The book market or the goods market?
Baghdad in its golden age expands a new quarter on the Tigris bank: a stationers' market selling books and copies and gathering scholars, or a goods market receiving silk and spice caravans to enrich the treasury? The decision: intellectual capital or material capital?
The positions
the stationers' party
the book market makes the scholars who make every market
The evidence
Baghdad was famed for its stationers more than its silk
Sources: place/baghdadbuilding/bayt-al-hikma
the goods party
the caravans feed the city and pay the translators' wages
The evidence
silk and spices entered her roads and she became the world's trade capital
Sources: exhibit/pathway-g11-chw3m-baghdad-and-the-silk-roadsplace/baghdad
You decide
Which market would your land have deserved as the planner? Write your reason.
Saved on this device