Status Updates From Samarcanda

‘Omar, you are not unknown in Samarkand. In spite of your tender years, your knowledge has already become legendary, and your talents are talked about in the schools. Is it not true that in Isfahan you read seven times a weighty work by Ibn Sina, and that upon your return to Nishapur you reproduced it verbatim from memory?’

At the bottom of the Atlantic there is a book. I am going to tell you its history. Perhaps you know how the story ends. The newspapers of the day wrote about it, as did others later on. When the Titanic went down on the night of 14 April 1912 in the sea off the New World, its most eminent victim was a book, the only copy of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, the Persian sage, poet and astronomer.