Between Orient and Occident: Transformation of Knowledge

Early investigations of transmission of scientific knowledge involving the Islamic world and Europe mainly concentrated on the places where such transmission took place, on the translation movements that can be identified at these various places, and on the actual works that were transmitted from one cultural area to another. Well-known examples of such concentrated transmission of scientific works are the following:

1.	In ca. 772 an embassy from Sindh in present-day Pakistan visited the Abbasid court in Baghdad. It included astronomers who assisted in the translation into Arabic of an Indian astronomical work of the type siddhānta.1 In Arabic this work became known under the name Sindhind, and it became the prototype of a number of astronomical handbooks with tables of the type which in Arabic and Persian was called ‘zīj’.2 In the Islamic world Indian astronomical methods were soon abandoned in favour of Ptolemaic astronomy, but they were nevertheless transmitted to Europe through Spain and were still being used in 15th-century England.3
2.	A translation movement from Greek into Arabic started in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliph al-Mamūn (813–833) in connection with the House of Wisdom and continued through the whole 9th century. Manuscripts of important Greek works in a large number of fields were brought from Byzantium, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, pharmacology, and philosophy. The best known scholars involved were Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, his son Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, the Banū Mūsā, Qusṭā ibn Lūqā, and Thabit ibn Qurra.4
3.	From the second quarter of the 12th century onwards numerous translations from Arabic into Latin were made in Spain, where Toledo became the principal centre. Many important works on mathematics and astronomy became available in Latin, including Euclid's Elements in a number of different versions; Ptolemy's Almagest; the algebra, arithmetic, and astronomical handbook of Indian type by al-Khwārizmī; a large number of astrological works; and numerous others. The best known scholars involved in these translations were John of Seville, Hugo of Santalla, Hermann of Carinthia, Robert of Chester, Plato of Tivoli, and Gerard of Cremona.5
4.	Starting at roughly the same time Latin translations were also produced in Italy. An important centre of these activities was Sicily, which had been in Muslim hands until 1060 and was then taken over by the Norman Kings. In particular Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who reigned from 1212 to 1250, actively supported scholarly work and translations. Various Muslim scholars are known to have worked in Sicily, for example the geographer al-Idrīsī. Well-known translators from the Arabic include the physician Constantine the African and later Michael Scot. Ptolemy's Almagest and many other works were also translated directly from the Greek.6
5.	Between 1095 and 1291 the Crusades led to scholarly interaction between Christians and Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean. Various Latin works attest to a flow of information from Iraq to Europe through cities such as Antioch. Well-known translators in this episode include Stephen of Pisa and Philip of Tripoli.7
6.	Translation activities in Byzantium took place in various periods. Some of the most important ones as far as astronomy is concerned are associated with Gregory of Chioniadis, who around the year 1300 studied astronomy in Tabriz near the south-western shore of the Caspian Sea and later became bishop in this city. He translated various Persian handbooks into Byzantine Greek, whose manuscripts ended up in the Vatican library.8
7.	Finally, influence of Arabic works on Renaissance scholars such as Regiomontanus and Copernicus seems to have taken place, for example, through Vienna and through the intermediation of the well-known Byzantine scholar Cardinal Bessarion.9

Each of these instances of transmission has directly or indirectly contributed significantly to the shaping of science in western Europe, and details of each of them have become known in particular as the result of researches carried out during the last two decades.10 Less attention has been paid to the actual process of transmission. Transmission has mostly been considered as unproblematic: knowledge at some point available in one cultural area later was available in another area in what was assumed to be the same form. One of the results of this highly simplified image of transmission is the long-standing idea that Muslim scholars were merely intermediaries who made classical Greek scientific works available to European scholars in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Transmission, however, is a highly complicated process, in which a large number of factors play a role. An important 1987 article by Sabra11 paved the way for serious investigations of the processes of transmission. Sabra stressed that scholars active in the 9th century translation movement in Baghdad did not simply ‘receive' the classical Greek works, but translated and ‘appropriated' Greek scientific knowledge in a complicated process that was strongly influenced by their own cultural situation. By further developing this knowledge, they initiated a new scholarly tradition in ways which need to be investigated separately for different parts of the Muslim realm and different periods. Two conferences at Oklahoma took Sabra's theses as starting points for detailed investigations of various important aspects of the transmission from Greece to the Islamic world and from the Islamic world to Europe up to the Renaissance. These addressed, among others things, the extent to which the received knowledge was adjusted to the scientific attitude of the receiving culture and the role of language in the appropriation of the received material. They included analyses of how Babylonian astronomy was metamorphosed in the Greek world, how Epicurean atoms were incorporated into the religious philosophy of the kalām, how Arabic geometry related to Greek geometry, how Aristotle's physical philosophy was transformed in the eleventh-century commentaries of Ibn Bājja, and how the Indians in the seventeenth century received the Muslim versions of Ptolemaic astronomy, as well as two essays on the philosophical perspectives of transmission.12

The proceedings of the Oklahoma meetings, followed by those in Montreal,13 have made clear that an investigation of the process of transmission of scientific knowledge between different cultural areas needs to consider, among others, the following aspects:

1.	The actors, i.e. the persons playing an active role in the process of transmission, including scholars, translators, as well as patrons. The scholars may have been in immediate contact with colleagues from a different cultural area or may only have read their books, either in the original language or in translation. Translators may have translated a scientific work with or without the aid of a native speaker, using an orally delivered or a written text. And patrons played a role by ordering the translation and study of certain scientific works with particular interests and particular goals in mind.
2.	Languages and forms of representation play a role in the process of transmission because, for example, Greek, Arabic and Latin have very different characteristics, which may make it difficult to render a text in one of these languages into another. In very subtle cases a particular correct translation led to scientific concepts being understood in an essentially different way from the original work. An obvious problem related to language was the lack of suitable terminology at the time texts about particular topics were translated for the first time. Also a different use of notation, abbreviations, and diagrams may have led to problems in the appropriation of a translated work.
3.	Differences in scientific models and methodologies may have led to serious problems in the appropriation of transmitted knowledge. Obvious examples can be found in astronomy when we compare the arithmetical models for the motions of the planets used by Babylonian astronomers with the Greek geometrical models laid down by Ptolemy in his Almagest. In such cases, in order to be able to use the parameters or tables from transmitted sources, it was necessary to have a proper understanding of the underlying methodology, and errors in transmission could very easily occur.
4.	Finally, scholars in different cultural areas worked in different types of institutions with different hierarchical structures, different priorities in research and teaching, and different resources. Also outside of institutions scholars will have had different social statuses, which influenced the way in which they appropriated learning from a different cultural area into their own.

The differences between one cultural area and another in all such aspects were likely to lead to transformation of scientific knowledge in the course of its transmission. In some cases such transformations could be the result of a misreading or misunderstanding of the original source, in many cases they will have been intentional adjustments to the scientific culture and the religious, political or social situation of the appropriators. Transformations that have taken place in the course of transmission are therefore at the very heart of the process of transmission and deserve special attention in its investigation.

The present issue of Annals of Science presents six articles dealing with the transformation of knowledge during and after the process of its transmission between different cultural areas. Five of these articles are based on talks given at the international conference Between Orient and Occident. Transformation of Knowledge, which was held on November 6–7, 2009 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.14 They address concrete cases of transmission involving the Eastern world and Europe over a period of nearly 2000 years, and illustrate all the above aspects through which the topic of transformation of knowledge may be approached. Not surprisingly, language and translation play a central role in most of the articles, but some attention is also paid to the way in which actual transmission took place between the actors involved, the differences in models and methods, and the role of institutions in the creation and preservation of scientific knowledge.

John Steele (Brown University, Providence RI), in his contribution Visual aspects of the transmission of Babylonian astronomy and its reception into Greek astronomy, investigates to what extent the eclipse data used by Ptolemy and other Greek astronomers depended specifically on the surviving Babylonian eclipse texts arranged by Saros periods. Due to the lack of relevant historical sources and pertinent information in the available scientific sources, Steele has to proceed mainly by comparing the technical characteristics of the Babylonian originals with the extent of the data available to Ptolemy and Hipparchus and with the eclipse data represented on the geared astronomical device known as the Antikythera. On the one hand, he notes in his introduction that the well-established transmission of Babylonian observations, numerical parameters and tables to Greek astronomers must have taken place through direct contact, since the highly technical information and vocabulary on astronomical clay tablets would have been impossible to understand without explanation by a specialist. On the other hand, he shows how once the Saros eclipse texts had become available to Greek astronomers, their inherent structure and layout would have made it possible to establish all peculiarities of the Babylonian calendar that were needed to use the records. Thus he concludes that the format of the original records must have been available to Greek astronomers. Steele further argues that also the Antikythera shows a clear dependence on the ideas underlying the Babylonian eclipse texts for Saros periods, and that the various differences that can be seen in these two entirely different implementations are partially due to the special requirements induced by the geared mechanism and partially to different astronomical interests by the Greek astronomers.

Kim Plofker (Union College, Schenectady NY) investigates the transformation of a very subtle characteristic of scientific knowledge in her article ‘Yavana’ and ‘Indian’: transmission and foreign identity in the exact sciences. She relates how, in spite of the traditional tendency to exclude the foreign from Indian religion and culture, the Sanskrit label ‘Yavana’ (from Greek ‘Ionian’) was explicitly attached to the elements of Greek horoscopic astrology that, together with Greek terminology, were adopted into the jyotiṣa literature in the early first millennium. However, in the case of Greek mathematical astronomy, which was transmitted along the same paths at the same time, such labelling was much rarer. The process of the appropriation by Indian scholars of Arabic and Persian mathematical, astronomical and astrological knowledge starting in the 13th century shows similar features, again using the word ‘Yavana’, which by that time had become to stand for any foreigner. Plofker suggests some possible reasons for the differences in treatment of the foreign knowledge by comparing it with the way in which certain Indian mathematical features (Hindu numerals, Indian circle) were transmitted to Islam with the label ‘Hindu’, whereas others (iteration methods, parameters, sine) were not.

Hidemi Takahashi (University of Tokyo), in his article The mathematical sciences in Syriac. From Sergius of Resh-‘Aina and Severus Sebokht to Barhebraeus and Patriarch Ni‘matallah, presents an overview of a fairly little-known category of mathematical and astronomical sources that played a significant role in the transmission between Greek and Arabic, namely those written in Syriac. He explains the importance of Syriac scholars in the translation movement in 9th century Baghdad, and indicates that a careful investigation of the vocabulary used in the earliest Arabic translations of Greek scientific works shows that the translators must have had earlier Syriac translations at their disposal. He therefore expresses the expectation that a detailed study of, for example, the extant works of Severus Sebokht may lead to a better understanding of the process by which an Indo-European body of knowledge came to develop in a Semitic idiom. Takahashi not only describes the relatively small number of Syriac sources that are extant, but also shows how a detailed comparison of later Syriac works with their Arabic sources makes it possible to recover elements of lost treatises in Syriac. He draws attention to a significant difference between the situation of Syriac scholars and those in Greek and Islamic societies, namely the absence of a Syriac state with a court bureaucracy that could have been instrumental in the preservation of materials in Syriac.

Peter Pormann (Warwick University), in his paper The formation of the Arabic pharmacology. Between tradition and innovation, deals with a range of issues related to the development of Arabic pharmacology. He describes how Arab scholars, on the one hand, adopted the Greek system of humoral pathology, but on the other introduced important and influential innovations in almost every aspect of this system. Between the earliest Arabic translations of the works of Dioscorides and Galen in the 8th century and those by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq in the second half of the 9th century, they developed a full-blown Arabic terminology, which incorporated elements not only from the Greek, but also from Syriac and Persian. This process, as indicated by Takahashi, can be followed in detail thanks to the identification by Ullmann of a number of essentially different early Arabic translations of a work by Galen and a comparison with a surviving Syriac translation. These works show a gradual development from transliterations of Greek terms together with Arabic translations towards pure Arabic terms (including in some cases literal translations from the Greek). A further transformation of Arabic pharmacology took place during the following centuries: Avicenna expanded the Greek ‘degrees of powers’ of drugs to a much wider range of simple drugs, and al-Kindī devised a system that made it possible to determine the degrees of compound drugs from their constituents. Furthermore, Arab pharmacologists introduced new drugs prepared from plants found only in Islamic lands or on the basis of medicinal substances imported from the East, especially India.

David Juste (University of Sydney), in his article Non-transferable knowledge: Arabic and Hebrew onomancy into Latin, treats aspects of the transmission of methods of onomancy, a peculiar type of divination involving numerical values attached to the letters of a name. In his case, language is not only a vehicle that is used to render ideas and vocabulary, as in the studies by Takahashi and Pormann, but the alphabets involved are at the very core of the topic. Because of the structural similarities between the Greek and Arabic alphabets, scholars working in Arabic were able to design an alphanumerical system parallel to that used in Greek. But the transfer of methods of onomancy into Latin required solutions for the significant differences between the Latin and Arabic (or Hebrew) alphabets. Juste presents four such solutions as found in the astrological corpus Alchandreana (10th century), which appear in a number of variants depending on whether they were designed for use with a cycle of seven or nine planets or the 28 lunar mansions. All this caused considerable confusion and ambiguity in the transmitted onomantic procedures.

Martin Gansten and Ola Wikander (Lund University, Sweden) investigate in their article Sahl and the Tājika Yogas: Indian transformations of Arabic astrology the origin of the Indian system of 16 planetary configurations (called yogas) as found in works by Nilakaṇṭha (1587) and his contemporary Gaṇeśa Daivajña. This system is a variation of the Greek system of planetary aspects, and the authors establish the direct source of the two Indian authors as the Kitāb al-aḥkām alā 'l-niṣba al-falakiyya (known as Introductorium) by Sahl ibn Bishr (Zahel, fl. first half of the 9th century). This becomes particularly clear from a comparison of the names of the 16 configurations in the original Arabic and their Sanskrit transliterations, which shows that a misreading of the Arabic led to the addition of an additional configuration in the Indian sources, for which new characteristics had to be defined. The Indian texts are obviously not direct translations of Sahl's work, so the authors compare the descriptions and examples of the configurations in Arabic and Sanskrit, using both technical and linguistic arguments. They conclude that some further, smaller changes in other configurations point to the use of an intermediate copy or translation of Sahl's text.

Notes

¹See, for example, David Pingree, ‘Indian influence on Sasanian and Early Islamic astronomy and astrology’, The Journal of Oriental Research, 34–35 (1964–1966 (1973)), 118–126; David Pingree, ‘The fragments of the works of Yaqūb ibn Ṭāriq’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 26 (1968), 97–125; David Pingree, ‘The fragments of the works of al-Fazārī’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 29 (1970), 103–123; Heinrich Suter, Die astronomischen Tafeln des Muḥammed ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī in der Bearbeitung des Maslama ibn Aḥmed al-Madjrīṭī und der latein. Uebersetzung des Athelhard von Bath (Copenhagen (Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab), 1914); and Otto Neugebauer, The Astronomical Tables of al-Khwārizmī. Translation with Commentaries of the Latin Version edited by H. Suter supplemented by Corpus Christi College MS 283, (Copenhagen (Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab), 1962). More generally, see also D. Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology. From Babylon to Bīnāker (Rome (Istituto italiano per l'Africa et l'Oriente), 1997).

²See Edward S. Kennedy, ‘A Survey of Islamic Astronomical Tables’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 46–2 (1956), 123–77; and David A. King, Julio Samsó, and Bernard R. Goldstein, ‘Astronomical handbooks and tables from the Islamic world (750–1900): an interim report’, Suhayl, 2 (2001), 9–105. A new survey of Islamic astronomical handbooks with tables is in preparation by the present author.

³Otto Neugebauer and Olaf Schmidt, ‘Hindu Astronomy at Newminster in 1428’, Annals of Science, 8 (1952), 221–228.

⁴See Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbāsid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries) (London (Routledge), 1998); various articles in Mohammad Abbatouy, Jürgen Renn, and Paul Weinig (eds.), Transmission as Transformation: The Translation Movements in the Medieval East and West in a Comparative Perspective, special issue of Science in Context, 14 (2001), 1–311; and Sonja Brentjes, ‘Textzeugen und Hypothesen zum arabischen Euklid in der Überlieferung von al-ḥağğāğ b. Yūsuf b. Maṭar (zwischen 786 und 833)’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 47 (1994), 53–92.

⁵See Charles Burnett (ed.), Adelard of Bath. An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century (London (Warburg Institute), 1987); Charles Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages. The Translators and Their Intellectual and Social Context (Farnham, UK (Ashgate-Variorum), 2009); various articles in Abbatouy et al. (note 4); and Menso Folkerts, Euclid in Medieval Europe (Winnipeg (Benjamin Catalogue for History of Science), 1989).

⁶See, for example, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, ‘Mosul and Frederick II Hohenstaufen: Notes on Atīraddīn al-Abharī and Sirâğaddīn al-Urmawī’, in: Draelants et al. (note 7), 145–163; and Matthias Schramm, ‘Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and Arabic Science’, in: Abbatouy et al. (note 4), 289–312.

⁷See Isabelle Draelants, Anne Tihon & Baudoin van den Abeele (eds.), Occident et Proche-Orient: Contacts scientifiques au temps des Croisades. Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 24 et 25 mars 1997 (Turnhout (Brepols), 2000).

⁸See Paul Kunitzsch, ‘Das Fixsternverzeichnis in der “Persischen Syntaxis” des Georgios Chrysokokkes’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 57 (1964), 382–411; David Pingree, The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades. Volume I, The Zîj al- Alā ī, 2 parts (Amsterdam (Gieben), 1985–86); and Anne Tihon, Études d'astronomie byzantine (Aldershot, UK (Variorum), 1994).

⁹See, for example, Michael H. Shank, ‘The Classical Tradition in 15th-Century Vienna’, in: Ragep et al. (note 12), 115–36. For the influence that Islamic astronomical works may have had on Copernicus, see, among others, Jamil F. Ragep, ‘Copernicus and his Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks’, History of Science, 45 (2007), 65–81; and George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA (MIT Press), 2007).

¹⁰See also various relevant contributions in the following proceedings of conferences on transmission: Ahmad Hasnawi, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, and Maroun Aouad (eds.), Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique grecque. Actes du colloque de la SIHSPAI (Societé internationale d'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie arabes et islamiques), Paris, 31 mars - 3 avril 1993 (Leuven (Peeters)/Paris (Institut du Monde Arabe), 1997); Dominique Tournès (ed.), L'océan Indien au carrefour des mathématiques arabes, chinoises, européennes et indiennes. Actes du colloque, Saint-Denis, La Réunion, 3–7 novembre 1997 (Saint-Denis (Publication de l'I.U.F.M. de la Réunion), 1998); and Yvonne Dold-Samplonius, Joseph W. Dauben, Menso Folkerts, and Benno van Dalen (eds.), From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas (Stuttgart (Steiner), 2002).

¹¹A.I. Sabra, ‘The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: a Preliminary Statement’, History of Science, 25 (1987), 223–43. Reprinted in Ragep et al. (note 12), 3–27.

¹²F. Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, and Steven Livesey (eds.), Tradition, Transmission, Transformation. Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma (Leiden (Brill), 1996).

¹³Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie Fumo and Carlos Fraenkel (eds.), Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture (Turnhout (Brepols), 2011). The proceedings of a second conference in Montreal on ‘Agents of Transmission, Translation and Transformation’ (2010) are in preparation. Several of these themes have been summarised, in respect to the translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin, in Charles Burnett's contribution to the Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science (eds. David Lindberg and Michael Shank) (Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), 2012), which includes sections on ‘goals’, ‘Greek or Arabic’, ‘sources’, ‘patrons’, ‘translators’ and ‘techniques’.

¹⁴The conference Between Orient and Occident. Transformation of Knowledge was organized as part of the project ‘Wissenstransfer zwischen Orient und Okzident’, which was granted under the ‘initiative of excellence’ of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Generous financial support for the conference was granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and additional funding was kindly provided by the Münchener Universitätsgesellschaft. I would like to thank all members of the Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften of Munich University for their support in the various stages of the organisation of the conference.