Pleiades' Dust

I- THINKER'S SLUMBER
 With the weakening of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth century, Western Europe slipped rapidly into what is now known as the Dark Ages, from which it would not emerge for a thousand years.
 Jim Al-Khalili - The House Of Wisdom
 Scornful dogma
 Withering era
 Silence in sight
 Treasures of cognition
 Have ceased to be
 Destructive minds
 Turning life to ashes
 Relentlessly
 Despotic hands on recollection
 Restraining man from recollection
 II. WANDERING TIMES
 Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance.
 ibid
 Wandering times
 Crawling thoughts abandoned at dusk
 Thinker's dream
 Lost in doubts
 Streams of lore
 concealing in drought
 Wandering times
 Scripted thoughts emerging at dawn
 Scholars' dream
 Starts to blink
 Streams of lore
 submerging with ink
 Glimpse of light in sight
 Dazzling minds are turning the page
 on darker times
 III. WITHIN THE ROUNDED WALLS
 Like the city of Alexandria, founded a thousand years earlier by Alexander the Great, Baghdad grew from nothing to become the world's largest city just fifty years after the first brick was laid. And just like Alexandria, it became a centre for culture, scholarship and enlightenment that attracted the world's greatest minds.
 ibid
 Nightfall unfurls its sky
 Whispers of waves... mesmerised
 Nightfall's canvas unfolds
 Frame in time, the stars have told
 Mighty circle of stone
 Standing strong, on the sands, alone
 Rounded walls
 Once foreseen
 Standing tall
 To the thinker's realm
 all roads shall lead
 IV. PEARLS OF TRANSLATION
 (...) the success of a spectacularly massive translation movement - a process that lasted for two centuries - during which much of the wisdom of the earlier civilisations of the Greeks, Persians and Indians was translated into Arabic (...) The translation movement owes its beginnings to the appeal of Persian culture (...) along with the development of paper-making technology they have learned from the Chinese. But once it began, this obsession with translating ancient texts sparked the beginning of a golden age of scientific progress (...) By the mid-ninth century it had evolved into a new tradition of original scientific and philosophical scholarship that further fuelled the demand for more translations, both in quantity and quality.
 ibid
 Enthralling thirst for ideas
 Led by translation's quill
 Searching the world with no fear
 Paving the way for curious minds
 Roaming the land for ideas
 Led by translator's will
 Reading the world becomes clear
 Paving the way for golden times
 V. COMPENDIUMS
 He (Al-Ma'mun) was well aware of the treasures to be found in the ancient texts of the Greek philosophers... He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of these scientific texts. Often, foreign rulers defeated in battle would required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold. Al-Ma'mun was almost fanatical in his desire to collect all the world's books under one roof, translate them into Arabic and have his scholars study them. The institution he created to realize his dream epitomizes more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age. It became known throughout the world as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma)(...) By the middle of the ninth century the House of Wisdom would have become the largest repository of books in the world.
 ibid
 Word by word
 Scribing compendiums
 Page by page
 Crafting compendiums
 Book by book
 Gathering compendiums
 Library filled with compendiums
 Embracing texts from the past
 Hints of knowledge are grasped
 Concepts in fragments, scholars, will craft
 Sheltered on paper, ideas shall last
 VI. STRANDED MINDS
 ON THE SHORES OF DOUBT
 By the end of the tenth century the translation movement was coming to an end, the Abbasid Empire was crumbling, less-enlightened caliphs were cracking down on freedom of speech and rationalist enquiry, and the great names associated with the House of Wisdom were already a distant memory. But to infer from this that the golden age of Arabic science was on the wane would be utterly wrong, for the best was yet to come (...) It was during the second half of the tenth century that we saw the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam arriving on the scene.
 ibid
 (Instrumental)
 VII. BESIEGED
 It was in 1258 that the accomplishments of the House of Wisdom and the Islamic Golden Age were brought to a cruel halt. During the Mongol invasion of Baghdad (...) the mosques, libraries, homes and hospitals of the great city were all destroyed. The family of the last Abbasid Caliph Al-Musta'sim, as well as thousands of the city inhabitants, were slaughtered, and the extensive collection of books and manuscripts at the House of Wisdom were thrown in the Tigris. It is said that for days afterwards the river ran black with the ink of books and red with the blood of scholars. It was a tragic ending for one of the most advanced, diverse and progressive cities of the age, and an ending from which it would take Baghdad centuries to recover.
 Isabella Bengoechea - Iraq's Golden Age: The Rise and Fall of the House of Wisdom
 Winds of dogma
 Have reached the rounded walls
 The flame of lore has been blown
 Arrows will, soon, be thrown
 Darkened era
 Will fill the land and souls
 As life turns black as ink
 A chapter starts to sink
 Rising storm from the East
 Circle of archers, intruding beast
 Trampled furrows of memory
 Seeds of invasion sowed by enemies
 Blindly burning to decimate
 Pages to ashes... Cognition's fate
 Drowned in despotic waters
 Treasures from minds are lost forever
 Stream of lore destroyed at last
 Running, for days, from red to black
 Scornful dogma
 Withering era