Days tracked
Scroll the turning points, not all 42 entries.
As each step activates, the map updates in lockstep: field-by-field integrity, manuscript outflow into the Tigris, and what exits Baghdad through copy networks.
Epoch Lives / Baghdad
In the year 656 of the Hijra, a woman named Zahra copied a treatise on the movement of stars. She worked in a city that had translated Aristotle, Euclid, and Galen while Europe forgot how to read.
She was a warrāqa—a copyist. This is the inventory of what her city knew, and what it lost.
Thesis: Baghdad fell when military pressure converted a city of circulation into a city of interruption, where manuscript destruction outpaced copying and evacuation.
Days tracked
Knowledge fields
Sack of Baghdad
Narrative acts
How does a city of books collapse: by one decisive strike, or by cumulative breaks in copying, storage, and circulation?
Each step tracks three linked systems: catalogue integrity, river saturation from manuscript loss, and evacuation bundles that leave the city.
Day-level diary entries from Zahra, plus chroniclers and modern scholarship on the 1258 siege and Abbasid intellectual infrastructure.
As each step activates, the map updates in lockstep: field-by-field integrity, manuscript outflow into the Tigris, and what exits Baghdad through copy networks.
Extended Reading
The crucial shift is from abundance to interruption. Early in the timeline, copying, storage, and movement form one system. Under siege pressure, those same functions become trade-offs.
Once triage begins, each saved bundle implies another field left behind. The visualization captures this by linking tile integrity, river saturation, and evacuation count in one frame.
The story is not one instant of destruction. It is a sequence: confidence erosion, selective preservation, rapid loss, then partial survival through redistributed nodes.
That sequence matters because it explains why some lines of knowledge persisted while institutional centrality in Baghdad did not.
As local integrity collapses, outward routes become the governing variable. Survival depends less on city walls and more on copy chains, scholars in transit, and receiving centers abroad.
In that sense, the visual map is a systems diagram of intellectual diaspora under military compression.
Modern information systems show similar behavior under stress: throughput declines before total failure, and resilience comes from distribution rather than central concentration.
The Baghdad argument is strongest when read as a model of how memory infrastructure fails and partially reconstitutes across geography.
What This Edition Tries To Prove
At first, scholarship absorbs pressure. Then labor shifts to survival. In the final phase, survival depends on copying outward, not preserving in place.
Loss appears by discipline, not all at once. Some fields fail early, others hang on through triage.
Tigris saturation is a proxy for manuscript destruction overtaking manuscript reproduction.
What persists does so through distributed copies in Cairo, Damascus, Maragha, and beyond.
What survived did not survive because of Baghdad.
It survived because someone, somewhere else, had made a copy.
You learned algebra in school.
That’s what survived.