The translators of Baghdad: how philosophy crossed into Arabic
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, Syriac scholars carried Greek medicine and philosophy into Arabic, often by way of Syriac — a decisive role in the flowering of the sciences in the Islamic world.
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When the caliphs of Baghdad wanted to read Aristotle and Galen, they mostly did not read them directly from Greek but through an intermediary: Syriac. And the people who did that work were, for the most part, Christians of the Church of the East.
Why the Syriacs
The Syriac schools — at Edessa, then Nisibis and Gundeshapur — had been teaching Greek logic, medicine and philosophy for centuries before Islam, and had already translated much of that inheritance into Syriac. So when Baghdad wanted these sciences in Arabic, it was the people of those schools who held both the languages and the material.
Hunayn ibn Ishaq
The most famous of them is Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi (d. c. 873), a physician and translator from al-Hira. He worked in the House of Wisdom, and with his school translated most of the medical works of Galen, along with Hippocrates and parts of Aristotle and Plato.
Hunayn left behind a letter in which he lists the works of Galen he had translated, noting for each who had translated it before him and how well — one of the earliest texts from which we know how translators thought about their own craft and judged each other's work.
What they translated
- Medicine: Galen and Hippocrates, on whom the whole of Arabic medicine was built
- Logic and philosophy: Aristotle and his commentators, the material al-Farabi and Ibn Sina would build on
- Mathematics and astronomy: Euclid and Ptolemy
What is worth noticing
This chapter is usually told as an Islamic story, or as a Greek one, and rarely as an Eastern Christian one. But the intermediary was not neutral: the language this inheritance passed through was Syriac, the institutions that preserved it were monasteries and church schools, and the men who carried it across prayed in Syriac.
It is one of the points where Eastern Christianity appears not as a minority preserved at the margins, but as an active party in forming the culture around it.