THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 185 of the Money-Changers, the Straw Merchants' Bridge, the Fief of the Carpet-Spreaders, the Hay Market, Trades and the Gate of the Horse Market, the Tanners' occupations Yard, the Four Markets, the Upper Barley Gate, the Silk House, the Slaves' Barracks, the Road of the Cages, the Fullers' Road, the Gatehouse of the Date Market, the Needle- Makers' Wharf, the Archway of the Armorers, the Cotton Market. In one part of the city Chinese goods were for sale, in another the famous Attabi stuffs (whence our expression "tabby cat"), woven in variegated colors of a mixture of silk and cotton. Here paper was manufactured of rags at a time when the West had lost the papyrus of antiquity and was forced to write all its manuscripts upon parchment made of sheepskin. Paper was originally dis- covered by the Chinese and was introduced among the Arabs in the eighth century, when factories were established at Samarkand and Bagdad. In Bagdad, too, was a mill with a hundred millstones, said to have been built for an early caliph by a Byzantine ambassador possessed of engineering skill. There were lanes lined with great warehouses and streets crowded with shops and bazaars, — twenty-four shops of the weavers of palm baskets, forty-three shops of perfume distillers, sixteen shops of drawers of gold wire, and over a hundred booksellers' establishments. Bridges of boats seven or eight hundred feet in length connected the quarters on opposite sides of the Tigris. An orphan school, — for Moslem rulers often endowed education and provided for the poor, — a hospital, an assembly hall of the poets, jails, cemeteries, mosques, and in East Bagdad alone some thirty colleges, were further features of the Paris of the Orient. This Oriental city life was to be seen on a somewhat smaller scale in Spain, although not much smaller, if we accept the statements of Arabian writers that Cordova and Cordova, the political and religbus capital of other Span* Mohammedan Spain, had a population of half a million, over one hundred thousand residences, three thou- sand mosques, and three hundred public baths. It extended
