[First posted in AWOL 14 October 2016, updated 15 May 2022]
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies
Between the 8th and 10th centuries CE, hundreds of
Greek philosophical, medical and scientific works were translated into
Arabic. These translations helped shape the development of philosophy
and science in the Islamic world. Through later Latin translations, they
also exerted some influence in the Latin West.
Most importantly, Arabic translations were crucial
for preserving, transmitting and extending ancient Greek thought: many
Greek texts were lost in the intervening centuries and are now only
extant in Arabic translation. The Arabic translators also had access to
manuscripts that were often several centuries older and potentially
closer to the Greek originals than those available to editors of ancient
Greek texts today.
The Arabic translators’ understanding of their Greek
sources was informed by their historical, cultural, religious and
linguistic background. Their reading of these texts offers a new
perspective on the ancient world that has the potential to enhance our
own understanding.
The Digital Corpus, which currently has ca. 1.2M
Arabic and 3.3M Greek words, consists of about 230 texts, three fifths
of which are Greek and the rest Arabic. The texts range in length from a
couple of pages to several hundred pages, and they represent more than
180 works by 28 authors. In addition to Greek and Arabic primary
sources, the corpus also contains a number of important Arabic secondary
sources, mainly commentaries on ancient Greek writings, important
secondary works and major bio-bibliographical sources.
The choice of texts was mainly determined by three
factors: the importance of their authors for the Greek-Arabic
translation movement; the availability of printed editions; and the
copyright status of these editions. The corpus therefore consists for
the most part of editions of major authors that were easily accessible
and not subject to copyright restrictions. The most important sources
for Greek texts were the complete editions of Galen by Karl Gottlob Kühn
(1821–1833), of Hippocrates by Émile Littré (1839–1861) and of
Aristotle by Immanuel Bekker (1831).
The texts assembled in the corpus cover a wide range
of subjects, but as a result of availability and copyright
considerations, philosophical and medical works, especially by
Aristotle, Galen and Hippocrates, are particularly prominent. The corpus
also contains a sizable sample of mathematical texts. Other fields
represented by one or more texts are astronomy, biology, zoology and
psychology as well as doxography.
Modern editors of most of the Arabic translations
included in the corpus have attempted to ascribe or at least date these
texts based on internal (style, terminology etc.) and external evidence
(information from bio-bibliographical sources etc.) According to these
ascriptions, the translators that worked at the height of the
translation movement during the second half of the eighth and the
beginning of the ninth century are particularly well represented in the
corpus, most importantly the members of the circle of translators
working with Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 873). They created almost all of the
medical texts in the corpus, a substantial part of the Aristotelian
Organon and a number of texts by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Earlier and
later phases of the translation movement, however, are also well
represented, e.g. through translations of Alexander of Aphrodisias,
parts of Aristotle’s Organon and his zoological writings and many of the
pseudonymous texts.
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