Birth of Avicenna

Avicenna was born in 980 CE in Afshona. A Persian polymath, Avicenna, whose Arabic name was Ibn Sina, was born near Bukhara in Central Asia and was a precocious student who is said to have mastered medicine as a teenager. He wrote hundreds of works, of which the most influential were The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical textbook in the Islamic world and Europe for centuries, and The Book of Healing, a philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia. His philosophy blended Aristotle with Neoplatonic ideas, and he argued for a distinction between essence and existence. He spent his later life in the service of various rulers in Persia and died at Hamadan.

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