How Arabic Translations of Ancient Greek Texts Started a New Scientific Revolution

In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).

The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralized government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the “Translation Movement” is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.

It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages—including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.

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Back in Baghdad, as so often happened, cultural change began from the outside—and in this case with the collection and comparison of foreign knowledge. The fundamental model and first material for the Abbasid translation project came from Iran, where sixth-century Sasanian shahs had commissioned Persian translations of important Indian and Greek works.

Living Iranians were an inspiration too. Sasanian intellectual traditions had weathered the Arab conquest, and Persian remained a major Iranian language, but Persian scholars had already started to translate classic works of their own literature into Arabic.

This ensured their preservation, and advertised the history and high culture of Iranian lands. Sasanian intellectuals also maintained useful links with scientific traditions farther east, above all with Indian mathematicians, the most advanced in the ancient world, and they had already translated important works from Sanskrit into their own language.

The Abbasid Caliphate, c. 850 CE

The benefits for the Abbasid caliphs of engaging with Iranian traditions were not purely intellectual. It helped them establish roots for themselves in the old Sasanian territory of Mesopotamia that they now occupied; in a similar spirit they built Baghdad itself in 762 in the circular form characteristic of Sasanian cities.

Incorporating the work of Greek thinkers into the Arabic canon was by contrast a declaration of cultural hegemony over the rump Roman empire at Constantinople, where older learning had been set aside in favor of Christian genres from sermons to saints’ lives, and where ancient science and philosophy now moldered in archives and monasteries.

More immediately, the project took inspiration from the contemporary intellectual culture of western Asia, revitalized by the unification under Islam of regions once subject to either Persia or Rome. Intellectual centers from Christian Edessa and Mosul to Zoroastrian Merv and resolutely pagan Carrhae were now not only in touch with one another but freed from the religious orthodoxy imposed by their old masters: theological disputes among foreigners were of little interest to the caliphs.

This world produced well-traveled intellectuals expert in topics from military strategy to astrology, and comfortable in Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), and now Arabic as well.

The final key component came from farther east. Paper had been invented in China in the second century bce and by the second century CE it is found in the trading oases of the Tarim Basin. It was first used as wrapping, but people soon realized that like leather and wood it made a useful surface for inked text.

The craft of papermaking reached the Abbasid world in the eighth century, and the first paper mill was built in Baghdad in the 790s. As paper was much cheaper to produce than papyrus, it finally made writing in great quantity a practical prospect.

In the early ninth century scientific scholarship in Baghdad coalesced around a library called the “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma), and the translation efforts were put on a more organized footing. The translators were paid a monthly salary, and the translations themselves often passed through several stages.

Persian scholars translated into Arabic works that had already been translated from other languages into their own, and since there was comparatively little direct Greco-Arabic bilingualism, Arabic translations of Greek works were often made from Syriac versions. Translation from Greek was therefore largely in the hands of Levantine Christians, already used to working across different languages including Greek and Syriac as well as Arabic.

We have a useful guide to the foreign works considered worthy of investigation in the form of an encyclopedia entitled Keys of the Sciences written by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850), a Persian-speaking mathematician and astronomer from the central Asian oasis of Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea, who worked at the House of Wisdom.

He divided the work into two books: one describes “Islamic religious law and Arabic sciences,” defined as law, theology, grammar, secretaryship, poetry, and history; the other is devoted to “the sciences of foreigners such as the Greeks and other nations”: philosophy, logic, law, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy/astrology, music, mechanics, and alchemy.

The Greek philosophers translated into Arabic ranged from Plato and Euclid writing in the fourth century B.C.E. to the third-century C.E. Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus. Arabic scholars took a particular interest in the work of Aristotle, as well as in Greek commentaries on it.

More practical Greek texts also found their way into the collection, on topics from engineering to military tactics to falconry. Popular literature included books of fables, “wisdom sayings,” and letters supposedly exchanged between famous historical figures. Classical poetry, drama, and history were of less interest: even Homer only appears in quotations found in scientific authors.

This was in part because the scholars involved knew how difficult it was to translate poetry well. Even translating scientific vocabulary relies on a shared way of seeing the world that was hard for intellectuals working centuries later to capture.

They managed it with varying degrees of success, especially when it came to the more abstract, philosophical texts. Some translations incorporate a great deal of interpretation: the “gods” become “the god” and one rendering of Plotinus’ work equates his idea of a “first principle” with Allah himself. But new manuscripts were acquired whenever possible to check against existing texts and new translations were issued where clear improvements could be made.

Scholars also thought hard about the methodology and challenges of translation: a Nestorian Christian doctor from Basra who worked in Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic called Hunayn ibn Ishaq argued strongly for the principle that translations should be fluent and relatively free, rather than rigorous but unreadable word-for-word renditions.

Some of the Greek texts were acquired through personal request, even from the caliph himself. Other manuscripts were found on investigative missions, or indeed rescued: a tenth-century compendium of literature written in Baghdad reports that camel-loads of old works were discovered in a pagan Greek temple that had been locked since the arrival of Christianity, getting worn and gnawed at by pests.

Some works still proved elusive: Hunayn ibn Ishaq reports a quest for a work by the Roman doctor Galen (129–216 C.E. ) who mapped the four “humors” (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) onto personality types. After searching in vain through northern Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, he eventually finds “about half of it, in disorder and incomplete, in Damascus.”

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The legacy of the Translation Movement is not in the translations themselves. The notion that the Arabs “preserved” ancient Greek learning that would otherwise have been lost is largely a myth.

Most ancient science was indeed lost to western Europe for almost a millennium: such works were usually written in Greek, even by Romans, and they disappeared with the knowledge of that language. Only a few Latin translations of Greek works had ever been made: Plato’s Timaeus and various works of Aristotle, as well as practical works like Ptolemy of Alexandria’s Handy Tables, containing the basic information needed to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the times at which they rise and set, and to predict eclipses.

For the most part however the original texts survived as well, kept and copied in the libraries, archives, and monasteries of the eastern Roman empire. Modern versions of ancient Greek texts are naturally based on those.

The Arabic translations are still useful, as they were often made from earlier and more accurate Greek manuscripts. And there are a few Greek works that survive only in Arabic translation, but they are curiosities rather than canonical texts: examples include a guide to estate management written in the first-century CE by a Roman author now known as Bryson, and a second-century CE treatise on physiognomy by the sophist Polemon.

The real legacy of the Arabic translations is the impetus they gave to further thought. As the Syriac patriarch Barhebraeus summed it up in the thirteenth-century CE:

there arose among [the Arabs] philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians, who surpassed all the ancients in subtlety of understanding. While they built on no foundations other than those of the Greeks, they constructed greater scientific edifices by means of a more elegant style and more studious researches, with the result that, although they had received the wisdom from us through translators  now we find it necessary to seek wisdom from them.

His story is too neat: Greek texts were far from the only inspiration for Arabic science. But as western European monks and nuns laboriously copied Latin manuscripts in candlelit monasteries, the manipulation, criticism, and sometimes outright rejection of foreign works by intellectuals working in the Islamic world catalyzed a scientific revolution.

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Excerpted from How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn Copyright © 2024 by Josephine Quinn. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.