Culture on the move

This lesson asks you to analyse how culture passes from one group to another and how that passing can change cultures. The museum offers three cases from the Islamic world, a script, a craft and a way of writing numbers; your class will add cases from other cultures and take up the question of losing a traditional culture. ¹

Look at who carried the thing, by which road and in which language, then compare what the receiving group kept with what it made its own. Ask whether anything was lost, and who says so.

Read one chain of teachers closely. In the record of the devising and spread of the Arabic script, al-Baladhuri relays from al-Sharqi ibn al-Qatami a report that three men of Tayy gathered at Baqqa and devised the script, measuring the spelling of Arabic against the spelling of Syriac ². A people from al-Anbar learned it from them, and then the people of al-Hira learned it from the people of al-Anbar ². Bishr ibn Abd al-Malik, brother of Ukaydir lord of Dumat al-Jandal, who was a Christian from the people of al-Hira, also learned it ². Bishr then came to Mecca and taught the spelling and then the script to Sufyan ibn Umayya and Abu Qays ibn Abd Manaf; in the lands of Mudar, Amr ibn Zurara learned it from him and was called Amr the Scribe ². Follow the chain with a pencil: which language, which place, which hand.

A student might write that al-Khwarizmi invented the numerals we use, or that the Abbasids invented paper. The records answer differently. On the numerals, the record of Algorism says that al-Khwarizmi did not invent the Indian numerals; he transmitted them and taught reckoning with them ³. On paper, the record of papermaking in Baghdad says that its subject is the moving of a craft to a city, not the inventing of paper again, since paper's Chinese origin precedes Islam by centuries ⁴.

The three cases do not rest on the same kind of evidence. The record of the script says it is a single report attributed to a single narrator, and that the data gives no date for it. For algorism, the Arabic original is lost and the oldest surviving witness is a twelfth-century Latin translation in the Cambridge library ³; the record keeps the witnesses apart, so that a gap in one cannot automatically be filled from the other ³. For paper, the evidence for the proposal in Baghdad is a modern reference text, and no surviving building or tools of the workshop were identified in the sources read ⁵. Bloom describes the scarcity of direct evidence for early Islamic paper production and use in Iran ⁶.

Set the three cases side by side: a single report, a lost original with a Latin translation, and a modern reference text without surviving remains. Which of them gives the firmest evidence for the road the thing is said to have travelled, and which the weakest, and why?

• The Devising and Spread of Arabic Script: the whole chain of learners in one report, with the record's note on how little supports it.
• Algorism: the Latin translation, its editions, and the record's reasons for calling al-Khwarizmi a transmitter.
• Establishing papermaking in Baghdad: what the references say about moving a craft to a city, and what they leave out.

Read The Devising and Spread of Arabic Script, Establishing papermaking in Baghdad and Algorism. For each, draw a line from the first group to the last and mark every hand it passed through.