University Library of Autobiography: Including All the Great Autobiographies and the Autobiographical Data Left by the World's Famous Men and Women (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from University Library of Autobiography: Including All the Great Autobiographies and the Autobiographical Data Left by the World's Famous Men and Women

When the ancient world of Rome and Greece was overthrown by the Teutonic barbarians, all the arts, all the culture of life, sank into darkness. To that dim period of over five centuries preceding the year 1000, we now give the name of the Dark Ages. During all those shadowy centuries, autobiography, the subtlest and most introspective of the arts, seems wholly to have disappeared. The wonderful "Confessions" of Saint Augustine created no school, was imitated by no successors until, some six hundred years having passed, we begin to trace the rising culture of the Middle Ages. We then find the first autobiographical successors of Saint Augustine not among Christians, nor even among Europeans, but among the Arabic scholars of the Mohammedan empire.

The fact is not wholly complimentary to Europe's boasted civilization; but it is undeniable that up to the twelfth century the East still remained more cultured than the West. The chief scholars of the world were of Arabic race. The wild desert dwellers who followed Mohammed to the conquest of the Eastern world, were quick to assimilate the arts of Persian civilization. Learned men were highly honored among them. Even when civil wars had divided the vast Mohammedan empire among a dozen different Sultans or "Emirs," scholars were still protected. They journeyed in safety from city to city, from Samarcand and Bokhara to India and Egypt, and even to far western Spain.

It was among these Persian-Arabic scholars that the autobiographic impulse again revived. First we find Avicenna, born in the year 980, "the perfect scholar," the teacher who was accepted as having mastered all knowledge before reaching manhood.

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