In Our Time - The Translation Movement

Episode Date: October 2, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest intellectual projects in history - the mass translation of Greek ideas into Arabic from the 9th century onwards.One night in Baghdad, the 9th century Caliph Al-Mamun was visited by a dream. The philosopher Aristotle appeared to him, saying that the reason of the Greeks and the revelation of Islam were not opposed. On waking, the Caliph demanded that all of Aristotle’s works be translated into Arabic. And they were. And it wasn’t just Aristotle. Over the next 200 years Greek philosophy, medicine, engineering and maths were all poured and sometimes squeezed into Arabic. Centred on Baghdad, this translation movement introduced the Islamic world to the philosophy of Aristotle, the geometry of Euclid and the Medicine of Galen. It caused an intellectual ferment that demanded the creation of new words to explain new concepts and house new arguments. Over 600 years before the European renaissance the intellectual legacy of Greece was woven into the tapestry of Arabic thought and it was only through the Arabic versions that Europe go its hands on many Greek ideas. With Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London; Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge; and Peter Pormann, Wellcome Trust Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one night in Baghdad, so it goes. In the 9th century, the Caliph al-Mamun, was visited by a dream. The philosopher Aristotle appeared to him saying that the reason of the Greeks and the revelation of Islam were not opposed. On waking, the caliph demanded that all of Aristotle's works be translated. into Arabic, and they were. It wasn't just Aristotle. Over the next 200 years, Greek philosophy,

medicine, engineering, and maths were all poured and sometimes squeezed into Arabic. It was a translation movement of extraordinary depth and significance. Hundreds of years before Aristotle reached the West, the intellect of Greece was woven into the tapestry of Arab thought, and then through another translation in the 11th and 12th centuries, into Latin, it transferred north to feed and even create the Renaissance. With me to discuss the translation movement of Greek ideas into Arabic,

Ramira Benison, Senior Lecture in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Peter Porman, welcome trust assistant professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick, and Peter Adamson, reader in philosophy at King's College London. Now that story is apocryphal, but it has the mythical power which shows that people believe there's a great deal in it. Is that how it started with the Caliph's calling on, their scholars to bring the knowledge of Greeks into the Islamic Empire. It did start with the Caliphs in the sense that it was a translation movement that was directed and promoted from the top down, as it were. One misleading thing about that is that it didn't actually begin with Al-Mamun.

It began a couple of Caliphs earlier with the second Abbasid Caliph, who was the founder of Baghdad. But it is true that the Caliphs thought it was for some reason, very profitable for them. to translate these works from Greek into Arabic. What was the driving force? Let's say it was the Caliphs, the rulers, the new Islamic empire, founded about 150 years before, driving towards and becoming the great imperial forces as we were replacing the Roman Empire,

challenging the Byzantine Empire, the great force there. Why were they so keen to get hold of Greek ideas at that time? Right. So I think there's a kind of obvious practical answer, which is that a lot of these works were very useful. So if you think about works on medicine, think about works on mathematics, engineering, which you mentioned, these are all things that can be deployed in the successful running of an empire. But in a way, that's not a satisfactory answer, because for one thing, they poured a lot of resources into it very quickly. And it's also not something that the previous caliphates or dynasty, the Umayyad dynasty, had done.

Also, they translated works that aren't of obvious practical applications. So Aristotle's metaphysics is not going to help you build a bridge or cure someone's eye infection. So we need a better explanation for that. And there's a very good book on the translation movement by Dmitri Guttas, in which he gives a few good suggestions about why it might have been politically expedient for them to do this. So one example would be something you just mentioned, which is their competition with the Byzantine Empire. So they were able to turn to the Byzantines and say, look, you're Greeks. but we actually understand Greek philosophy better than you do.

We're the ones who are translating this. We're the ones who are carrying on Greek wisdom for the present, whereas under Christianity, Greek wisdom has sort of fallen into the doldrum, so to speak. But it is a wonderful time, isn't it, because you've got territorial expansion and great conquest, and then to move forward, they're going for cultural colonialism and expansion, which actually transforms their society and gives it incredible strengths that it didn't have until then.

We're talking about something very, very important and key in the development of knowledge over the last 2,000 years. Let's get down to how it worked in practice, which a lot of this program will be to do with. I understand that the philosopher Al-Kindi ran a translational circle. Now, how would he get hold of a piece of, how would he go about getting the stuff to translate and how would he get it translated from Greek into Arabic? Who would he use? Who were his translators? So his translators, this is right, he was probably not himself a speaker of Greek,

but he would have had a circle of people who did know Greek. And a lot of them, maybe all of them, in the case of the Kindi Circle, would have been Greek-speaking Christians who are mostly from Syria. So you have to remember that the Abbasid Empire takes in a huge geographical sweep, right? And that includes a lot of people who are even native Greek speakers or who are able to speak Greek because of their educational background, maybe in the Christian monasteries, for example. And so the people who were working for Kendi, interestingly, wouldn't necessarily even be Muslims.

They would be Christians of various denominations and sects. And because they had the ability to read Greek, they were able to translate into Arabic. Sometimes they would have translated directly from Greek into Arabic, which seems to have been the case mostly in Kendi circle. But in the translation movement, a very common practice was to translate by way of another Semitic language, Syriac. So they would translate, sometimes even if they had a Greek manuscript, they would translate it into Syriac, and then they would translate the Syriac into Arabic, right? Because the translators are from Syria, but the people, as it were, the market or the customer needs to read it in Arabic. So out of the Nestorian monasteries, which had fled the Byzantine Empire, came the translations which went to Baghdad.

Yeah, that's right. And in fact, I mean, something that's often forgotten here is that there's a previous Syriac tradition of, for example, philosophical translations, and they had worked on, for example, Aristotle's logic before Kendi and his people come along. So Syriac was a magnificent intermediary linguistic force. Amira Benison, so we're talking about Baghdad. He goes to Baghdad. The capital's moved from Damascus to Baghdad. It's the hub of the whole process.

As we understand it in the 9th century, we're talking about a magnificent city. Can you tell us of its qualities and character? Yes, the city of Baghdad was founded by the Caliph al-Mansur around 7-5-6. So at the time of this translation movement, I think we have to remember that it was actually a dynamic new city. It was almost a brash new world, this magnificent new hub of empire. It was drawing in people from across a very large region, from as far west as Spain, as far east as the frontiers with India and China. So there was enormous variety of people in. Baghdad. They were all people who hoped to make their fortunes in the empire, in the imperial

administration. And in addition to this great diversity of people, you also had a lot of money pouring into Baghdad, which is also, of course, very important for the translation movement. There was money available to pay people to translate texts from Greek or Syriac into Arabic. In addition to that, just the fact that Arabic had become the lingua franca of the empire was very important. It meant that people with all kind of different knowledge bases could begin to interact with each other so that a lot of knowledge could be brought together in one place, not just Greek knowledge, but Sasanian Persian knowledge, and that all these different traditions were sort of being put into a single pot

out of which came this wonderful intellectual movement in Baghdad. And there was a great idea of flexing at flexing. of a lot of the sinews of cultural expansionism, wasn't there? The idea, as I understand it, the idea was put about that actually they were reclaiming their own knowledge because Alexander the Great had stolen Persian knowledge and had it translated into Greek, and so they were bringing the Greek knowledge back into the Arab world,

and they were claiming their own. It wasn't anything new. So they're feeling very powerful in that sense. Yes, I think that's very true. I mean, there's a certain amount of debate about which group within the empire are primarily responsible for this movement. but there was a very strong Persian component. These are, however, Arabized Persians,

people who are working in the Abbasid court and administration, Persian from an ethnic point of view, but Arabized. And certainly, as Gutas mentions in his book, a lot of these Persians came out of an imperial tradition in Iran where there was a belief that all knowledge had originally sort of scattered out of Iran, and it was one of the monarch's obligations to bring that knowledge back to a single Persian base, if you see what I mean. So you can see this magnificent new city,

full of wealth, full of peoples from an amazing number of what countries we can now name, but they had different names at the time. And the intellectual elite was driving, this translation, we were seeking knowledge in many directions. We're going to have mathematics, medicine, engineering, philosophy, and so on. It wasn't a cheap process, was it? some of these absurd translations of money then to now, which always are quite comical,

but the idea of translating a big Irish would cost you the equivalent of 2 million pounds, that good translators would get paid 24,000 pounds a month for translating. Are these... So you had to pay a lot to do it? Absolutely, you did. I mean, the figure often cited is 500 gold dinars, which was an extremely large amount of money, yes, around $24,000 a month for one's work whilst making a translation.

So the translators were considered to be extremely prestigious and important individuals. To give you some sense of the extent of the movement, and Nadim who wrote a list of sort of important intellectual figures in Baghdad and Iraq more generally in the late 10th century lists 70 translators, I think it is. So 70 people who were sort of prominent in. enough as translators to get into his book. So it really was a very significant movement at that time. Peter Paulman, one of the big areas of imported knowledge,

translated knowledge, was medicine. And the man in his circle was most famous of that was Hunain Imin Ishak. What kind of text did he bring in? Well, he is famous for translating Galen and other medical authors. So Galen is a Greek medical author of the second century AD and the most prominent figure in the history of medicine. And we are very... For about 1,400 years after, isn't it?

That's right. I mean, like even the 19th century, people were still reading Gail in university as textbooks to train physicians. So, I mean, the early 19th century most of the time. But so he's like the towering figure, let's say, of Greek medicine. And he was translated by this Hunan Ibn Ishaqa and his circle.

He himself had a circle. And we are particularly well informed. about these translations because he wrote an account of his translations of Galen. And this is known as the Riesala or Epistle. And in this Riesala, he lists roughly 200 texts by Galen, which he and his entourage translated to this. Also his son, Ishaq, and there's his nephew, Habej, and others who translate as Peter Adamson, has just described it. from Greek into Syrac and from Syrac into Arabic.

There were families. You mentioned his brother's son, the Musa family. They tended to become family businesses, didn't they? Well, I mean, the Banamusa, they were like famous sponsors of translation. So there's this chap called Musa Ibn Shcher, and he's a highwayman turned plutocrat, who became very important in the, you know, like in the courts of the Caliphs. And his three sons had all sorts of interest, astrology, medicine, philosophy, the occult.

And so they paid good money, as Amira said, for having these texts translated. And we know about their names, and they often pop up in this stage of translating things from Syriac into Arabic or from Greek into Arabic in this epistle or Riesala. I think it's important to stress right away that we're not just talking about passive translations. We're not just saying they translated Greek through Sittal. Syriac into Arabic and they had the Greek knowledge at their dispersal, which was in itself absolutely fantastic. But they weren't doing that. They were using that to push on and develop that. They developed a lot of these ideas.

Can you give us some idea of what they did with Galen's notions about medicine, how they began to develop those in their own way and push it forward? Of course. I mean, there's innovation in the area of medicine on numerous levels. I mean, let's take Honan. He was a translator, but he also was a doctor. to various caliphs and a court physician. And he wrote on ophthalmology, for instance.

So there's one condition which people have argued. He is the first to describe a condition unknown in Greek medical texts. It's called Pernus in Sablin Arabic. Ten texts on the eye, didn't he? That's one of these texts, that's right. And he also in these 10 treatise on the eye uses illustrations of the anatomical features of the eye. for the first time, so as far as we can tell.

So you have innovation, new diseases recognized, you know, like new techniques to teach. That's just like Honan. You could find many other ways of innovation in medicine. And I developed. Peter Adamson, it does seem intellectually extraordinary vigorous. There must have been some friction and resistance, though. Well, you mentioned that must have been.

I've read there must have been. when trying to put the sort of the Greek stroke to a certain extent Christian empire into the power of Islam. Yeah, I mean, something that's very interesting picking up on what Peter Foreman has just been talking about is that when the translations come in, not only do they write independent treatises, so a lot of what Kendi was doing was writing independent treatises based on these translations, but the translations themselves would considerably alter the, content of the philosophical works. So in some ways what they were trying to do was minimize the tension you were just talking

about already in the way that they translated it. So, for example, there's a translation of Platinus, who is the founder of Neo-Platonism, a late-ancientist version of Platonism, which was, and this was produced in Kendi's Circle. And in that translation, it talks about God, the Creator, and assimilates the first principle in Plotinus' system to this divine creator. Now, the translator of this work is a Christian named Himsy, and it says in the prologue that Kendi corrected the translation. It's not clear what that means. Maybe it just means that he improved the Arabic.

And although it's clear that the translation has been made so that a Christian or Muslim would find the Plotinus material more acceptable, because it talks about the creator, right? And it worries about things like divine attributes, which aren't obviously such an issue in place. Titus. You can't actually tell whether the concerns driving those changes are Christian or Muslim. So it's a kind of compromise between Greek pagan philosophy, the Christian concerns maybe of the translator and the Muslim concerns of the person who commissioned the translation and also corrected it. But on the other hand, it's not like this was sufficient to make sure that nobody objected to it. I mean, there were people who very stridently objected to the, the, the, this taking over of Greek wisdom into Islamic culture. And Kendi, I mean, one of the best signs of this is something that Kendi says himself. So in his most important work, which is called on first philosophy, there's an impassioned rebuke of the people who are complaining about Greek philosophy and its importation. And he says, look, if this stuff is true, it doesn't matter who came out with it.

It doesn't matter if they're pagan or whatever. If the truth is true, then we should embrace it and we should bring it into our own culture. That sounds to me, anyway, I'm sure to a lot of our listeners, a wonderful state of mind. And I have the idea from reading, a glowing idea of a society which was prepared in this area of knowledge to be religiously integrated in a way that was not happening very much anywhere else. We've talked about the Nestorian Christian, we've talked about the Muslims,

but can you, Mary Bannison, develop that idea? Because Salon's began to grow up in Baghdad, where, as I understand it, scholars from many religious backgrounds would meet on equal footing. Can you just develop that? Is this a sort of little glow that is, again, rather like the Caliph's dream, a little bit of mythology? Or what's that going on? It was definitely going on. I think one of the very important aspects of intellectual culture in Baghdad at the time

was the Salon culture called a Majlis in Arabic. And it seems quite clear from the sources that all kinds of different people, gathered in the homes of eminent courtiers with the caliphs themselves and that it was understood that at a Magdalis you would have a fairly free and open discussion of all kinds of different issues, religious issues, philosophical issues, and people of all different religious backgrounds were welcomed. And really the criteria... I've mentioned Muslims and Christians, presumably Jews.

And also Jews, yes, and probably earlier on Zoroastrians as well. there's no objection to anyone of any faith or sect attending a majolist, the criteria for participation really is to be able to argue your point well in elegant Arabic rather than to have a particular standpoint. It's interesting that one of the most heavily translated and earliest translated books was Aristotle's book on how to argue, how to proceed in logical argument. And that became a textbook for a great many of the scholars, didn't it, whatever they were studying?

Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, we've been talking about, the causes for translation. And I think an added cause is, of course, that as a new empire and a new religion, Islam did actually need to develop its own ability to argue theological and philosophically against Christians and Jews who already had well-developed dialectical traditions. So Muslims were very keen to have these materials in Arabic so that they could actually develop ways of arguing and reasoning to justify their own positions. Peter Paulman, Can we talk about the technique?

I thought you maybe wanted to come in earlier. Yeah, I just... Would you pick up that point first? Yeah, of course, of course. It has to do with, like, this cosmopolitan atmosphere and this atmosphere of religious tolerance. I mean, important is what Peter Adamson said, that Muslims and Christians actually often had the same concerns

and they found themselves together against, let's say, pagan Greek philosophy or like being uncomfortable with the same things. So one could get this impression that there's like a Greek Christian tradition on the one hand, and, you know, like an Arabic Muslim tradition, and they are opposed. But that's actually not really the case very often. I mean, although there are, you know, disputes between Muslims and Christians, I mean, with many of the problems of, you know, like the creation of the world, divine attributes, these problems are shared between the three religions, and they are confronted then also in,

I mean, like in Greek philosophy or there were discussed in late antiquity. And if I can just make one quick point, I mean, if you're not. look at hospitals, for instance, I mean, Greek medicine transcends religion. So, I mean, it's not Christian or Jewish or Muslim. And so you have a tradition which allowed people from different backgrounds to partake in this medical discourse. And so the hospitals, which were set up, were often set up as Islamic foundations by, you know, like Muslim rulers. But the medicine practiced there was pagan and the people who practiced the medicine, let's say in 10th century back down. that could come, you know, could be Christian, Muslim, Jews, but also, you know, Sabians.

You know, like there's some sort of pagan sect. We have one very prominent figure there. And the patients came from different backgrounds as well, you know, like, and they did like elite meds. And so, you know, like something happens there because this Greek knowledge transcends religion. That's an important point. Yeah. Just to come in on that philosophical parallel is that in the generation or so after Kendi and Hunan, there's this school of philosophers in Baghdad, the so-called Baghdad Aristotelians,

and the founder of that school, Abu Bishar Matah, is a Christian, but he has a student who's the most famous Muslim philosopher between Kendi and Avicenna, named Al-Farabi. And then Farabi had a student named Yachyev and Adi, who was a Christian, and Ibn Adi had an epistolary exchange with a Jewish philosopher who had asked him questions soliciting answers from this Aristotelian map. and some of these people were translators. So, remember, Abu Bishiro was a translator,

but Fadabi wasn't probably, Fadabi didn't know Greek. And so you see the actual schools, I mean, how formally it can really be considered as school is unclear, but you do have student-teacher relationships across confessional divides. Can I come back to you, Peter Pomer, for a moment? Can you tell us about the difficulties of the techniques of translation?

presumably a lot of these ideas, terms, concepts were new to the Arabic world and that would you just have to find new words for instance or translate words into words that existed and someone that would not exist because the concepts would be new. Can you give us some idea of the problems involved? Because we talk about translations as if you were rattling off between a translation on German to English and that sort of thing. But it's a very different enterprise, isn't it?

Yeah, it was, yeah, absolutely. and that's what is amazing. So even in modern Arabic nowadays, you can still feel the impact of the 9th century translation movement. So, I mean, like one thing, there's like this idea of theory, you know, like Theoria in Greek.

It comes from the Greek word Theoreen to look. And so Nadara means to look in Arabic, and Nadaria would then mean theory. So they're kind of, this is what we call a culk. So you use like a similar word and you create an abstract noun and then you can express a new concept. I mean, to give you an example, in medicine, for instance,

there's a disease called phrenitis, some sort of brain fever, something similar to meningitis. And so this phrenitis sometimes was just transliterated in Arabic letters, faranitis, but because fa and cough, two letters are similar. They have one dot and two dots above each other. So they were confused. But there was also, so this was like trans iteration, which sometimes happened, but it wasn't very satisfactory.

And so people then, you know, might have used to loan words from Persian, Bersam, to translate this. This was one way of doing it. Or at some stage they would use these calques, you know, like another example is alopecia. You know, like if you, if in the Greek word alopecia comes from alopex, the fox. And alopecia, so to speak, is the fox disease. and the Arabs just, like when they had this disease and had to translate it, they just said, da, Athelab, you know, like the disease of the fox, and so created a new term,

which was then, you know, like, it was a calk, it was a loan translation, but it was very, you know, like, it could be understood, I mean, if you knew the concept. And it became boldness. Yeah, it became, well, some sort of boldness, that's right. I mean, like, that's actually, like, quite, I mean, like, the first chapters of many books, because it's often from head to toe, they start with all sorts of remedies for hell, I mean, you know, it's quite amazing. I mean, Amira, I don't know what you want to be asked.

Amira, I'd ask you, it was also about translating techniques of thinking as well as translating the words in which the thoughts were expressed, wasn't it? Yes, absolutely. I mean, that you, the, but I think one thing that one needs to remember in terms of that is there's not necessarily such a strong break in these traditions when you're talking about Christian translators who are all already full. familiar with the Syriac and the Greek background. And there is a sort of a flow through

and because the Arabs had taken over all these different regions, they're actually sort of building on an existing culture. Although they do mine out a lot more material, there is a sort of an ongoing understanding of some of these concepts. And we're beginning to talk quite soon, Peter Ellipson, of Arabs scholars becoming in their own right, quite magnificent scholars and taking things forward, which will go through several centuries.

Avicenna, Avarayas, there they go. Can you just develop that? Yeah, in fact, so one thing about the translation movement is that it lasts about, say, 200 years, and you might wonder, why did they stop? Did they run out of texts or what's going on? So I think, obviously, that's a complicated question, but part of the answer is that it's a victim of its own success

because you have figures like Farrabi and even more so Avicenna in philosophy or someone like Ibn al-Haitam in, mathematics and optics. So Ibn al-Heitham is the first person to really understand how vision works. So Ibn al-Hitham would be responding to the Greek optical tradition. Avicenna would be reading and responding to Aristotle, but then, as you said, taking them further or at least changing the terms of the debate, and often in a way, in the case of Avicenna,

that made it easier to see how some of these Aristotelian or even non- Aristotelian and original ideas could be deployed in the service of Islam. And so there's something very striking about the philosophical literature in Arabic, which is that up until about the time of Avicenna, what you have is people writing about and writing commentaries on Aristotle. And except for Averroes in Andalusia, who's a kind of conservative who wants to go back to Aristotle. In the Islamic world, people start writing commentaries on Avicenna instead.

And so Aristotle kind of falls into disuse because the very authors who the Greek translation, translation movement inspired become the authors who everyone is thinking about and responding to. Completely absorbed, it taking it on and it becomes their culture. And you could say something similar at the level of terminology, so like what Peter was talking about, a lot of these things become technical words that then are carried on. I just want to go to Amir Abennyson for a second, Peter Pum.

And that's due to the libraries, the development of libraries, which perhaps you can talk a little about because they do sound very new and very splendid. Not new as libraries. We know that libraries have been there for. thousands of years, but the development of library and the library system in Baghdad. Yes, and I think that the development of libraries is very important, and now there are a couple of, if you like, sort of more technological or institutional underpinnings to this movement, which we've talked a little about in the Majlis, but libraries are equally important.

By about the mid-eighth century, the Muslims had acquired the technology of making paper, probably through Central Asia from China. As a result, it became much... Which is quite expensive, but also. quite common, partly because they're very rich. Quite expensive, but much more freely available and easier to use than parchment. You could make books much more quickly if you had the money to pay for them. So sort of book copying, book binding, the creation of books becomes very important in Baghdad and other cities, in fact. And in addition to that, you have this idea of the library.

There's a lot of talk about the Caliph's own Betel Hekma or House of Wisdom. We don't actually know very much about that or how important. it really was. But I think what is important is this idea of an institution where books are collected and gathered. And that certainly catches hold, not just with the Caliphs, but with the elite of Baghdad itself. Wasn't it thought that the library at Shiraz had a copy of every book that had ever been? Absolutely. Reputically, yes. And there were great halls with little rooms off, in the halls were chests. The books were kept in chest. And I presume he went to the small rooms, took him out, went small rooms to read them and then replaced them.

Yes. Well, I mean, Avicenna, in his room. His biography describes the library in Bukhara, in fact, in 10th century Bukhara. And he says there was actually a library staff and that there were catalogs and you could consult the catalogs and then you could order books and the staff would bring them to you. So in fact, a very, very modern library system. Some of these libraries provided free paper for scholars so they could make notes. That was the case in Mosul. There was, as you said, a magnificent library in Shiraz. And it's worth noting that these were actually a lot of these were founded in the 10th century,

not by the Abbasid caliphs themselves, but by other patrons, the bujids in the case of Shiraz, the Samanids in Bukhara. So this isn't just a movement by the 10th century that's led by caliphs, but also by the elite as a whole and rulers of a second level down.

What's interesting, I'm coming to your Peter Osmond, what's interesting is that the energy of empire then becomes taken, energy goes into the culture of empire in a very powerful way. We'll comment on that a bit later, but Peter Arnold, were there any significant omissions from the translation? Yes. So, for example, they don't seem to have been all that interested in Greek literature.

They do get occasional mentions of Homer, but it's not like they were translating the entire Iliad and Odyssey into Arabic. In philosophy, the most notable omission is probably Plato. It's not a complete omission. They do know probably paraphrase versions, in other words, sort of summaries of some of his works like the Republic and the Tamaus, and in fact, they know the Tamaas through a paraphrase that was written by Gaelin in Greek and then translated into Arabic. But it's a very striking contrast that they have this very complete knowledge of Aristotle. They know pretty much what we know about Aristotle, whereas their knowledge of Plato is very patchy. And obviously the question arises, why would that be?

So I think there's maybe a couple of things to say about this, sort of an obvious thing, is that, Aristotle's works come with a title that tells you exactly what it's about. So Aristotle kind of lends itself to a curriculum. You can just take the Aristotelian corpus and there you've got your philosophical curriculum. But related to this is a more interesting answer, which is that in the late ancient world already, in the Greek tradition, Aristotle had been seen as a kind of introductory author and then you would go on to Plato. So these were all Platonists who were reading both Aristotle and Plato. They thought both Aristotle and Plato were great philosophers. who fundamentally agreed with each other.

And it was like Aristotle was the BA and Plato was the PhD. And so for that reason, Aristotle was more important educationally. And so it was natural that the first things you would translate and start thinking about would be the works of Aristotle and not these supposedly much more advanced works of Plato.

Peter Ballin, who would like to take that up? Well, I mean, I want to say, I would like to come back to different, I mean, a related point about continuities and the breaks. I mean, Peter Adamson talked about how in philosophy, Avicenna kind of superseded more or less everything. Now, that is partly true in medicine as well, because we have like Avicenna wrote the canon of medicine, and that became all encompassing.

But there are many authors, I mean, like post-Avisana even, Abdelatif al-Bardadi in 12th century Baghdad, for instance, who argued that you have to go back to Hippocrates. and Galen. So I think that when it comes to medicine, the knowledge of the Greek, like the presence of the Greek authorities was somewhat greater than maybe

what we have in philosophy. This is often the Mayor of Edison called the Golden Age of Arab Scholarship. We haven't even begun to talk about mathematics in which they took a lot from the works of Euclid and developed greatly in that area. But would you give it that?

Would you, would you, we getting towards the significance of it, the legacy of it. Will you give it that appellation? Do you think it had a dynamic effect as I sort of trailed it? I think it had a hugely dynamic effect. I mean, it was hugely important for the Muslim world itself. I mean, they made huge advances in all areas. I mean, in a sense, as we've all been saying,

to call it a translation movement is a bit of a misnomer. It's this incredible sort of research culture where there are advances going on in all areas, which transform. formed the Islamic world itself. But beyond that, then, of course, the knowledge also began to dissipate beyond the frontiers of Islam, particularly through the Iberian Peninsula and the key city of Toledo, which fell to the Castilians in 1085. And after that city fell, Toledo became home to a new translation movement, if you like, where Jews, Christians and Muslims were working

together to translate Arabic language materials into Latin. Sometimes sometimes, sometimes, by way of Hebrew or Castilian. And then this knowledge went on to be incredibly important in Latin Christendom. I'll come back to that in one second. I just want to sort of say a little bit more about the Arabic movement itself. Can you just, Peter Paulman and Peter Adamson, sorry about the Dublin, nowhere around. Can you just develop a little bit more how they took forward Greek medicine and then you maybe for mathematics, Peter Adamson, to Peter Paulman.

Can you just say how far that was? We've talked about the eye, we've talked about the use of diagrams, we've talked about the development hospitals, just to flesh a, flesh it out, a bit more. Yeah, well, I mean, like, you could, another area is anatomy. I mean, there's a famous instance of what is, what should be called the pulmonary circulation, the fact that the blood, you know, like, you know, does not go from one chamber of the heart to the other, but goes via the lungs. this is some, I mean, like Galen believed that there was like a, in the septum, that there was like a little hole, which is not true. It's true in fetuses, and this is where he might have got this idea from.

So there's Ibn Anaphis in a commentary actually to Avicenna's canon says that there is no such man, there's no such hole, and that the blood circulates through the lungs. So that's like a famous, let's say, discovery in the realm of anatomy. There are other people like Abdel Latifal and Bardadi, who says, sometimes correct galanic anatomy. Another famous case is the distinction between smallpox and measles. So this is Arasi in the 10th century. For me, I mean, since I mentioned Arasi, this is Abu Baku Muhammad Ibn Zakaria Arasi. This Arasi also developed kind of, or is innovative in testing drugs. So we have instances where he talks about 2,000 patients.

So he looks at treatment and what works. for large groups of patients that would only have been possible in this hospital environment. And he also talks about two-thirds, one-thirds. I mean, there's one instance where we have a control group here, where he mentioned that he bled patients in the case of this meningitis brain fever kind of thing.

And he left, he did not bleed one group of patients and they contracted brain fever as a consequence of that. So there's the idea of a congenital. control group, although the link between bleeding and meningitis are bleeding as a cure is not always recognized nowadays. Can you just give us one or two brushstrokes about

mathematics? Then I want to move on to what Amiru is talking about, the fall of Toledo, the Arabic interlite and then into Europe. So mathematics is a really fundamental part of the translation movement. One of the most useful things you can translate, of course. And it also becomes very dominant even as a way of thinking about how

to think about anything. So Kindi, for example, thinks that Euclid's axiomatic way of proving things in mathematics could be applied to areas of philosophy. But there's a lot of pure mathematical research, so algebra, for example, and geometry. But something else that's important to remember is that they would have seen sciences that we don't think of as branches of mathematics. They would have thought of them as part of the mathematical curriculum. So things like astronomy, which is, again, a very important part of the translation movement. For them, it's always allied with astrology.

and they don't necessarily distinguish between them. But, yeah, I mean, in fact, the interest in astrology helps bring in a lot of the texts that we would think of as astronomical texts. Ptolemy is a major authority in both astrology and astronomy. Optics would be another example because when you do optical studies, you have these geometrical demonstrations and so on.

So we're talking about a huge, not so much in Renaissance, a huge, well, it is. It's a really, it is, it's a first Renaissance, I suppose. I think we are talking about Renaissance, so correction, that. And then as you said, Amira, the fall of Teledo is a useful marking point, about 1084, 1085. And Arabic was translated into Latin, also in Sicily. Was that Constantine the African? Was he in Sicily?

It doesn't matter. It was translated into Latin, and it moved up into what we now call Europe, and began what developed into the early Renaissance and their Renaissance. Now, can you imagine the European development going in the direction it subsequently did without that? Amira? No, I think it's difficult to imagine Europe developing intellectually in the same way as it did without this input from the Arabic world. I mean, in the same way that we can't really imagine sort of Arab-Islamic intellectual life without the translation movement from Greek into Arabic. as well. It's difficult to see how Europe would have progressed in the direction it did

without all this information translated from Arabic into Latin. And we're looking at broadly the same kind of genres. Latin Christians were also interested in astronomy and astrology in the first instance. They were also extremely interested in medical knowledge. Avicenna's canon of medicine was very well known in Europe very quickly. And also philosophy and religious materials as well. How would you assess the lexical? When we talked about Aquinas, he's talking about Aristotle, but he's going through the, not only in the, it has been translated for him by the translators in the Arabic Renaissance, but he's going back to Arabic scholars as well as to Aristotle, isn't it? Yeah, in fact, two of the most commonly cited sources or authorities in Aquinas are Avicenna and

Averroes. And for Latin medieval philosophy, Averroes is the commentator, the way that Aristotle is the philosopher. So he's the guide to understanding Aristotle. And in fact, in some cases, their best early, complete translations of Aristotle's works are Latin translations of the Arabic text of Aristotle that's contained in Averroes' commentary. So he'd quote a bit of Aristotle and then comment on it. They would then translate that quotation to Latin. And that was their text of Aristotle. But in general, I mean, And certainly in philosophy, you see this complete change. All kinds of topics that hadn't been discussed earlier in medieval philosophy begin to be discussed. And the idea of discussion, the idea of Aristotelian debate and so on, can you, sorry, we come to the end of this program.

It's a bit of a nuisance, but there you go to the moment. Can we just, can you just give us some idea of your view of the legacy of this when it came to, let us call it Europe? You can say that this tradition in Latin garb, you know, like the Arabic tradition translated into Latin, is at the beginning of medieval university medicine. You know, like, I mean, Constantine, the African, Salerno, the first school of meds. And he kind of translates huge amounts of texts. And that becomes kind of the cornerstone of university teaching. And so basically both in the high and late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, you know, like,

Arabic authors are on the program of students. they dominate the medical curriculum and doctors, also practicing doctors, much prefer, you know, Avicenna because he's so logical and so easy to understand and so well-organized. So they prefer Avicenna to the new translations, which are then made of Galen and Hippocrates in the Renaissance. So the impact is absolutely massive. Finally, and so briefly, I do apologize to the error.

But we're not absolutely not talking about this was there for the end of the Arab of the Arabic culture and the whole business transferred north which has been a miss... People have thought that for it.

Oh, it's rolling out of time. We are talking about the Arabic going in parallel, keeping going. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's easy to think that sort of knowledge pours into the Araboslamic world

and then pours out again, but of course it does continue within the Araboslamic world too. Thank you very much. Amira Benison, Peter Adamson, Peter Paulman. Next week, we're going to talk about the mathematician

Kurt Gerdles incompleteness theorems. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.