Up till now I have treated Greek culture in antiquity as if it were a single entity existing from the pre-Socratics in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE down to John Philoponus in the sixth century CE and beyond. This is, of course, anything but the truth. Before Alexander the Great, there was a collection of city states scattered along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia minor, the Mediterranean coast of North East Africa, modern day Greece, Southern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain that were vaguely united because they spoke various dialects of a common language. From about 500 BCE the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia.
These city states waged war with each other and rose and fell in prominence and power. In 336 BCE Alexander came to power and as is well known from school history lessons conquered a very large chunk of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, introducing the so called Hellenistic period and culture after the fragmentation of his Empire following his early death. The Hellenistic period is considered to have covered the period from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE down to the death of Cleopatra VII, yes that Cleopatra, in 30 BCE.
The Romans began to exercise a strong influence over Greece in about 200 BCE, eventually swallowing it by about the turn of the millennium. From now on Greece and other Greek speaking areas such as Alexandria in Egypt were Roman provinces. Under the Romans Greek science reached a high point of sorts in the second century CE with the medical writings of Galen (129–216) and the writings of Ptolemaeus (fl. 150) on astronomy, astrology, optics, geography, and music. At this time educated Romans read the works of Greek philosophers and scientists in Greek. From the second century onwards, it was basically all downhill for Greek scholarship till Constantine I moved the capital of the empire to Byzantium, in the early fourth century, renaming it New Rome, later he would name it Constantinople. From now on the empire was split into two, the Western and Eastern Empires and whilst the Eastern Empire flourished the Western Empire continued to decline. However, neither empire produced any significant scientific advances. As already explained in the last episode, Neoplatonism in various shades was the predominant philosophical direction.
In the sixth century CE, very few people could still read Greek, so Boethius (c. 480–524) and Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585) both of them Neoplatonic Christians in the service of Theodoric the Great (454–526) the Ostrogoth ruler of Italy between 493 and 526, thought efforts should be made to conserve manuscripts of Greek learning and also to translate them into Latin.
Boethius set out to translate the complete works of Plato and Aristotle but actually achieved very little before he was put to death still relatively young. He only managed Aristotle’s work on logic. If he translated any other works they did not survive. He is said to have written texts on the Quadrivium–arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. He produced a loose translation of the treatise on arithmetic of the Neopythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 60–c. 120 CE) and wrote a textbook on music both of which became standard textbooks in the Middle Ages. His purported translations of Euclid and Ptolemaeus have not survived.
Like Boethius, Cassiodorus was politically active on the court of Theodoric. When he retired he founded the monastery of Vivarium near Squillace in Calabria right down in the south of Italy. Here he wrote, amongst other things, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (543–555), a recommended reading list, a guide for introductory learning of both “divine” and “secular” writings. The first section deals with divine literature but the second reflects what would become the seven liberal arts , the Trivium and Quadrivium–grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Cassiodorus and his Institutiones served as a model for other Christian monasteries, to conserve and copy manuscripts of classical learning.
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), another Neoplatonic Christian, is generally regarded as the final figure in scholarship in classical antiquity, although he can also be regarded as a proto-scholastic. His contribution to the preservation of classical knowledge was his Etymologiae, a summa of universal knowledge. An encyclopaedia consisting of 448 chapters in 20 volumes. Written in Latin, it abridges and summarises the Roman Learning in Late Antiquity. As such he preserved many fragments of classical learning that would have been hopelessly lost. However, because of its popularity many important works were no longer copied and so lost. The Etymologiae continued to be immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, There were at least ten printed editions between 1470 and 1530.
The works of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore formed the basis of the curriculum during the Middle Ages, first of the Latin schools attached to the cathedrals and then later of the undergraduate degree at the medieval universities.
Two things are important to note, firstly in opposition to a widespread popular myth, propagated by many militant atheists, Christianity and Christians were not responsible for the decline and loss of classical learning in late antiquity. In fact, the opposite is true, what survived in Europe did so because it was conserved and copied in monastery libraries, which is where much of it was found by the manuscript hunters during the Renaissance.
“Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he understood only a limited amount of Greek.” This quote from the Catholic Enyclopedia indicates the next step of our story. After the decline of classical knowledge in Europe there was a brief period of less than two centuries before it began to be studied, criticised, and further developed in the Islamic Empire in Arabic translation. This raises the question as to why the newly emerging Islamic culture undertook the translation and appropriation of classical Greek learning.
In order to put this massive transition of knowledge into context we need to make a sketch of the early history of Islam. According to Islamic tradition Muhammed (570–632), born in Mecca, began to receive revelation from revelation from the Angel Gabriel in 610 at the age of forty. He began to preach, first privately, then publicly, then in 622, persecuted by the Meccans, he and his follower fled to Medina (the Hijra, emigration), the year now regarded as the birth year of Islam. Note that Isidore of Seville was still alive and compiling his Etymologia. Muhammed died in 632 and was succeeded by the first four caliphs Abū Bakr till 634, ʿUmar till 644, Uthman ibn Affan till 656, and Ali ibn Abi Talib till 661. The last three were all assassinated. Ali ibn Abi Talib’s son Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was declared caliph, but a major war broke out between different fractions and eight months after his appointment he abdicated in favour of Mu’awiya I, the governor of Syria and the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty or caliphate.
During this period Islam had expanded at a phenomenal rate and from its humble beginnings it had conquered the whole of the Arabic peninsula, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, large parts of Byzantium and Persia, as well as the Mediterranean coast of North Africa by 1655. The Umayyad Caliphate ruled the Islamic Empire from 661 until 750, expanding it further with the conquests of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Central Asia, Sind, and parts of Chinese Turkestan.
During the first four caliphates Muslim were fully occupied with creating and defining their religion and expanding, through conquest, their area of influence, and had little or no interest in Ancient Greek or any other knowledge for that matter. The Umayyad Caliphate had moved the capital of the empire to Damascus, which had previously been part of Byzantium and was therefore predominantly Greek speaking. Most of the administration was also Greek speaking but they too showed no real interest in acquiring the corpus of Ancient Greek knowledge. All of this would change dramatically with the end of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750.
For various reasons the Umayyed dynasty were increasingly unpopular and in 750 they were overthrown in the ‘Abbāsid Revolution. I’m not going to detail the twists and turns in the struggle for power between the ‘Abbāsids and the Umayyads, but the ‘Abbāsids managed to forge a large coalition of Muslims and non-Muslims, which succeeded in toppling the Umayyads and leading to the establishment of the ‘AbbāsidCaliphate.
It was now that the extraordinary appropriation of Ancient Greek knowledge began under the second ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (714–775), who reigned from 754 to 775.
How extraordinary this was is explained by Dimitri Gutas:
A century and a half of Graeco-Arabic scholarship has amply documented that from about the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East were translated into Arabic. What this means is that all the following Greek writings, other than the exceptions just noted, which have reached us from Hellenistic, Roman, and late antiquity times, and many more that have not survived in the original Greek, were subjected to the transformative magic of the translator’s pen: astrology and alchemy and the rest of the occult sciences; the subjects of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theory of music; the entire field of Aristotelian philosophy throughout its history: metaphysics, ethics, physics, zoology, botany, and especially logic – the Organon; all the health sciences: medicine, pharmacology, and veterinary science; and various marginal genres of writing, such as Byzantine handbooks on military science (the tactica), popular collections of wisdom sayings, and even books on falconry – all these subjects passed through the hands of the translators.[1]
The translation movement, which began with the accession of the ‘Abbāsids to power and took place primarily in Baghdad, represents an astounding achievement which, independently of its significance for Greek and Arabic philology and the history of philosophy and science (the aspects that have been overwhelmingly studied to this day), can hardly be grasped and accounted for otherwise than as a social phenomenon (the aspect of which has been little investigated), To elaborate: The Graeco-Arabic translation movement lasted, first of all, well over two centuries; it was no ephemeral phenomenon. Second, it was supported by the entire elite of ‘Abbāsid society: caliphs and princes, civil servants and military leaders, merchants and bankers, and scholars and scientists; it was not the pet project of any particular group in the furtherance of their restricted agenda. Third, it was subsidized by an enormous outlay of funds, both public and private; it was no eccentric whim of a Maecenas or the fashionable affectation of a few wealthy patrons seeking to invest in a philanthropic of self-aggrandizing cause. Finally, it was eventually conducted with rigorous scholarly methodology and strict philological exactitude – by the famous Hunayn ibn-Ishāq and his associates – on the basis of a sustained program that spanned generations and which reflects in the final analysis, a social attitude and the public culture of the early ‘Abbāsid society; it was not the result of the haphazard random research interests of a few eccentric individuals who, in any age or time, might indulge in arcane philological and textual pursuits that in historical terms are proven irrelevant.[2]
Why did the ‘Abbāsids initiate this mind blowing socio-political, socio-cultural programme of intercultural translation? What motivated it? What did they intend to achieve? In what follows I will give a sketch of an answer based on the arguments presented by Dimitri Gutas in his book.
One of the ‘Abbāsids strongest allies in their rebellion against the Umayyads were the Persians both Islamic and non-Islamic. They, of course, were hoping for independence but that was not on the ‘Abbāsids agenda. To pacify the Persians and help them accept their fate the ‘Abbāsids utilised the tactic of cultural–political assimilation rather than subjugation. Most notably, they built a new capital city for the Islamic Empire in Persia, the legendary Baghdad just north of the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon and the adopted Persian ideologies and practices, where they were not in conflict with Islam. To these belonged the mass translation of scholarly text from Greek. How this came about needs a little background.
In 750 when we say Persia, we are talking about the Sassanian Empire, which was established in 224 CE and lasted till 651 when it was conquered by the Arabs. It arose on the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian Empire defeated by Alexander in 330 BC, when Adashir I defeated the Parthians and they regarded themselves as the true heirs of the Achaemenid Empire. The Sassanians had a myth/legend that Zoroaster, the founding prophet of their religion, was, in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian canonical scriptures, the source of all leaning. The Chinese have a similar myth concerning the Yellow Emperor, who is said to have discovered and invented everything. When Alexander conquered Persia he copied all of this leaning had it translated into Greek and sent back to Greece. He then destroyed all traces of it in Persia. Basically, everything from Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle et al had been stolen by Alexander from the Persians. Quoting Gutas again:
[4] In the confines of India and China, however, there survived some things [of these books] which the kings of Persia had copied and preserved there when charged to do so by their prophet Zoroaster and Gāmāsb the learned…
[6] Then Ardašīr ibn-Bābak the Sassanian sent to India and China for the books which were there and also to Byzantium. He had copies made of whatever had reached there and traced the few remains that survived in ‘Irāq. He collected those that were dispersed and brought those that had been separated.
[7] After him, his son Sābūr did the same until these books had been copied in Persian in the way in they had been [compiled by] Hermes the Babylonian who ruled over Egypt, Dorotheus the Syrian [of Sidon], Qaydarūs the Greek from the city of Athens which is famed for its science, Ptolemy the Alexandrian and Farmāsb the Indian. They commented upon them and taught them to the people in the same way in which they had learned from all those books which originated in Babylon.
[8] After Ardašīr and Sābūr, Kisrā [Chosroes I] Anūširwān [531–78] collected these books, put them together [in their proper order]. And based his acts on them on account of his desire for knowledge and love for it.[3]
This is just one of several accounts of Alexander’s theft of Persian knowledge and the attempts to retrieve it made by the Sassanians. There was an imperative in Sassanian society to retrieve the “stolen” knowledge and translate it into Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Some texts had already been translated into Pahlavi when al-Manṣūr started his programme of assimilation. He simple adopted the Sassanian imperative and set the translation moment in motion beginning by translating the Pahlavi texts into Arabic and then extending to the Greek scholarly literature which was also translated into Arabic. As already noted above the Islamic overlords more that fulfilled that imperative in which they were assisted by Persian, Jewish and Syriac Christian scholars, and translators. The latter often translated first from Greek into Syriac, an Aramaic dialect, and then into Arabic.
Much of the Pahlavi literature, which was first translated, was astrological and al-Manṣūr adopted astrology, which had previously been unknown in pre-Islamic Arabic culture, although the Umayyads dabbled they didn’t seriously adopt it. He did so in a big way because astrology played a significant role in Persian court culture where the astrologer was a valued court advisor. When he built Baghdad, he had four astrologers, the Persian court astrologer Nawbaht and his colleagues Māšā’allāh, al-Fazārī, and ‘Umar at-Tabari, determine the most fortuitus day to lay the foundation stone, 30 June 762.
The transfer of Greek and also Indian and Chinese knowledge into Arabic in the Middle Ages played a significant role in the history of the evolution of the sciences. When I first started becoming interested in the history of science main stream texts still claimed that the Arabic scholars merely preserved the Greek knowledge and added nothing new to it. We now know that this is rubbish and in the next episodes of this series I shall be looking at the Arabic contribution to the evolution of physics.
[1] Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society(2nd–4th, 8th–10th centuries), Routledge, 1998 p. 1
[2] Gutas, p 2
[3] Abū-Sahl ibn-Nawbaht’s Kitāb an-Namutān quoted by Gutas pp 39-40
The Renaissance Mathematicus 
Typos:
“actually achieved very little before he [was] put to death”
“As such [it preserved] many fragments of classical learning that would have been helplessly [hopelessly?] lost.”
“brief period of less that [than] two centuries”
“Chines[e]”
“The latter often translation [translated?] first from Greek into Syriac, an Aramaic dialect, and then into Arabic.”
“astrology played a significant role in Persian court culture with [where?] the astrologer was a valued court advisor.”
“Greek and also India[n] and Chinese”
You wouldn’t believe how many times I read through this looking for typos!
Thony, Have you ever thought of just sending your missives to Michael (or someone else – I’m not volunteering) just to proofread before publication. I too am always frustrated by not being able to see my own errors until they are there on the published page (and sometimes not even then).
I’m not volunteering either, as this would deprive me of one of the reasons I look forward to Wednesdays.
(Not to catch typos, to be clear, but to savor the post. This was an especially good one. I knew about the history of some particular translations, like Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses, but not the whole context.)