Paid the Weight of the Book in Gold
A Nestorian Christian bargaining with a Muslim caliph over the price of translating pagan Greek philosophy into the language of the Qur'an. Every part of that sentence is doing work.
In ninth-century Baghdad, the caliph al-Ma'mun made a translator an offer.
For every manuscript Hunayn ibn Ishaq rendered from Greek into Arabic, he would be paid the book's weight in gold. Not a fee. Not a commission. The physical weight of the finished volume, in gold.
The heavier the book, the larger the payment. Hunayn, who was nobody's fool, is said to have taken to using thicker paper and writing in a larger hand.
Look at who is in that room. A Nestorian Christian, bargaining with a Muslim caliph, over the price of translating pagan Greek philosophy into the language of the Qur'an.
Every part of that sentence is doing work.
The Abbasid translation movement ran from roughly the eighth century to the tenth, and it is the single largest deliberate transfer of knowledge in recorded history. Almost the entire surviving Greek scientific and philosophical corpus went into Arabic: Aristotle, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Dioscorides. Alongside it, Persian astronomy, Indian mathematics and medicine, and whatever could be bought or copied from Byzantium.
It was not a happy accident of a rich empire. It was a programme, with a budget, run for two centuries.