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Banu Musa

The Banu Musa were heavily influenced by, and played a major role in, the movement to translate scholarly Greek texts. The Muslim society started to really put an emphasis on scholarly work. This laid the groundwork for the Banu Musa. There were many more resources available to them that had not been available for previous generations.

Al Ma’mun established The House of Wisdom, a place for the most renown scholars of the day to gather and conduct their research. The brothers were a part of this prestigious group. Al Ma’mun also collected many works from Byzantium, and established one of the largest libraries since Alexandria. This was the source of their material that they translated, and built their research on.

The Banu Musa looked at area and circumference quite a bit differently than the Greeks did. In the research they translated, the Greeks looked at volume and area more in terms of ratios, rather than giving them an actual number value. Most of them based such measurements relatively on another objects size. In their most popular publication the Kitab marifat masakhat al-ashkal The Book of the Measurement of Plane and Spherical Figures) Banu Musa gave volume and area number values. This is evidence that were not just translating Greek material and recreating. They were actually building on concepts and coming up with some of their own original works.

They made many observations and contributions to the field of astronomy, writing nearly a dozen publications over their astronomical research. They made many observations on the sun and the moon. Al-Ma’mun had them go to a desert in Mesopotamia to measure the length of a degree. They also measured the length of a year to be 365 days and 6 hours.