Chapter 433: A Class of People

In the early days of Mahmud's reign, a Turkmen chieftain named Seljuk from the Oghud kingdom of Oghud led his tribe to the north of the empire for refuge because of a conflict with Yehu, and this part of the Turkmen became known as the "Seljuks".

Mahmoud appointed the Seljuk family to the hereditary title of Bey, and the Seljuk Turkmen owned a pasture in the northern part of the empire and became mercenaries guarding the northern frontier of the empire.

However, after Mahmoud's death, the royal family struggled for power, and the governors of the provinces rebelled, and the country's situation showed a downward trend.

The Seljuk Turkmen, who had moved into the north of the empire earlier, had flourished in the major cities of Khorasan after two or three generations.

Seljuk Bey – Tughluk was the grandson of Seljuk, an eloquent leader who saw divisions within the Ghaznavids and raised the banner against the Sultan.

Twenty years ago, the Ghaznavid army fought a decisive battle with the Turkmens in Dandankan, and the Ghaznavid army was defeated, and Tughluk led the Seljuk army to take advantage of the situation to enter Western Asia and establish the Seljuk dynasty.

Ten years ago, when Christianity officially split into two denominations, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the Seljuk Turkmens led their army to occupy Baghdad, forcing the caliph to confer the title of "sultan" and give orders, and the caliph was under its full control, and the great empire of the Arabs was destroyed.

The Ghaznavid dynasty continued to decline, and in 1058 Ibrahim of the Ghaznavid dynasty succeeded to the throne.

Although he was an excellent calligrapher and a qualified diplomat, all he could do was to restore the Ghaznavid Empire a little.

The Ghaznavid dynasty today is almost reduced to a servant through diplomatic means of allied with the Seljuks to attack the princely states of India.

In the midst of the turmoil, the status of scholars, especially those of the Arab-Ghaznavid lineage, was somewhat bleak.

Lying on his hospital bed, the wise master of the Palace of Wisdom said to his students: "Go to the East, to the Far East, to the Far East, to the Chinese ...... that the Prophet told us."

So Kuro and Elp went from Baghdad to the east, which had inherited the essence of Persian culture and Arab culture.

The culture of the East was once so yearning for Quro and Elp that Muhammad, the last messenger sent by Allah to the world, once said, "Philosophy is the lost camel of the herdsmen, and it must be sought, even if it goes to China." ”

But along the Silk Road, they found that their knowledge far exceeded that of the scholars of the countries they passed, whether in terms of politics, military, economy, culture, ...... In all respects, it cannot be compared with the once glorious and prosperous great Arab empire.

During the long-term turmoil of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, many Greek and Roman classical works were transmitted to the Arab Empire through Byzantium.

The predecessors of Quro and Elp studied them carefully and translated many ancient works into Arabic.

Translation activities began in the Umayyad dynasty, with the caliphs of Khalid and Abdul al-Ahmad? Aziz ordered court scholars to translate some Greek and Coptic books on alchemy, astrology, and medicine into Arabic.

After the rise of the Abbasid Dynasty, the translation activities entered a heyday because the successive imperial caliphs attached great importance to the creation and perfection of religious laws and cultures, advocated and encouraged academic activities, implemented relaxed political and cultural policies, and absorbed the cultural and academic achievements of people of different nationalities and religions within the empire.

Countless works have been translated, presented, and annotated by scholars. Translated from Persian, Syriac, Greek, into Arabic.

The activity lasted from the 136th to the 400th year of the religious calendar, and it took more than 200 years in the middle, and the heyday was in the Maimon era, that is, between the 198th and 300th years of the religious calendar, almost just 100 years.

In the capital Baghdad, Maimun established the "Palace of Wisdom", a state-level comprehensive academic institution, composed of the Translation Bureau, the Academy of Sciences and the Library, to organize and centralize the country's translation and academic research activities.

The Wisdom Palace has hired nearly 100 famous scholars and translators of different nationalities and religious beliefs from all over the world to collectively engage in translation and research activities, and have sorted, proofread and translated more than 100 kinds of ancient books of various disciplines collected from all over the country with a large amount of money; He also revised, revised and retranslated the relevant works that had been translated in the early days.

In the process of translation, because translation and research are closely integrated, the Arabs have made a pioneering contribution to world civilization.

Studies dating back to the Middle Ages in the centuries B.C.; Spatially, it spans three continents: Asia, Africa and Europe; The content covers language, literature, astrology, religion, philosophy, history, art, political science, law, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, natural sciences and other disciplines.

Add to that the physics, chemistry, architecture, literature, and geography that the Arabs themselves developed...... In the end, the achievements of civilizations from all over the world at that time were brought together - this was the "Arab Centennial Translation Movement" that had a profound impact on world culture.

The movement, which had begun to decline abruptly because of the Turkic invasion, came to an abrupt halt after the Ghaznavid crisis.

Kuro and Elp were embarrassed, and the young governor in front of him was very gentle, but he seemed to like to admire their embarrassment.

"Honorable Governor, as the Willer of Allah and the successor of the saints, knowledge is our holy war, and learning is our life. The siege engines did not bring any adverse effects to the war of the city governor, and it is obviously unfair for you to position us in this way. ”

The principle of the big siege vehicle is not uncommon, and any carpenter who makes a weighing rod in the Great Song Dynasty is far more experienced than the three people here. Su You's science and engineering system, the diagram is very clear, the diagram of the principle of the lever is drawn, the formula is a column, almost no translation is needed, Kuro and Elp know that the physics knowledge of the city governor in front of them is not inferior to theirs.

Su You is interested in some details that are not depicted in ancient pictures, such as throwing a thirty-pound stone cage, or even a person's hundred-pound corpse into the city to threaten the enemy, even if the length of the force arm is ten to one, it needs to bear thousands of catties or even tens of thousands of catties at the fulcrum of the lever.

Then the question arises, what kind of wooden pole can withstand such a strong force at a fulcrum, and after repeatedly withstanding its sharp changes and releases, it can still guarantee its service life?

Just like the Shenjian Bow mentioned in the "Mengxi Bi Tan" copied in China in later generations, the range did not reach the range of 1,000 steps mentioned in the book, and the effective killing range was hundreds of steps. Later historians at Cambridge University in England also failed to replicate the great trebuchet with such an amazing effect.

The original material was not strong enough, so how did the ancients use their wisdom to do this?

Ancient scientists, more like Olympiad students, had to use low-level knowledge reserves to solve high-level mathematical problems, and the wisdom in them always amazed Su You.

After Su Xiaomei got Zu Chongzhi's "Fixation Technique", she exchanged letters with Su You, and it took three months for the two of them to deduce Zu Chongzhi's son Zu Yu to use Liu Wei's Mu He square cover principle and idempotent equal product theorem to find the volume of the sphere.

To put it mildly, Su You, without the direct teaching of his predecessors, copied the ideas of Liu Wei and Zu Xuan, and used the mathematical knowledge of the Han Dynasty to prove the principle of Mu Hefang Gai and the formula of the volume of the sphere, although it was only a translation, but its sense of achievement was no less than writing a poem that he was satisfied with, and it was far more than defeating the 70,000 army of Western Xia.

In this sense, Su You, along with Kuro and Elp, is actually the same kind of people.