Gutas Dimitri - Greek Thought, Arabic Culture

With the accession of the Arab dynasty of the Abbsids to power and the foundation of Baghdad (762 AD), a Graeco-Arabic translation movement was initiated that lasted for well over two centuries. By the end of the tenth century, almost all scientific and philosophical secular Greek works that were available in late antiquity, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy, had been translated into Arabic.

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores the social, political, and ideological factors operative in early Abbsid society that occasioned and sustained the translation movement. It discusses the social groups that supported and benefited from the translation movement and studies the paramount role played by the incipient Arabic scientific and philosophical tradition in its symbiotic relationship with the translation movement. Finally, it traces the legacy of the translation movement in Islamic lands and abroad, suggesting a direct link with the ninth-century classical revival in Byzantium.

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented analysis of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the middle ages.

Dimitri Gutas is Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation (1975), Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (1988), and, with Gerhard Endress, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (1992).

First published 1998

by Roudedge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group

Reprinted 1999

1998 Dimitri Gutas

The right of Dimitri Gutas to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design (WaIes), Ebbw Vale

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the Graeco-Arabic translation movement in
Baghdad and early bbsid society (2nd-4th/8th-10th c.)/
Dimitri Gutas
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Civilization, ArabGreek influences. 2. Islamic Empire-Intellectual
life. 3. Greek language Translating into ArabicHistory. 4. Translating
and interpretingIslamic Empire. 5. Islamic EmpireHistory7501258.
I. Title.
DS36.82.G7G88 1998 1998
909.0974927dc21 9742761
CIP

ISBN O-415-06132-6 (hbk)

ISBN o-415-06133-4 (pbk)

To Athena, Smaragda, Platon, and Ioanna

Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism , New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. xxv.

This is a study of the major social, political, and ideological factors that occasioned the unprecedented translation movement from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad, the newly founded capital of the Arab dynasty of the Abbsids, during the first two centuries of their rule (the eighth through the tenth centuries). It draws upon a long and distinguished line of historical and philological works on Graeco-Arabic studies, or the study of the medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic. It can thus gratefully dispense with the who, the what, and the when of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement and concentrate on the how and why, in an effort to understand and explain it as a social and historical phenomenon.

Graeco-Arabic studies has its formal origins (insofar as scholarly investigations of any subject can be said to have formal origins) in the wish expressed by the members of the Royal Society of Sciences in Gttingen, and recorded in the minutes of the session held in 1830, that a collection be made of the references to Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and Persian translations of Greek authors, an accurate account of which we are lacking to this day (Ut colligantur notitiae de versionibus auctorum Graecorum Syriacis, Arabicis, Armeniacis, Persicis, quarum versionum histori accurat adhuc caremus, as reported by Wenrich in his preface). Two scholars responded to this call, Gustav Flgel and Johann G. Wenrich, with essays, written in Latin, that appeared in 1841 and 1842 respectively. Flgels Dissertatio is a modest survey of ninety-one Arabic interpretes , i.e., both translators and students of Greek works, while Wenrichs Commentatio is a more elaborate study following the specifications mentioned by the Royal Society: the first part contains a detailed account of the background and nature of the translations of secular Greek works into Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and Persian, and the second lists the Greek authors and their works that had been so translated. The bibliographical survey of Arabic translations and translators was continued half a century later by Moritz Stein- schneider who brought the work of Wenrich and Flgel up to date in a succession of articles published in various periodicals (188996) and reprinted jointly under separate cover only in 1960. Since Steinschneiders days much new information has been acquired, not least through the impressively comprehensive bibliographies of the Arabic sciences presented by Manfred Ullmann ( Medizin [1970], Geheimwissenschaften [1972]) and Fuat Sezgin (GAS III-VII [19709]). These efforts culminated in the recent (198792) book- length article by Gerhard Endress, remarkable for its synthesis and historical contextualization. Published in two separate volumes of the collective work Grundriss der Arabischen Philologie (GAP) , it offers the most extensive and up-to-date narrative and bibliographical survey of the translations, the translators, and the development in Arabic of each specialization.