 The Abbasid Golden Age and its capital city of Baghdad are probably best known to most people from Arabian nights, an exotic world filled with magic, adventure and unusual characters that couldn't be more different in time or space than the European audience for whom they were first translated in the 18th century. Of course, we all know that Arabian nights is fictional, but actually this reflects public perception both then and now. In reality, Baghdad in this period was the capital city of an empire that stretched all the way west to the Atlantic. It was a city with the largest population of Christians in the world and it was a place where elite culture was dominated by the study and transformation of ancient Greek and Roman texts. Its territory was filled with churches, synagogues and ancient temples as well as mosques and that paints a slightly different picture, doesn't it? When it comes to culture and civilisation, we tend to think in terms of difference. We draw lines around time periods in geographical areas to make them more manageable to study and understand, but in doing so, we often overlook similarities. We can forget, for example, that there are as many differences between North and South France as there are similarities between Southern France and Northern Spain, and rigid civilisation on cultural boundaries can have a real impact. For example, it's incredibly common to think that Europe and the West have always been distinctly different than the Middle East, but this is an idea that would have seemed absurd to most members of the Abbasid Empire. On my slide, you can see Baghdad's famous round city with four straight roads running from the centre to four equidistant gates on the outskirts and a very symmetrical urban layout. It was considered remarkable in its day and it was probably influenced by the most iconic and important text of all recantipity, Euclid's elements. In the centre, you can just about see a green dome that would have been instantly recognisable to any well-travelled guest as a very similar to one in Christian Byzantium, the capital city of the people who still call themselves Roman. And there was nothing more prestigious than the discovery of a particularly obscure Greek text. Unless, of course, it was hosting the most distinguished evening salon, gatherings of brilliant guests who debated ideas, socialised and networked. And that sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? Just as here in Denmark, we see art and public architecture that reflect classical Greece and Rome, alongside those that use Viking heritage and completely new creations, Soviet Abbasids drew on the Greco-Roman traditions of their empire and cleverly combined them with others to create a new culture for themselves, one that reflected their heritage and the future they aspired to. And as we can see, it really wasn't that different after all. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed my talk.