Even the greatest Jewish philosopher Maimonides wanted to live in Spain, but sadly he was expelled and ended up in Alexandria, Egypt. There he wrote his awesomely titled defensive rationality, A Guide for the Perplexed. I'm translating the title, of course, because the original text was written in Arabic. Meanwhile, China was having a golden age of its own. The Tang Dynasty made China's government more of a meritocracy and ruled over 80 million people across 4 million square miles. And they might have conquered all of Central Asia had it not been for the Abbasids, whom they fought at the most important battle you've never heard of, the Battle of the Talas River. This was like the Ali-Fraser of the 8th century, and the Abbasids won, which ended up defining who had cultural influence where, with the Abbasids dominating to the west of the river and China dominating to the east.