combination that you need to get to this object.”
“So this scroll must have to do with Archimedes, then?” said the professor. “Well done, Mr. St. James.” The professor took the scroll from the box, closed the door, and gently unrolled it on the table. His reaction to its contents was nothing short of ecstatic.
“Oh good Lord,” he said. “On Sphere-Making!”
Everyone gasped, including me. On Sphere-Making was a lost work of Archimedes. It was believed to describe the design and construction of such devices as orreries and astronomical clocks. Perhaps it also described the design of the Apothecary itself.
When the professor next spoke, it was with a reverent hush, as though he were afraid to awaken a sleeping beast. “Mr. St. James, turn the page.”
I did so. The next page of the book featured a sketch of the Roman Forum, a drawing of two babies suckling from a wolf, and a portrait of Livy that I recognized from his bust at Cambridge. I took the notebook back out and performed my calculations on the new page of Archimedes’ geometry. I handed a new list of numbers to Clive, and he aligned the dials appropriately. When Samuel pressed the catch, the door revealed another scroll, this one in a more modern style. The professor withdrew it from the box and gently opened it.
“Professor,” I said, “unless I’m mistaken, that should be a copy of Livy’s Ab urbe condita libri, his history of the founding of Rome.”
“It is indeed. How did you know?”
I showed him the page from the book. “Professor, I think I know what this is. I think it’s a catalog of the contents and locations of Archimedes’ Apothecary. The geometric equations describe the coordinates to be dialed, and the rest of the page documents the nature of the relic therein.”
“How many more entries are there?” said the professor.
I leafed through the catalog quickly, counting the occupied pages. “I count at least a dozen entries, most of them books or similar. There are also two or three other objects. Shall I retrieve their coordinates for you?”
“By all means, Israel, by all means,” said the professor.
I got on with my calculations, and we managed to recover another couple of books and a golden scepter wrapped with a snake, the symbol of the Greek god Asclepius, god of healing. I was in the middle of another string of numbers when we heard a commotion from outside. The commotion was shortly followed by screams.
The five of us burst from the professor’s cabin to see that another ship had pulled alongside our own. They had thrown grapnels onto our vessel and laid a plank from one to the other. Three of the ship’s crew already lay dead from the pirate’s blades. While the remaining crew sat on the deck with their hands folded at sword point, an extravagant man with a turban and scimitar boarded our ship and demanded that our precious cargo be brought to him.
The professor waved us back into his cabin and slowly approached the man, whom I took to be the pirate’s captain. As I watched through the crack of the door, I could only barely hear the professor speaking to the captain. It seemed as if he were trying to reason with the man, perhaps trying to appeal to a sense of academic propriety.
The pirate captain ran him through without hesitation.
I pulled away from the door, locking it behind me, and motioned to the others to cover the relics, trying to keep quiet so as not to draw the attention of the murderers outside. I heard someone trying the lock, most likely the captain, and then I heard him shout to his crew and back away from the door.
“Everyone get down!” I whispered to the others. We hit the deck just in time for a cannonball to tear through the cabin’s forward bulkhead, revealing the entire weather deck of the ship to us. The pirate captain strode confidently through the rubble, with some of his rabble behind him looking on.
“Stand aside, schoolboys,” he said. “You have something there that does not belong to you.”
“Nonsense,” said Clive.
The pirate drew aside the cloth covering the Apothecary with the tip of his sword.
“I think not,” he said.
“That is an important historical and scientific find,” said Samuel. “It does not belong in the hands of a pirate.”
“Pirate? I’m insulted,” said the pirate. “I am a loyal subject of the Caliph. I seek only to do his bidding and be … duly compensated.”
“Privateer, then,” said Samuel. “The point still stands. This object belongs not in a throne room, but in a place of learning.”
“As do you,” said the pirate captain.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Martin’s hand edging toward a letter opener. He had a look in his eye that I hadn’t seen before, but then none of us had ever seen the professor run through before today. Martin’s fingers closed around the grip of the crude blade, and he made to lunge for the intruder.
“Martin!” I shouted. “No!”
Martin sprung for the captain, the opener in his hands. One of the other pirates drew a pistol and fired. The ball passed through Martin’s head, killing him instantly. Clive saw his chance and launched himself in a rugby tackle toward the captain, who drew his sword and drove it through Clive’s ribcage in midair. The blade slipped from the captain’s hands, so he drew a dagger from his belt and plunged in down into Samuel’s heart before Samuel had a chance to react to the melee.
I was dumbfounded. I was all that stood between these pirates and the Apothecary of Archimedes, not to mention everything else we had recovered. As the pirate captain approached me, I stood in front of the box and took one last desperate chance.
“Please, you don’t have to do this.”
He smiled at me. “I’m sorry you think so.” And he stabbed me in the stomach.
He stood over me as I lay bleeding at his feet. As his crew looked on, he gestured victoriously at the box, said something to them in rapid Arabic, and wedged the blade of his dagger into a crack around the edge of the back panel of the box. I tried to warn him away from his course, but I could barely summon the energy to remain conscious.
He pulled on the dagger’s grip, and a corner of the back panel peeled away.
From within the innards of the box came a bright flash of light. My vision immediately filled with interlocking gears, floating strings of numbers and symbols, and orbiting, glowing spheres. I could feel the wisdom and intellect of Archimedes himself flowing into my head, and much more besides. This was a knowledge far beyond any mere human mind, something entirely alien to this world. Whatever it was, I now fully understood the Apothecary, in every sense of the word, and more importantly to my present situation, also the Rod of Asclepius.
The glow faded away, and I once again perceived the ruined cabin and the pirate crew. The pirate captain, and every other pirate with a view of the Apothecary, were backing away from me and screaming. Some of them were clawing at their eyes or pressing their hands to their heads, as though the fire that had burned within my mind were consuming theirs. They tugged at their hair and beat their skulls against the ship’s mast and rails, and ultimately, most of them flung themselves over the side and into the sea.
As the other pirates and the rest of my own ship’s crew looked on, I crawled toward one of the tables in the late professor’s cabin and reached up for the cloth that we had thrown over the relics. I grabbed the hem and pulled it quickly towards me. The Rod of Asclepius rolled off the table and landed in my hand. I turned onto my back and gripped the rod tightly in both hands, pressing the rod’s pommel against my chest.
The pirates shouted and pointed at the rod as the gleaming metallic serpent that encircled it suddenly came to life. It slithered along my arm and crawled onto my chest. I screamed in agony as it plunged its head into the wound in my stomach. It worked itself in and out of the hole as the pirates watched. One of them ran to the rail and vomited over the side. After a few seconds of blinding pain, the snake withdrew its head and bit into the skin near the wound. I could feel some sort of fluid pumping into my veins as the wound closed up and healed over before my eyes. As the last traces of the damage disappeared, the snake crawled back onto the rod and became once again an inanimate ornamentation.
My pain completely gone, I stood up with the rod in my hand and removed the pirate captain’s knife from the box’s rear panel. Holding the rod in one hand and the knife, still wet with my own blood, in the other, I turned to the pirate crew.
“Return to your ship, gentlemen.”
They stared at me, frozen in their tracks.
“NOW!”
As one man, they turned and fled for their own ship, clumsily setting the sails and fleeing for their own shores. I turned to the crew and located the captain, instructing him to make all haste for England. He seemed hesitant to take instructions from me, seemingly due both to my own junior station and my recent theatricality, but I did my best to reassure him that all would henceforth be well and that he would be wise not to pursue and supernatural line of questioning.
As the crew cleaned up the mess that the pirates had made of the ship and kept us on our way back to Cambridge, I completed my inventory and study of the relics we had recovered from the Apothecary:
Archimedes’ On Sphere-Making, a technical manual of numerous wondrous mechanisms, including indeed the Apothecary itself;
Livy’s Ab urbe condita libri, a history of Rome from its founding by Romulus and Remus to the reign of Caesar Augustus;
Plato’s Hemocrates, the third in his trilogy describing the nature of the world, including the details of the lost continent of Atlantis;
Moses’ The Book of the Wars of the Lord, a chronicle of the journey of the Jews from Egypt to the Holy Land, describing the Ark of the Covenent and countless other relics;
The Rod of Asclepius, able to cure and ailment and repair any wound, no matter how dire; and
The Novoscope, a Han-dynasty Chinese vase capable of indicating via a ring of ornamental dragon heads the distance and bearing to other extraordinary objects like itself and the Rod.
By the time I returned to Cambridge, I had made a complete study of what we had recovered on our ill-fated voyage to Baghdad, and I had become aware that there were other relics like them out in the world, relics that it would be to me to recover and safeguard. Furthermore, the endless ingenuity of the human race and the fickle machinations of the universe would doubtless lead to the creation of brand new relics, with capabilities for which no one would be prepared. No one, that is, except me.
That was in the year 1863. My life has not been the same since.
