To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

Al-Mamun sent a mission to Constantinople that brought back manuscripts in Greek. The delegation probably included the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the greatest of the ninth-century translators, who founded a dynasty of translators, training his son and nephew to carry on the work. Hunayn translated works of Plato and Aristotle, as well as medical texts of Dioscorides, Galen, and Hippocrates. Mathematical works of Euclid, Ptolemy, and others were also translated into Arabic at Baghdad, some through Syriac intermediaries. The historian Philip Hitti has nicely contrasted the state of learning at this time at Baghdad with the illiteracy of Europe in the early Middle Ages: “For while in the East al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy, their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names.”