78 



LITERATURE OP THE ARABS. 



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 lib- 

 rary, many of whose original manuscripts are still pre- 

 served in the Escurial. Casiri has given a catalogue 

 of those accounted the most rare in the time of the 

 Moors j and has recorded the names and works of 

 120 authors, theologians, civilians, historians, phi- 

 losophers, and other professors, whose talents con- 

 ferred dignity and fame on the university of Gra- 

 nada. Toledo, Malaga, Murcia, and Valencia, 

 were all furnished with splendid literary appara- 

 tus. 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 re- 

 specting the course of study and internal govern- 

 ment of the Arabian schools. Every institution 

 for the education of youth, strictly speaking, was 

 connected with religion ; hence public establish- 

 ments for this purpose were always found in con- 

 junction with the mosques. Of these foundations 

 there were two classes ; one was composed of infe- 

 rior schools, where children, chiefly of the lower 



