Josephine Quinn at Literary Hub: In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).
The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralized government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.
The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the “Translation Movement” is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.
It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages—including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.
***
Back in Baghdad, as so often happened, cultural change began from the outside—and in this case with the collection and comparison of foreign knowledge. The fundamental model and first material for the Abbasid translation project came from Iran, where sixth-century Sasanian shahs had commissioned Persian translations of important Indian and Greek works.
Living Iranians were an inspiration too. Sasanian intellectual traditions had weathered the Arab conquest, and Persian remained a major Iranian language, but Persian scholars had already started to translate classic works of their own literature into Arabic.
This ensured their preservation, and advertised the history and high culture of Iranian lands. Sasanian intellectuals also maintained useful links with scientific traditions farther east, above all with Indian mathematicians, the most advanced in the ancient world, and they had already translated important works from Sanskrit into their own language.
The benefits for the Abbasid caliphs of engaging with Iranian traditions were not purely intellectual. It helped them establish roots for themselves in the old Sasanian territory of Mesopotamia that they now occupied; in a similar spirit they built Baghdad itself in 762 in the circular form characteristic of Sasanian cities.
Incorporating the work of Greek thinkers into the Arabic canon was by contrast a declaration of cultural hegemony over the rump Roman empire at Constantinople, where older learning had been set aside in favor of Christian genres from sermons to saints’ lives, and where ancient science and philosophy now moldered in archives and monasteries.
More here.
