8 Modern Advancements the Moors Brought to Europeans

The YouTube clip "When Black Men Ruled the World: THE MOORS" (3:05 minutes) sheds light on a little known fact -- on historically, who really was intellectually superior and developed.

“Moors were commonly viewed as being mostly black or very swarthy, and hence the word is often used for negro,” The Oxford English Dictionary

The Moors established an Empire spanning parts of northern Africa to southern Europe, ruling in Europe for nearly 800 years (711-1492 AD), which is longer than Europeans have been out of the Dark Ages,

In fact, the Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art and agriculture brought Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. 

1 - UNIVERSAL EDUCATION — While Christian Europe had a 99% illiteracy rate, 2 universities and 0 libraries, the Moors had 17 universities in 7 cities along with over 70 libraries. The Moors introduced their education system to Europe, bringing it out of 1,000 years of intellectual gloom.

2 - FASHION AND HYGIENE — The Moor Ziryab pioneered the concept of changing clothes based on seasons. He also created deodorant, daily bathing, and invented toothpaste. He made popular the concepts of shaving, haircuts, and hair washing among men.

3 - CUISINE — Ziryab introduced the concept of the three-course meal, which included the soup, main course and desert. The Moors introduced a number of crops that remain prominent in Spain today.

4 - URBAN UTILITIES — Moorish cities had street lights, hospitals, and running water. Paved and lighted streets did not appear in London or Paris for hundreds of years later. Moors built an aqueduct that brought water from the mountains to the city.

5 - MEDICINE — The “father of modern surgery” was the Moor Al Zahrawi, who developed innovative and precise surgical instruments, as well as the premier textbook of Western medical training.

6 - HUMAN FLIGHT — The Moor Ibn Firnas made the first scientific attempt to fly. Although his flight worked, his landing was unsuccessful.

7 - ADVANCED AGRICULTURAL TECHNIQUES — The Moors introduced Spain to rice, hard wheat, cotton, and more. Along with this came knowledge of crop irrigation and cultivation, building underground grain silos that stored grain for up to 100 years.

8 - PAPER MAKING — Moors introduced paper making to Spain, allowing for accurate preservation and dispersal of knowledge.

Great Cat Quotes

In ancient times, cats were worshipped as gods. They have never forgotten this.

Anything on the ground is a toy. Anything not there yet soon will be.

Cats know how to obtain food without labor, shelter without confinement, and love without penalties. 

A house without a cat is  like a kiss without a hug.

Purrs and meows massage the heart.W. L. George

Mama, if you really loved you, you'd let me deep-fry the poodle.

Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.

Never feed your cat anything that clashes with the carpet.

I got rid of my husband. The cat was allergic.

Never try to out-stubborn a cat.

Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause the most inconvenience.

Cats are emotionally honest. Humans may hide their feelings; cats do not!

Cats have delicate constitutions, but you've never seen one suffer from insomnia.

My boyfriend said it was him or the cat. I miss him sometimes.

Variety is the spice of life. Cats ignore people one day and annoy them the next.

Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food?

Anyone who considers protocol important has never dealt with a cat.

Cats know how to feel. They don't care, but they know.

What are cat diapers called? PamPurrs.

Dogs eat. Cats dine.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

The cat could be man's best friend ... but would never stoop to it.

Cats care. They wake us up 20 minutes before the alarm goes off so we can get to the office on time.

People that hate cats will come back as mice in their next life.

Scold a cat ... and she will file that away for future reference.

A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine and the hearth in foul weather.

A cat accepts the comforts but rejects the bonds of domesticity.

Cats were put on earth to erase the dogma that all things were created to serve man.

To err is human, to purr is feline.

Cat: a beating heart and an angel's soul covered in fur.

A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution.

Meow is like aloha. It can mean anything.

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

If you want the best seat in the house, you'll have to first remove the cat.

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry. French proverb

If stretching were wealth, the can would be rich. African proverb

The cat is nature's beauty. French proverb

A person without a cat or dog is a scoundrel. Portuguese proverb

Sailing Alone around the World

Captain Joshua Slocum, born in Nova Scotia in 1844 and who later became an American citizen, had been lured by the sea his entire life. At 14 he ran away to work as a cook on a fishing schooner and two years later when his mother died he left home for good, enlisting as an ordinary seaman on a British merchant ship bound for Ireland. Then from Britain he shipped again sailing for China, the Philippines, and Singapore, and by 18 he had been awarded the certificate of second mate.

Around 1870 he was given command of a merchant ship that he sailed out of San Francisco to Japan, China, the Spice Islands, and Sydney Australia, where he met an American woman, Virginia Albertina Walker, who he married. The two were well matched for ship life and together for the next 13 years sailed the world, with Virginia giving birth to and schooling their seven children (only four survived) on the various ships that Slocum commanded. 

But this ideal marriage to the sea and a wife did not last and Virginia took ill and died. Two years later Slocum married his cousin Henrietta aka Hetty and with a crew of 10, including two of Slocum's sons, the newlyweds set out for South America. The voyage was conflicted with problems -- a cholera outbreak, a smallpox epidemic, and a mutinous crew before finally running aground near Paranagua, Brazil. Stranded, Slocum salvaged what he could from the wreck and constructed the Liberdade, a 35-foot long "canoe" that he sailed for 5,500 miles home, the adventure that he later published in his Voyages of the Liberdade, 1890. Hetty was completely disenchanted with ship life, and on their honeymoon voyage at that, and the forever-after land-loving Hetty and old sea-wolf Slocum stayed married but pretty much only in name.

With the advent of steamships, sailing the seas became steaming the seas, yet old-school Slocum refused to adjust. In 1892 Slocum was offered the rotting shell of a 37-foot long oyster boat, the Spray, which Slocum rebuilt from the keel up. And with this oyster boat Slocum determined to circumnavigate the earth alone, a feat emphatically expressed as impossible.

Many books by Joshua Slocum titled Sailing Alone around the World. I read the Barnes and Noble 2005 edition. It came with a timeline of Slocum's life juxtaposed with world events affecting him (e.g. the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 affecting his solitary return) and a glossary of sea terms.

In April 1895 Slocum sets sail aboard the Spray. He had almost no money and lacked critical navigational equipment. The last leg of his journey he even lacked a map as the goat that had kindly been given him as a companion chewed through his ropes, equipment and seemed to have a palette partial for maps. On June 27 Slocum sails into Newport, Rhode Island, completing the world's first solo circumnavigation, a passage of 46,000 miles. 

To earn money for his journey, along the way at various ports he would entertain people in halls and informal places with his stories, charging them a small fee. At some of these ports he would stay but a few days or even hours while at others he would stay for extended periods of time, like at the southern tip of Africa where he was given a free rail pass and just wandered, enjoying the sites, for three months. On his return to the States, he achieved great fame and his adventures printed first as a serial and later as a book, Sailing Alone around the World, were well received. With the proceeds he was able to purchase a house on the Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. 

Yet, the sea still called and restless Slocum sailed off to the Caribbean for the winter of 1905, returning with rare Caribbean orchids for President Theodore Roosevelt. On November 14, 1909, the aging Slocum in the aging Spray set sail for South America, and the story of him and his Spray, which to this day is one of the most replicated boats due to its reliable and well-balanced construction, disappeared. 

Sailing Alone around the World (Barnes and Nobles 2005), p 230-231

Tim Severin's "The Jason Voyage"

A historian friend introduced Tim Severin to me a few years ago when I told him a favorite book (at the time) was Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. Heyerdahl (1914 - 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer. Probably his most famous work was his book Kon Tiki, which was a raft made following ancient craft-building traditions with vines for binding balsa logs and bamboo canisters for storing water. Thor and a five others sailed their raft from the Peruvian coast to the island reefs of Raroia in the Tuamotus 4,300 miles distant. No one died, the 1947 adventure was a success and his subsequent book of his endeavor -- from building the raft to the difficulties of sailing without contact to the rest of the world to being cast on an island and feared as spirits of the original Kon Tiki -- was publicly well received. He proved the hypothesis that ancient peoples could have followed sea routes to navigate the globe, particularly to relocate to the Polynesian Islands. He made subsequent voyages and in 2011, a few years after his death, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives were added to UNESCO's "Memory of the World" Register.

Tim Severin (1940 - present) made similar grand voyages of adventure. He is a historian, a navigator, and fortunately a writer, as he combines these three pleasures with grand adventure writing after research-based adventure seeking. As a navigator, he reads ancient texts and ponders on sea routes taken, e.g. Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002), the Sinbad Voyage (1980-1981), In Search of Moby Dick (1999). He also did motorcycle and camel explorations when retracing the route of Marco Polo. He has been quite diverse in his explorations; his routes have been almost uniformly based on ancient ones documented in literature, e.g. The Jason Voyage (1986), or the non-fiction historical texts.

The Jason Voyage

The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1986)

Since Wikipedia already wrote a brief summary of the voyage, there's no need to reinvent the wheel and summarize the book myself:

The epic poem Argonautica, first written down by Apollonius of Rhodes in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC, became the basis for Severin's next expedition. He began his research into ancient Greek ships and the details of the text in 1981. Master shipwright Vasilis Delimitros of Spetses hand built a 54-foot (16.5 m) replica of a Bronze Age galley based on a detailed scale model of the Argo. In 1984, with twenty volunteer oarsmen, Severin rowed and sailed from northern Greece through the Dardanelles, crossed the Marmara Sea, and passed through the Straits of Bosphorus to the Black Sea—a voyage of 1,500 miles (2,400 km). Along the way they identified many of the landmarks visited by Jason and his Argonauts, and found a likely explanation for the legend of the Golden Fleece. Severin recounted the expedition in The Jason Voyage (1985).

Though historians have questioned the veracity that anyone like Jason could have existed, or at least existed but doubted whether the golden fleece existed, they have also questioned the navigability of the Argonauts' route from Athens to Georgia. With his commissioning of a boat as identical to the original Argos as possible, and with an equal number of men (minus the mythologically great Heracles, Castor and Polux, etc) Severin proved that a sea-route could done. En route to Georgia following the original argonaut route he made stops on islets and recorded tides; he experienced brutal storms like Jason had experienced in literature, and Severin identified the appearance of rocks, hills, and island formations that matched those on the route of the original Argonauts. 

While in Greece, no self-respecting girl would want the evil name of Medea, but in Georgia it is a very popular name. Medea had been a princess, daring, brave; she had chosen her own destiny, and the name of Medea is not twisted with subterfuge like it is further to the west. In Georgia it is a name of pride. Quick-witted princess Medea, to help Jason, had told Jason the solution to circumventing the sacred bulls. Then she had charmed the guardian snake that protected the golden fleece, and together with their golden possession the lovers had fled. Medea was a temptress but a beauty, the bulls are still part of temple worship, snakes are apparent in archaeological diggings and were cult objects. Evidence in the present-day points to the symbols of the past.

The voyage that Tim Severin embarked on was to demonstrate that the route could be taken, but he also was able to prove that the old literature isn't just dusty words but geographical, topographical and archaeological evidence supporting the veracity of the "tale". One of his final sentences in The Jason Voyage is "What had seemed as a far-fetched yarn when we began the Jason Voyage had found its solution in Georgia, 1500 miles away from its starting point in Iolcos" Greece. 

No more spoilers. The book is a travelogue entwining the historical and the present, a great journey!

Paris by Rutherford

I have just discovered another favorite author, Edward Rutherfurd. He writes like my favorite author of many years, James Michener (1907 - 1997) and author of more than 40 books, most of which were historical novels. Michener's historical fiction were typically on countries or geographical areas, and he would travel the area for months, interacting with locals, historians, researchers, delving into the history. Then he would organize a rich history in his mensa-brain and create novel characters (pun intended) to live from, often preceding, recorded time in the area to the present. His books are epics, they are historical dynasties of people not famous but who, by their very lives, were the foundation to what exists today, they are tomes of knowledge! I've read several of his books, which usually are 600+ pages, and I marvel that every page is filled with rich content. Michener doesn't waste words; he shapes thought and imagery with every word!

Edward Rutherfurd (1948 - present) writes rich historical novels in epic and tome-like multi-generational format like Michener. Since I've only read this book by Rutherford, I can't really compare overall content, but from looking at what Rutherford puts on the shelves, Rutherfurd writes on not only countries — e.g. Sarum (1987), Russka (1991), Dublin: Foundation (2003), Ireland: Awakening (2006), China (this year 2017) — but also on deep histories of big cities — London (1997), New York (2009), Paris (2013). 

Paris, the book I just finished, is 832 pages. The book opens with a light history of the days before Julius Caesar saw the possibilities of the mud-flats and islands and rich valley where the throbbing city of Paris now is. The tribal village on the Seine River was ideally located for development, a hub, a road to see what lay beyond, and so the village developed, shaped by conquerors, reshaped by the Huns, the Franks, the Dark Ages. 

Rutherfurd writes the dramatic history of Paris, starting in the year 1216, by following the dynastic line of four families. Each family represents a different socioeconomic class of people that contributed to building the city into the modern, refined and travel-venerated city it is today: a family of street persons descending from a cutthroat, a noble titled family blood-related to the king, a merchant family that directly contributed to the financial and socioeconomic development of the city and a branch of which broke off and represented emigration to Canada, and a Jewish family that developed the learned centers of Paris and in payment received ostracization, deportment and even death as their legacy. 

In the 1600s two other family dynasties were added: another merchant family strategically intermarrying with the Renard merchant family and which represented a growing hierarchy of merchant classes and the unspoken taboo of not marrying outside of one's economic level. The other family (the Gascons) was a look at the laboring class who with their blood and sweat built the physical foundation of the city. In fact, a greater part of the latter half of the book was about the Gascons and how this family met great people and how the social barriers of class started collapsing, particularly with world war, and how war brought these families into a tight network together, having to interact together, and this beginning of integration representing the modern Paris — families still separated by socioeconomic histories but integrating and recognizing that each socioeconomic class played its part in the Paris of the 20th century.