Armenian Wisdom Quotes

The eyes of the Armenians speak long before the lips move and long after they cease to.

If there was wisdom in beards, all goats would be prophets.

Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money, and materials required to fulfil their duty. They endeavoured to acquire knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. In 815, the Caliph of Ma'mun established in Baghdad the Bait al-Hikmah ('House of Wisdom'), a library and centre for translation.

To accommodate the vast scale of the work needed to translate, copy, study and store the volumes of Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian and Greek texts that were being accumulated in Baghdad, al-Mansur, his grandson al-Mamnun and his great-grandson Harun al-Rashid all generously patronised a royal library and astronomical observatory modelled on those of the great Persian kings. In time the institution became known in Arabic as the Bayt al-Hikma, or the ‘House of Wisdom’ or sometimes the ‘Treasury of the Books of Wisdom’.60 It eventually came to rival Nalanda as the largest library of the early medieval world.61