and, why do i call the "islamic golden age" a "babylonian renaissance"?

because that's what it was.

while muslims like to take credit for this now, the islamic authorities were actually not particularly impressed by all of the star gazing and astronomy that was going on and acted more to suppress it than to support it. the names that have come down to us are almost all kurdish. the contribution that islam played into this was really on the level of ending the damn war, which allowed the ancestral populations (which were semitic, not persian) to kind of regain themselves.

so, they built a city called baghdad on top of the ruins of babylon, but it just turned back into babylon, and picked back up where the babylonians had left off, in staring out at the stars and trying to figure it out.

the babylonians were, in their day, master astronomers, and we have stories of pythagoras traveling to babylon to meet the "sages" there for good reason; large amounts of what we call greek math are probably ultimately babylonian, in origin. we just can't trace it back; instead, we get these dead ends at the greek. more often than not, those dead ends are going to go back to babylon.

and, that's what happened - a return of babylonian science, in the city they built on top of the wreckage.

baghdad was eventually decimated by a grandson of genghis khan, and brother of kublai khan, and i'm in the camp that argues they never fully recovered.