House of Wisdom

The House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, was a major Abbasid public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad and one of the world's largest public libraries during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom was founded either as a library for the collections of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the late 8th century or was a private collection created by al-Mansur (r. 754–775) to house rare books and collections of poetry in Arabic. During the reign of the Caliph al-Ma'mun, it was turned into a public academy and a library.