Fatimid library at Cairo dispersed

1168

As Saladin's rise dismantled the Fatimid regime, its immense palace library - said to contain a hundred thousand volumes of Arabic, Greek, and Syriac works - was sold and scattered. Books were used as fuel and as filler for bookbindings. An intellectual world disappeared over a few years, its philosophical and scientific treasures absorbed into private collections or lost forever beneath the pragmatic indifference of the new Sunni administration.