Greek Thought, Arabic Culture

The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.)

Dimitri Gutas

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134926343
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Ancient History

From the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East, were translated into Arabic.
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores 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 'Abbasids', during the first two centuries of their rule. Dimitri Gutas draws upon the preceding historical and philological scholarship in Greco-Arabic studies and the study of medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic and analyses the social and historical reasons for this phenomenon.
Dimitri Gutas provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented survey of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the Middle Ages.

Part I Translation and Empire

The Background of the Translation Movement Material, Human, and Cultural Resources

DOI: 10.4324/9780203017432-1

1 The Historical, Economic, and Cultural Significance of the Arab Conquests

Certain material conditions that prepared a background against which a translation movement could take place and flourish were established by two momentous historical events, the early Arab conquests through the Umayyad period and the ‘Abbāsid revolution that culminated in 134/750.

Less than thirty years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 10/632, Arab armies had conquered in southwest Asia and north east Africa the lands that a millennium earlier had fallen to Alexander the Great. They put an end to the Persian Sasanian empire (224–651), the successor to the Medes and the Parthians who had reclaimed from Alexander’s empire the territories east of the Euphrates, and they rolled back irretrievably Alexander’s conquests in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, lands which had been ruled after him in succession by his epigones, by the Romans, and by the Byzantines. Although by 732 the new empire that was founded on and organized in accordance with the religion revealed to Muhammad, Islam, was to extend yet further afield – from Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent to Spain and the Pyrenees — the heart of the new civilization which it generated lay in the centers of ancient civilization, from Persia through Mesopotamia and Syro-Palestine to Egypt.

The historical significance of the Arab conquests can hardly be overestimated. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were reunited with Persia and India politically, administratively, and most important, economically, for the first time since Alexander the Great, and for a period that was to last significantly longer than his brief lifetime. The great economic and cultural divide that separated the civilized world for a thousand years prior to the rise of Islam, the frontier between the East and the West formed by the two great rivers that created antagonistic powers on either side, ceased to exist. This allowed for the free flow of raw materials and manufactured goods, agricultural products and luxury items, people and services, techniques and skills, and ideas, methods, and modes of thought. The salutary impact of this event was further magnified by the fact that it came in the wake of the disastrous Byzantino-Persian wars of 570–630 which devastated the area, decimated the local populations, and disrupted trade. These wars, like all the successive conflicts between Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines on the one hand and Persians on the other, were generated by the economic barriers raised by the political division of the Near East into East and West. Specifically, free access to the East-West trade routes would seem to have been at the heart of the conflict. Prior to the outbreak of renewed hostilities after Justinian’s death in 565, his successor, Justin II (r. 565–78), well aware of the eventual effect of the war on trade, entered into negotiations with the Oghuz Turks in Central Asia in order for the Byzantines to gain access to the northern silk route, to the north of the Caspian Sea.

One particular aspect of the economic prosperity ushered by the reunion of East and West deserves special mention. Although, as one would expect, trade benefited particularly from the new conditions established by the “pax Islamica,” it was agriculture that witnessed a revolution. The lifting of the barriers between India and the Eastern Mediterranean saw the systematic importation into Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean of numerous strains of plants, legumes, and fruits and the development of new ones, as well as agricultural techniques and a knowledge of intensive farming and full use of fallow lands. Thus, much more than trade, which enjoyed a continuity not seen before and a concomitant expansion, but whose benefits were necessarily restricted to the merchant classes, it was the agricultural revolution of the first centuries after the Arab conquests that provided much of the wealth of the early empire and benefited all social strata: the upper classes who owned the lands and appropriated the produce, the peasants who cultivated them, and the lower classes whose diets were inevitably enhanced.¹

See the fundamental work by A.M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. The effect of the agricultural revolution on the diet of the people is sketched in the articles by E. Ashtor, “The Diet of Salaried Classes in the Medieval Near East,” Journal of Asian History, 1970, vol. 4, pp. 1–24, reprinted in his The Medieval Near East: Social and Economic History, London, Variorum, 1978, no. III; and “An Essay on the Diet of the Various Classes in the Medieval Levant,” in R. Forster and O. Ranum (eds), Biology of Man in History. Selections from the Annates, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, pp. 125–62.

An equally significant result of the Arab conquests and arguably the most important factor for the spread of knowledge in general was the introduction of paper-making technology into the Islamic world by Chinese prisoners of war in 134/751. Paper quickly supplanted all other writing materials during the first decades of the ‘Abbāsid era, when its use was championed and even dictated by the ruling elite. It is interesting to note that the various kinds of paper that were developed during that time bear the names of some prominent patrons of the translation movement: gǧa‘farī, named after Ğa‘far al- Barmakī, and ṭalḥī and ṭāhirī after two members of the Ṭāhirid clan.²

See the article “Kāg̱ẖad” by Huart and Grohmann in EI IV,419b. For these individuals see below, chapter 6.1c.

In addition to the introduction of paper, the lifting of the barriers after the Arab conquests between the East and the West of Mesopotamia also had an extremely beneficial, though obviously unintentional, cultural consequence. It united areas and peoples that for a millennium had been subject to Hellenization ever since Alexander the Great while it isolated politically and geographically the Byzantines·, i.e., the Greek-speaking Chalcedonian Orthodox Christians. This is doubly significant. First, it was the exclusionary theological policies and practices of Constantinopolitan “Orthodoxy” that created religious schisms in the first place and drove Syriac- speaking Christians into religious fragmentation and, in the case of the Nestorians, into Persia. The effective removal from the Islamic polity (the Dār al-Islām) of this source of contention and cultural fragmentation, and their unification under a non-partisan overlord, the Islamic state, opened the way for greater cultural cooperation and intercourse. Second, the political and geographical isolation of the Byzantines also shielded these Christian communities under Muslim rule, and all other Hellenized peoples in the Islamic commonwealth, from the dark ages and aversion to Hellenism into which Byzantium slid in the seventh and eighth centuries.

While Chalcedonian Christians were quarreling over the icons and vying with each other in repudiating the pagan tradition, Syriac-speaking Christians, who, after the Arab conquests, in addition to being doctrinally separate from the Chalcedonians were now also politically apart, developed along different cultural lines. Secular Greek learning was by this time thoroughly assimilated by Syriac speakers³ and well entrenched in the major centers of Eastern Christianity throughout the Fertile Crescent, from Edessa and Qinnasrīn in the west, through Nisibis and Mosul in northern Mesopotamia, to Ğundīsābūr well into western Persia, to mention only the most famous centers. The same atmosphere doubtless existed in Monophysite and Nestorian congregations thoughout the area, if we are to judge by scholars who appeared during the early ‘Abbāsid period with a solid background in Greek learning; witness Dayr Qunnā south of Baghdad on the Tigris [EI II,197], the site of a large and flourishing Nestorian monastery, where Abū-Bišr Mattā ibn-Yūnus [EI VI, 844–5], the founder of the Aristotelian school in Baghdad early in the tenth century, studied and taught. In addition to religious centers, other prominent cities in pre-Islamic times also maintained a tradition of some Greek learning; an example would be al-Hīra close to the Euphrates in southern ‘Irāq, the capital of the Laḫmids [EI III,462], which, despite the waning of its fortunes after the rise of Islam, could still be the home town of the famous Ḥunayn ibn-Isḥāq [EI III,578–81]. To these should be added at least two other major centers of Greek learning at the antipodes of each other and, in a way, embracing the Hellenized world that was to be the birthplace of the ‘Abbāsid Graeco-Arabic translation movement, Harrān (Carrhae) in northern Mesopotamia just south of Edessa [EI III,227–30] and Marw in northeasternmost Persia at the gates of Central Asia [EI VI,618–21]. The former remained obstinately pagan well into the tenth century and kept alive numerous Greek ideas, beliefs, and practices that seem to have been extinguished in most other areas, while the latter combined a vigorous Hellenism, as exhibited in its brand of Zoroastrianism that was to play a significant role in early ‘Abbāsid times (see chapter 2.5), with an equally Hellenized Nestorianism.

See the fundamental studies by S. Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning,” in N. Garsoian, T. Mathews, and R. Thompson (eds), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, 1980, pp. 17–34; and “Syriac Culture in the Seventh Century,” Aram, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 268–80.

We have little direct information on the kind of instruction and study of secular Greek learning that went on in these centers, but we can get some idea about school practice during the time of Ḥunayn ibn-Isḥāq from his own pen, who compares as follows curricular procedures in Alexandria in late antiquity with those of his day:

[The members of the medical school in Alexandria] would gather every day to read and study one leading text among those [books by Galen], just as our contemporary Christian colleagues gather every day in places of teaching known as skholē (σχολή) for [the study of] a leading text by the ancients. As for the rest of the books, they used to read them individually – each one on his own, after having first practiced with those books which I mentioned – just as our colleagues today read the commentaries of the books by the ancients.⁴

G. Bergsträsser, Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen [Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes XVII,2], Leipzig, 1925, pp. 18.19–19.1, on the basis of the corrections to the text given in G. Bergsträsser, Neue Materialien zu Ḥunain ibn Isḥrāq’s Galen-Bibliographic [Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes XIX,2], Leipzig, 1932, p. 17.

Ḥunayn’s passage refers specifically to medical instruction, and one is not sure whether the description given here can be assumed to apply in general to other fields as well; logic in the form of the first three or four books of Aristotle’s Organon almost certainly was included in the formal training. Ptolemaic astronomy and astrology may also have been studied, though these subjects seem to have been particularly cultivated by Persian scholars who were also in contact, for developments in these fields, with their Indian counterparts.

With the advent of Islam, all these centers were united politically and administratively, and, most important, scholars from all of them could pursue their studies and interact with each other without the need to pay heed to any official version of “orthodoxy,” whatever the religion. We thus see throughout the region and throughout the seventh and the eighth centuries numerous “international” scholars active in their respective fields and working with different languages. As examples of such scholars we may mention, for the seventh century, Severus of Nisibis (d. 666/7), who was equally conversant with Persian as he was with Greek and Syriac, and his student Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), the major representative of “Christian Hellenism.”⁵ Less well known but just as important for the transmission of astrology are two scholars of the following century, Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785) and Stephanus the Philosopher (d. after 800), both widely familiar with Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi and (through Pahlavi) Indian sources. Theophilus was the ‘Abbāsid al-Mahdī’s court astrologer and military advisor as well as the author, among other things, of a book on military astrology, while Stephanus, possibly his student or associate, worked in Mesopotamia and visited Constantinople in the 790s where he wrote a treatise in praise of astrology that appears to have re-introduced mathematical sciences in Byzantium (see chapter 7.4).⁶ Māšā’allāh and Nawbaḫt, their equally international contemporaries and colleagues, are better known through the Arabic sources. The former a Jew from Basra apparently of Persian origin and the latter a Persian, they drew up the horoscope which determined for the ‘Abbāsid al-Manṣūr the day (30 July 762) on which construction of the city of Baghdad was to begin.⁷

So called by A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, Bonn, Marcus und Webers, 1922, pp. 248–56. For Severus see pp. 246–7. Cf. Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation,” pp. 23–4, and GAS VI,111–12, 114–15. See the studies by D. Pingree, “The Greek Influence on Early Islamic Mathematical Astronomy,” Journal ofthe American Oriental Society, 1973, vol. 93, p. 35, and “Classical and Byzantine Astrology in Sassanian Persia,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1989, vol. 43, pp. 236–9; cf. GAS VII,48–50. See D. Pingree, “The Fragments of the Works of al-Fazārī,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1970, vol. 29, p. 104; cf. GAS VII, 100–1, 102–8.

What is significant to notice about these scholars under the new conditions generated by the Arab conquests and the lifting of the political and religious barriers is that they were representatives of living scientific traditions and experts in their respective fields; they were multilingual and hence could draw on the scientific literature written in languages other than Greek; they were in contact with each other either personally through travel or through correspondence; and, finally and most importantly, because of their multilingualism, they were responsible for the transmission of knowledge without translation. This would explain the appearance, almost overnight, it would seem, of numerous experts in the court of the ‘Abbāsids once they made the political decision to focus the efforts of the available scientists and sponsor the translation of written sources.

2 The ‘Abbāsid Revolution and the Demography of Baghdad

The coming to power of the ‘Abbāsid dynasty and the subsequent transferral of the seat of the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad had far-reaching consequences for providing a demographic background conducive to the translation movement. The base of power of the ousted dynasty, the Umayyads, was in Syro-Palestine, and their capital was Damascus. After the Arab conquests and throughout the Umayyad period (661–750), and possibly even beyond the mid- eighth century, Greek was widely current in Syria and Palestine as the native language of significant portions of the local population, as the lingua franca of commerce and business, and as th...