How did Greek science survive by being translated into Arabic?
For two centuries Baghdad paid translators to turn Greek science into Arabic, and some Greek books now exist only in that Arabic.
▶ Start the storyBecause a government decided it was worth paying for. From the middle of the 8th century to the end of the 10th, rulers in Baghdad funded a large, sustained effort to turn secular Greek books, on medicine, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, into Arabic. Historians call it the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, and it played a significant role in the Islamic golden age.
It did not start from nothing. Syriac-speaking Christian scholars had already spent centuries translating Greek texts into Syriac, so the caliphs hired experienced translators, many of them Christians, and over time Muslim, Sabian and Jewish scholars joined in. Some translations went through Syriac, others straight from Greek. Even the paper helped: the papermaking skill learned from Chinese prisoners of war in 751 made books cheaper to copy. And there was a political motive too: the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, used translation as an ideology to hold a young, fractured empire together.
751
Papermaking learned from Chinese prisoners of war
754–775
Al-Mansur reigns and uses translation to bind the empire
Late 10th c.
The movement ends
The star translator was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian from al-Hira. As a young man he asked his medical teacher so many questions that he was thrown out, so he went off to learn Greek, and came back reciting Homer and Galen. Hunayn did not translate word for word: he first grasped the meaning, then rewrote it in Arabic or Syriac, and he compared several manuscripts to get the text right.
The result outlived the originals. Apollonius' Conics books V to VII and Diophantus' Arithmetica books IV to VII survive only in Arabic, and to follow the story of Greek science into Latin, historians have to analyse Greek texts that were translated into Arabic and then into Latin.
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Recap
Hunayn collated several manuscripts and translated for meaning, not word for word, and later translators followed his method.
💡 A trick to remember it · Hunayn's recipe: gather the copies, fix the text, grasp the meaning, then write it fresh.
Surprising fact · Apollonius' Conics books V to VII and Diophantus' Arithmetica books IV to VII exist only in Arabic.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.