Ancient Science · Part 26 · Late Alexandria · B2
What Happened Next: Baghdad, the Translators and the Road to Europe
Part 26 of Ancient Science, the last: how did the books of Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy reach us, when so much was lost? Sophia follows them to Baghdad, where they would be translated, corrected and added to, then on to Toledo and Sicily, where they would be put into Latin, and shows the long chain of people who kept them alive. Would, was to, was going to, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight is our last night with ancient science, and I want to answer the question we began with: how do we know any of this, when so many books were lost?
You said in the first lesson that some came back through Arabic.
I did. Tonight I will show you how. It is a story of a city that did not yet exist in your time, Baghdad, and of translators who would carry Greek books into Arabic, and later from Arabic into Latin.
Not everything. But far more than would otherwise have survived. Let me show you.
In 762 CE, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded a new capital on the river Tigris: Baghdad. Within a century it was one of the largest cities in the world. Its rulers and rich families paid scholars to find Greek books and translate them into Arabic: medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy.
Many of the translators were Christians who spoke Syriac, a form of Aramaic, and knew Greek. The most famous, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, translated much of Galen. He collected several copies of a book before translating it, compared them to find the best text, and translated the meaning rather than word by word.
Or try our free games and lessons.