"Masarjis" the Jew, known as "Yahya ibn Masarjawayh" the Syrian, had translated the medical work (the Pandects of Aaron) by the Christian priest and Alexandrian physician Aaron from Syriac into Arabic; it is among the oldest Arabic medical compositions.

"Meyerhof" holds that this may have been written in Greek, then translated into Syriac, then into Arabic. He adds that Aaron's researches have not reached us, but it appears they contained the first description of smallpox, a disease that was unknown to ancient Greek medicine.

"Abu Yahya ibn al-Bitriq" (d. 796 or 806) is regarded as among the earliest translators from Greek, and to him is attributed the translation of the works of Galen and Hippocrates and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos (the Book of the Four). As for Yahya (Yuhanna) ibn Masawayh, the Nestorian Syriac, who died (243 / 857), a pupil of Jibril ibn Bakhtishu and a teacher of Hunayn ibn Ishaq, he undertook, at the command of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the translation of the ancient books found in Ankara and Amorium, most of them on medicine.

Yahya was thoroughly versed in Syriac and Arabic and composed skillfully in both, and he had a firm command of Greek as well. The Nestorian physician Abu Zayd Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi (d. 263 AH / 876) at first studied under the aforementioned Yahya ibn Masawayh, and worked in his pharmacy; then, in Baghdad, after mastering the Greek language and studying medicine in Alexandria, he made contact with Jibril ibn Bakhtishu, who recommended him to al-Ma'mun to direct the House of Wisdom. Hunayn, together with his son Ishaq and his sister's son Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan al-A'sam, carried out the translation from Greek into Syriac, while Ishaq and Hubaysh most often undertook the rendering of what had been translated from Syriac into Arabic. The work of these three was not confined to translating the Greek books with precision and care alone; they also oversaw, as opportunity allowed, the translations of others—such as the translations of Isa ibn Yahya and Musa ibn Khalid (who translated from Persian)—correcting and verifying the translations, which is what is known today as revision.

The people of Baghdad recognized in Hunayn ibn Ishaq—as Dr. Muhammad Kamil Husayn points out—his great service to their renaissance, and they esteemed him most highly; he reached the utmost of scholarly glory and became the supreme authority for all translators. An indication of this is that a man named Istifan ibn Basil translated the book of Dioscorides on materia medica, the Pharmacopoeia, and presented the book to Hunayn, who approved it.

Perhaps many translators used to do this, so that Hunayn's approval of a given translation was the best proof of its soundness.

Hunayn translated Aristotle's commentary (the Hermeneutica) into Syriac, and his son rendered it into Arabic; Hunayn translated Euclid and all the works of Galen and Hippocrates, and to him is due also the credit for producing the Arabic translation of the Pharmacopoeia of Dioscorides. The English orientalist "Rom Landau" holds that these translations alone point to Hunayn's active, vital interest in medicine. But this interest is confirmed above all by his many compositions on medical subjects, the most famous of which are his book (Questions on Medicine) and his book (A Treatise on the Eye), which is regarded as the first systematic book on ophthalmology. He also translated Archimedes and Apollonius, and translated as well Plato's Republic and Plato's Timaeus, and Aristotle's Categories, Physics, and Magna Moralia, and Themistius's commentaries on Book Thirty of the Metaphysics. He also translated the Book of Minerals attributed to Aristotle, which was for a long time regarded as an authority in chemistry, and he translated the medical treatises, the Epidemics[?].

Ibn al-Nadim mentions, in the course of his account of the translators and the interest in the sciences and translation: (Muhammad ibn Ishaq said: Among those who devoted themselves to bringing out the books from the land of the Byzantines were Muhammad, Ahmad, and al-Hasan, the sons of Shakir the astronomer—whose account will come hereafter; they expended lavish sums and dispatched Hunayn ibn Ishaq and others to the land of the Byzantines, and they brought them back rare books and marvelous compositions in philosophy, geometry, music, arithmetic, and medicine; and Qusta ibn Luqa al-Ba'labakki had produced something, which he rendered for him).

Ishaq ibn Hunayn produced, alongside original compositions of his own on medicine—as O'Leary mentions—Arabic translations such as Plato's Sophist, and Aristotle's Metaphysics, On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, and On Interpretation (or the Commentary), which Hunayn had translated into Syriac. His son also translated some of the commentaries of Porphyry, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Ammonius. Philip Hitti observed that Bar Hebraeus and al-Qifti agreed that Hunayn was a fountainhead of knowledge and a mine of virtues, and "Leclerc" said of him: "He was the greatest figure of the ninth century... He had one of the finest minds and a character among the best we know in history."

The most important of Hunayn's works is his translation of all the writings of Galen into Syriac, then into Arabic. The Greek originals of seven of Galen's books on anatomy have been lost, but they are, fortunately, preserved in the Arabic language.

The Syrian physician Qusta ibn Luqa al-Ba'labakki (204 AH / 820 – 299 AH / 912), who was renowned in philosophy, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music, devoted himself to rendering the Greek works that he had brought from Central Asia—as Ibn al-Nadim noted above. He was a physician and worked at the making of astronomical instruments. Among his compositions are (The Burning Mirrors) and (Greek Agriculture). Qusta rendered into Arabic in particular the books specializing in mathematics and astronomy.

Ibn al-Nadim said of him: (excellent in translation, eloquent in the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic tongues; he translated many things, and corrected many translations.) In Harran—which inherited, as we have seen, the scientific glories of Alexandria in philosophy and medicine after Antioch—there arose the physician, philosopher, and mathematician[?] Thabit ibn Qurra (222 AH / 836 – 288 AH / 901).

The brothers, the sons of Musa, had the credit of introducing him to the caliphs. He was the head of the community of pagans who worshipped the stars and the wandering planets (hence the community's long-standing attention to astrology, astronomy, and mathematics). To Thabit, to his son Sinan (d. 331 AH / 943), to his two grandsons Thabit (d. 362 AH / 973) and Ibrahim (d. 334 AH / 946), and to his great-grandson known as Abu al-Faraj—to all of these is attributed the credit for translating the greater part of the Greek books on mathematics and astronomy... among them the works of Archimedes (d. 212 BC) and Apollonius (born around 262 BC), which became wellsprings for the pioneering Arab and Muslim astronomers and mathematicians.

Thabit and the members of his family—the scholarly translators—were distinguished by their advancement in both translation and science alike, and they rendered service to science by refining the earlier translations. The translation of Euclid, for example and not by way of limitation, which Hunayn had carried out earlier, was refined at Thabit's hands. It was granted to Thabit to excel in the scientific fields to which he contributed, thanks to the scientific spirit with which he was endowed. He was learned in the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic languages, and produced many books in logic, mathematics, astrology, and medicine, and likewise on the rites and beliefs of paganism, in which he continued to believe.

Among the earliest translators of the mathematical and astronomical sciences in the school of Harran was al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar (who flourished between 786 and 833[?]), and to him is attributed the first translation of Euclid's Elements of Geometry and one of the earliest translations of Ptolemy's Almagest.

Ibn al-Nadim says: al-Hajjaj ibn Matar rendered [works] for al-Ma'mun, and he is the one who translated the Almagest and Euclid. As for the book—the Elements of Geometry—it appears that it was translated twice, once for al-Rashid and once for al-Ma'mun, and this before Hunayn's translation. Al-Hajjaj produced the Arabic text of the famous Almagest on astronomy in the year 826–830, relying on a Syriac translation.

Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d. 328 AH / 939) was among the Nestorian translators from Syriac; he translated into Arabic Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Poetics, the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias on On Generation and Corruption, and Themistius's commentary on Book Thirty of the Metaphysics. All of these were translated from Syriac copies, and he did not content himself with translation, but also composed original commentaries on Aristotle's Categories and on Porphyry's Isagoge.

The Syriac Orthodox came to prominence in the latter part of the tenth century as translators from Syriac into Arabic. Among them was Hunayn's pupil Yahya ibn Adi al-Takriti (born in Takrit 280 AH / 893, died in Baghdad 364 AH / 974).

Yahya revised many of the existing translations and produced translations of Aristotle's Categories, Sophistical Refutations, Poetics, and Metaphysics; he also translated Plato's Laws and Timaeus, as well as the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias—already mentioned in the discussion of Matta ibn Yunus—on the Categories, and the commentaries of Theophrastus on the Ethics.

The leadership of his religious community devolved upon Yahya. Among the Jacobite translators was Abu Ali Isa ibn Zur'a (398 AH / 1008), born in Baghdad. He translated the Categories, the Natural History, and On the Parts of Animals, together with the commentary of John Philoponus, or Yahya the Grammarian.

These are a select group of the translators and scholars who contributed diligently and attentively to the transmission of the scientific heritage, and who at times were creative in the sciences and branches of knowledge within their specialties—which, together with other factors, helped the Arabs and Muslims toward civilizational interaction in the Middle Ages.

In the next issue you will read about Ahiqar