Sailing from Byzantium (17 page)

The scholars, an-Nadim tells us, belonged to the “House of Wisdom,” which modern historians have long taken as an organized research institution that al-Mamun established especially for the task of translating Greek texts into Arabic. Recent research has cast some doubt on this picture—the fabled “House of Wisdom” may have been conjured up by later writers such as an-Nadim as they tried to explain a translation movement that went back much further than al-Mamun. Al-Mamun traditionally gets the lion's share of the credit, but this research suggests that it was al-Mansur who inaugurated the first systematic attempts to make ancient Greek learning available to the Arabs. And the translators themselves were part of a movement to translate Greek literature that was already well established under the Sas-sanid Persians, long before the Arabs arrived.
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An-Nadim's and other similar accounts probably tell us more about how later generations looked back on the origins of the translation movement, which played a central role in early Abbasid society, than they do about those origins themselves. One thing that stands out in them is the idea of Byzantium as the repository of reason's ancient secrets. Whether or not these accounts are historically accurate in their portrayal of the House of Wisdom, in a larger sense they idealized Byzantium itself as a House of Wisdom for the questing and curious civilization that had, by their own era, clearly emerged in Islamic lands.

The translators who did this work were not Byzantines, but they came from a culture whose roots went back to Byzantium. They were Syrians, members of Christian traditions that had been excluded or suppressed by the Byzantines’ increasingly narrow, intolerant piety. The schools in which these translators learned Greek also owed their origins to Byzantium, since most of them were based on the school of Alexandria in Egypt, which before the Arab conquest was the capital of secular learning in the Roman and Byzantine world. Much of the translation work took place in Baghdad, but the translators received their training in this network of schools.

The greatest of them was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, born near Baghdad in 808 and known to the West as Johannitius. His name would become linked in the
Fihrist
and other later sources with the House of Wisdom, and most modern accounts follow these sources in portraying Hunayn as taking daring field trips to Byzantium from the House of Wisdom in order to acquire precious Greek manuscripts.

But in fact he himself never mentions going to any specific Byzantine territory by name, though later sources have him going at one point “to the land of the Greeks.” This could mean Byzantium, or it could mean a city such as Alexandria. He does write about wide-ranging journeys to lands the Arabs had conquered from the Byzantines, such as a trip he took in order to find a good manuscript of Galen's
On Demonstration:
“I traveled in its search in northern Mesopotamia, all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt until I reached Alexandria. I found nothing except about half of it, in disorder and incomplete, in Damascus.”
^∗
Nor does he ever mention the House of Wisdom, as he almost surely would have done had he worked there.

Hunayn's family were Nestorians, Christians whose distinctive religious outlook had originated in Byzantium with a fifth-century bishop named Nestorius. Nestorius had been embroiled in the controversies over the nature of Christ that were raging through the church at the time, and had settled on a position that, like that of the Arians, emphasized Christ's humanity, and that was eventually rejected by the Orthodox as heretical. It stood in distinction to the position of the Monophysites, who emphasized Christ's divinity. Nestorian beliefs, like Monophysite ones, were popular in eastern parts of the empire, especially among Syrians and Egyptians. Orthodox authorities persecuted Nestorians along with Monophysites in Syria, as well as in Egypt and elsewhere.

Most of the Nestorian Syrians ended up leaving Byzantium for Persia. There these religious refugees found a warm
welcome from the Sassanids, who were happy to have an alternative and rival version of Christianity to throw up against the Byzantines. In time Nestorian missionaries spread their version of Christianity far into Central Asia and even China, where Nestorian communities existed into the eleventh century. In contrast to the Nestorians, most Syrian Monophysites stayed within Byzantine borders, though their homelands, too, eventually fell to the Arab conquest.

The Nestorians, then, were descended from Byzantine Syrians who had settled in Persian Iraq before it was conquered by the Arabs. Up to the conquest, the Syrians had been one of Byzantium's dominant ethnic groups, and they remained important after it, though the bulk of the Syrian population now lived in the conquered areas. By Hunayn's day most spoke Persian as a first language, but like Hunayn many would have grown up comfortable also in Syriac and perhaps also Greek, both of which were used in liturgy, and in Arabic, the language of the governing class with which they were so closely associated.

In Hunayn's time, learned Syrians—and there were many of them—considered themselves descended from the ancient Babylonians or, alternatively, from the Assyrians, both of whose empires had contested over the Fertile Crescent before the rise of Persia. But Syrians were related to the Arabs, and their native language, Syriac, was a Semitic language (like Arabic and Hebrew) that had evolved from Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Syriac's similarity to Arabic would play a key role in the translations, since it meant that relatively little effort was needed to render into Arabic a Greek work that already existed in Syriac. It took much more effort to sit down and make an original translation directly from Greek into Arabic, with the result that the majority of
Greek works that made it into Arabic went through the middle stage of Syriac.

Starting in the fifth and sixth centuries, the religious controversies and later the missions to the East spurred demand among Syrians for religious texts in their own language. The early translators focused mostly on biblical and patristic writings. Long before the Arab conquests, as they developed a stronger tradition of translation from Greek into Syriac, they branched into secular learning as well, and Greek literary forms deeply shaped their own emerging literature.

Hunayn may have been the star translator, but he was certainly not alone. Moving back in time, a sampling of his illustrious predecessors might include the eighth-century Nestorian patriarch Timothy I, a learned bibliophile who translated Aristotle's
Topics
and other works for the Ab-basids, reinvigorated the Nestorian clergy, and brought the missionary effort to its high point; Jacob of Edessa, a seventh-century Nestorian bishop who (like many of these figures) studied Greek in Alexandria; and Jacob's teacher Severus of Nisibis, the leading Syrian intellectual of the seventh century, another polymath Nestorian bishop, translator, astronomer, and logician, fluent in Greek and Persian but proud of his Syrian culture to the point of chauvinism.

The Syrians had an abiding sense of their own place at the center of the universe. In late antiquity the stereotypical holy man was a Syrian, such as the fifth-century Symeon the Stylite, who lived in contemplative seclusion outside the Syrian city of Antioch—first in a dry cistern, then chained to a rock in a little cell, and finally on a tiny platform at the top of a fifty-foot-high column or
stylos.
This famous Christian ascetic attracted pilgrims from as far away as Britain, Gaul, and Spain in the West to Armenia and Persia in the East.

They wanted to touch him, which was partly why he kept adding to the height of the column, which had originally been much shorter, erected to remove him first from the world of sin and only later from his fans as well. Symeon set a fashion in asceticism. Monk-capped columns began popping up like toadstools, which they resembled.

This was the world of the Hellenized Syrians—brilliant, polyglot, devout, and assuming more than its share of cosmic entitlement. For the Abbasids, the Syrians made up a preexisting, accessible pool of talent and knowledge in Greek studies. They would always constitute the core group of translators in the translation movement.

By the time of the Arab conquests, the Hellenized Syrians enjoyed an extensive network of monasteries and schools in the conquered areas, and these schools would make up the most important institutional framework for the transmission of secular Greek learning to the Arabs. In contrast with broke and battered Byzantium, the Fertile Crescent under the Arabs was dotted with prosperous, well-established Syrian schools that offered Greek studies. The heirs of Alexandria itself, they constituted the leading centers of Hellenism in the world. Each had its own specialties and traditions, from Antioch, Edessa, and Qinnasrin in the west, to Nisibis and Mosul in Iraq, to the famous school at Jundi-Shapur to the east, deep in Iran. Though ultimately originating in the Byzantine cultural milieu, by the time of the conquest these schools were much more sophisticated than anything Constantinople could offer.

Most were Nestorian, and they had been strongly supported by the Sassanids. Nisibis, which had inherited leadership from Edessa in the fifth century, was the largest, and was considered the center of Nestorian culture. While theology took pride of place in all of them, the Nestorians
also gravitated to science and medicine, and it was these areas that drew the Sassanids’ and later the Abbasids’ support.

Under both regimes, the Nestorians held what amounted to a near monopoly on medicine. Hunayn's father, Ishaq, was a pharmacist, and Hunayn himself is reported to have studied medicine as a young man at Baghdad and Jundi-Shapur, where a renowned practicing hospital supplemented the coursework. Like Hunayn, whose own son Ishaq ibn Hunayn
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also became a famous translator, many of the leading translators belonged to families whose activities were passed on through generations. The leading Nestorian medical dynasty was that of the Bukhtishu, but others included the Masawayh, the al-Tayfuri, and the Serapion, tightly knit clans that were prominently associated with the school at Jundi-Shapur.

Since all the important medical writings were Greek, there was a logical connection between medicine and translation. But the same held true for other areas. In addition to medicine, students at the Nestorian schools could also take up philosophy, music, mathematics, geography, zoology, botany, meteorology, and astronomy, as well as basic grammar and rhetoric.

Hunayn's teacher in Baghdad was none other than al-Mamun's personal physician, a severe and sharp-tongued Nestorian named Yuhanna ibn Masawayh, scion of one of the leading dynasties. Yuhanna, who possessed what one can only hope was an unusually macabre and ironic sense of humor, glowers from the sources with the bedside manner of a peckish condor. He not only protested against the caliphal ban on dissection for medical purposes, but nominated his
own son, whose intellectual prowess apparently fell short of Yuhanna's desires, as a candidate for vivisection:

Had it not been for the meddling of the ruler and his interference in what does not concern him, I would have dissected alive this son of mine, just as Galen used to dissect men and monkeys. As a result of dissecting him I would thus come to know the reasons for his stupidity, rid the world of his kind, and produce knowledge for people by means of what I would write in a book: the way in which his body is composed, and the course of his arteries, veins, and nerves. But the ruler prohibits this.

Offering scarcely more tolerance to the young Hunayn, whose endless questions irked him, Yuhanna in fact soon ended up angrily dismissing Hunayn from the medical school.

Hunayn is depicted in the sources as having spent the next few years traveling and studying Greek. His exact whereabouts during this sojourn are uncertain (this is when he is reported to have gone “to the land of the Greeks”), but when he reappeared in Baghdad, he'd got a good start in gaining the mastery of Greek that would eventually make him famous, to the point where he could supposedly recite passages of Homer from memory.

He was soon reconciled with his former teacher Yuhanna, who demonstrated the sincerity of both his change of heart and his anatomical curiosity by commissioning Hunayn to translate Galen's
On the Anatomy of Veins and Arteries
and
On the Anatomy of Nerves,
plus seven other Galenic works. Still, just to be on the safe side (and to avoid potential vivisection), Hunayn records that with these translations especially he “took pains to express the meaning as clearly as
possible; for this man likes plain expression and urges constantly in that direction.”

After studying Arabic in Basra and finishing his medical education at Jundi-Shapur, Hunayn returned to Baghdad, where he eventually won appointment to Yuhanna's old position, that of court physician, under one of al-Mamun's successors, al-Mutawakkil. All the time he continued with the translations, which were in high enough demand that professional translators like Hunayn could charge very handsome fees for their work. The demand came from the Abbasid court and its courtiers, from state and military officials, and from doctors, scientists, philosophers, and scholars. Like the translators themselves, many of the wealthiest patrons were members of dynasties whose patronage spanned generations. One such clan, the well-known Banu Musa or “sons of Musa,” is recorded as paying 500 dinars a month “for full-time translation,” which one scholar has worked out to about $24,000 in today's American dollars. At such rates the translation movement could and did attract the best talent, and the Banu Musa reportedly favored Hunayn, introducing him to al-Mamun and helping advance his career.

Hunayn is credited with literally hundreds of translations, from disciplines that included medicine, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, magic, and dream interpretation, and even a highly praised version of the Old Testament. He also wrote around a hundred works of his own, many summarizing his translations. Modern philologists have found Hunayn's techniques almost unbelievably advanced— essentially the same as those used today, though reinvented in the West nearly eight hundred years later by Lorenzo Valla and his successors. Textual critics have used many of Hunayn's translations to help restore the original Greek text in cases where no Greek manuscript survives.