Southward and eastward, however, two different cultural patterns had emerged. One was the Byzantine Empire -- populated by Hellenized Central Asians: Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Armenians, Egyptians and Persians. It existed as a static, class-dominated, authoritari

After graduating, Omar entered the service of the Seljuk Sultan Malek-shah. During his career he wrote ten books, although only three have survived: two pioneering treatises on algebra and one book of verse. Along with other leading astronomers, he constructed an observatory for the Sultan in 1074. He is also famous for having compiled a set of astronomical tables so complete that they formed the basis for a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian one compiled five centuries later. However, the death of the Sultan in 1092 heralded a drastic change in Omar's prospects. His good friend and protector, First Minister Nizam-ul-Mulk, was murdered soon after. This double tragedy ushered in a period of dynastic and sectarian conflict, along with international and civil warfare. A violent sect of Ismaelis became powerful, and religious reaction and persecution were rampant. As if that were not enough, the First Crusade, pursued by the feudal knights of Western Europe and the feeble Christian court of Byzantium, had begun its incursion into the troubled Islamic empire. In the devastation of Jerusalem that ensued, 70,000 Muslims were murdered and thousands of Jews burned in their synagogues. The city's magnificent libraries were also destroyed.

Mohammed, the founder of Islam, became at the same time the founder of a new Arabic state with its capital at Medina. In the century after his death the Islamic rulers (called Caliphs or successors to the Prophet) expanded their jurisdiction from the Arabian Peninsula west to Morocco, north to Spain and Armenia and eastwards to Persia, Palestine, Syria and even to the borders of India. By the time another century had passed, however, the over-extended Saracenic empire had begun to disintegrate, and Baghdad had emerged as the centre of an independently functioning eastern part. In 1055, the Sultan of the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, assuming complete control over what was by then the Oriental Islamic Empire.

In addition to the accusation of Sufi-like mysticism, Omar has frequently been charged with pandering to sexual licence, gluttony and drunkenness. It is true that many of the quatrains attributed to him in earlier times seemed to extol excess. However, it has been ascertained by modern Persian scholarship that these were later accretions, written either by his detractors or by supporters who understood neither his use of imagery nor his Epicurean philosophy. For Omar -- as for Epicurus before him -- wine and female beauty symbolized enjoyment of life in the here and now, rather than in some imagined heavenly paradise. He employed them as metaphors for that fellowship among human beings seen by Epicurus as both a means and tentative end of human existence. Similarly, the clay wine pot so often found in Omar's poetry represents the inorganic matter out of which humanity was formed. It is through the quatrains replete with such references that Omar is revealed as thoroughly Epicurean.

Qidam rejects that the world began at a point of creation and that it ends at a point chosen by God. Rather, it views the existence of the world as an endless continuum. Cause and effect, qidam states, prevent the world from assuming either a beginning or an end; because, every end has to be followed by another beginning as every beginning follows an end. Time and Tide, on which many of Khayyam's quatrains draw, are based on "qidam." The relationship of "madda' and "surat" is the most revealing of Khayyam's intimate views of the Creator. Madda, the building block of existence, cannot be realized unless it is associated with surat, an association that God alone can make. The most poetic of images of Khayyam--the piece on the chessboard, the rose by the brook, the pot in the potter's shop, and the puppets of the puppeteer God--draw on this unique ability of the Creator to impart "life" to the already existing matter.

As mentioned, Khayyam has five works on philosophy. In them, especially in the 1047 "Ris

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