66 LITERATURE OF THE ARABS. 



pie ; and their rich Hbraries preserved to Europe 

 many valuable works which nowhere else existed. 

 It was in Spain that Arabian learning shone with a 

 brighter lustre, and continued to flourish to a later 

 period, than in the schools of the East. Cordova, 

 Seville, and Granada rivalled each other in the 

 magnificence of their academies, colleges, and libra- 

 ries. The former city, celebrated as the birthplace 

 of the poet Lucan and the two Senecas, possessed a 

 celebrated university in the time of the Romans. 

 Its reputation did not degenerate under the Sara- 

 cens, and Casiri has enumerated the names and 

 writings of nearly 170 eminent men, natives of this 

 place. Hakem founded here a college and a royal 

 library comprising 400,000 volumes : he had care- 

 fully examined every work, and with his own hand 

 wrote in each the genealogies, births, and deaths of 

 their respective authors. The academy of Granada 

 was long under the direction of Shamseddin of 

 Murcia, so famous among the Arabs for his skill in 

 polite literature. Ibn Almotawakkel, who reigned 

 there in the twelfth century, possessed a valuable 

 library, many of whose original manuscripts are still 

 preserved in the Escurial. Casiri has given a cata- 

 logue of those accounted the most rare in the time 

 of the Moors ; and has recorded the names and 

 works of 120 authors, theologians, civilians, his- 

 torians, philosophers, and other professors, whose 

 talents conferred dignity and fame on the university 

 of Granada. Toledo, Malaga, Murcia, and Valencia, 

 were all furnished with splendid literary apparatus. 

 In the cities of the Andalusian kingdom alone, 

 seventy libraries were open for the instruction of 

 the public. Middeldorpf has enumerated seventeen 

 distinguished colleges and academies that flourished 

 under the patronage of the Saracens in Spain, and 

 has given lists of the eminent professors and authors 

 who taught or studied in them. 

 A few scattered notices are all that we possess 



