Ziryab (“Blackbird”) was a great musician who lived in the Medieval Spain in the 9th Century. He was born in about the year 789 in Iraq, perhaps in its capital, Baghdad.

 

Ziryab became an expert musician, so his

teacher Ishaq started to be very jealous of

him. Ishaq told  Ziryab he had to leave

Baghdad. Ishaq would give him money to go

to other country but if he decided to stay in

Baghdad, Ishaq would kill him.

Ziryab went to Córdoba with his family. He

arrived to Spain in 822 and he started to work in the Córdoba royal court.

 

Ziryab created a school of music an introduced lost of innovations until he was known as “the founder of the musical tradition of Islamic Spain”.

He added a fifth pair of strings to the lute and it is supposed he knew the words and melodies of 10,000 songs by heart. He was also an excellent poet, a student of astronomy and geography, and a dazzling conversationalist.

 

Ziryab loved well-prepared food almost as much as he did music. He revolutionized the arts of the table in Spain, in ways that survive to this day. Ziryab combined different products in imaginative récipes. He delighted court diners by elevating a humble spring weed called asparagus to the status of a dinner vegetable.

Ziryab decreed that palace dinners would be served in courses according to a fixed sequence, starting with soups, continuing with fish or meats, and concluding with fruits, sweet desserts and bowls of pistachios and other nuts.

 

Ziryab taught local craftsmen how to produce tooled and fitted leather table coverings. He replaced the heavy gold and silver drinking goblets of the upper classes a holdover from the Goths and Romans with delicate, finely crafted crystal.

 

He developed Europe's first toothpaste (though what exactly its ingredients were, we cannot say). He popularized shaving among men and set new haircut trends. Before Ziryab, royalty and nobles washed their clothes with rose water; to improve the cleaning process, he introduced the use of salt.

 

He created hairstyles that were daring for the time. Ziryab introduced a shorter, shaped cut, with bangs on the forehead and the ears uncovered. He taught the shaping of eyebrows and the use of depilatories for removing body hair.

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Extract from Flight of the Blackbird, written by Robert W. Lebling Jr.