The atlas of carried books
Every classical text that survives was carried.
Across 28 centuries, books crossed from Greek and Sanskrit into Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Castilian. Each crossing was a decision by a person with a name. This atlas maps who moved which book, where, when, and on what evidence; the companion book, Carried Across, makes the argument, and Falsafa's whole design follows from it.
- Works
- 27
- Crossings
- 77
- Carriers
- 99
- Languages
- 13
- Places
- 21
- Sources
- 69
The chains
Iliad
The wrath of Achilles, sung before Greece could write it down. The founding epic of European literature waited two thousand years for a complete Western translation.
Greek Latin EnglishOdyssey
The homecoming epic, carried west in the same Florentine project that moved the Iliad, and re-voiced in English in every century since.
Greek Latin EnglishThe Histories
The display of Herodotus's inquiry, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time. Valla carried him into Latin in the same papal project that moved Thucydides.
Greek Latin EnglishHistory of the Peloponnesian War
The war that broke the Greek world, written to be useful forever. Its English chain begins with Thomas Hobbes, who translated it as a warning.
Greek Latin EnglishAphorisms
The most memorized text of ancient medicine, beginning with the most famous sentence in it: life is short, the art long. Medical students recited it in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin for over two thousand years.
Greek Arabic LatinRepublic
The design of the just city and the just soul. The Arabs philosophized with it secondhand; the West got it whole only when Ficino's Latin Plato was printed in 1484.
Greek Latin EnglishOn the Soul
Aristotle's treatise on what it is to be alive: nutrition, perception, imagination, intellect. Its third book, on the intellect, became the most fought-over text in medieval philosophy, in Arabic and then in Latin.
Greek Arabic Latin HebrewTopics
Aristotle's manual of dialectic: how to argue from accepted opinions without contradicting yourself. Exactly the tool a caliph needed for staged interreligious debate, which is how it got its Arabic commission.
Greek Syriac ArabicNicomachean Ethics
Aristotle's lectures on the good life, which entered Arabic in the Hunayn workshop's orbit and reached complete Latin through a bishop of Lincoln.
Greek Arabic Latin EnglishElements
The axiomatic compilation of Greek geometry and number theory, and the most reprinted scientific text ever written. For most of its history, readers west of Byzantium met it through Arabic.
Greek Arabic LatinManusmriti
The ordinances of Manu: dharma codified. Its English chain begins with a Calcutta judge who needed the law he was supposed to administer.
Sanskrit EnglishDe Rerum Natura
Epicurus in Latin verse: atoms, void, and freedom from fear. The book slept through the Middle Ages in a few Carolingian copies until a papal secretary found one in 1417.
Latin EnglishAeneid
Rome's founding epic, never lost and never done: every age of English has felt obliged to make its own.
Latin EnglishDe Materia Medica
The Greek catalogue of drugs and the plants, minerals and animals they come from, in continuous medical use longer than almost any book ever written. Its Arabic career needed two cities and a diplomatic incident.
Greek ArabicAlmagest
Ptolemy's mathematical model of the heavens, completed in Alexandria around 150 CE. Even its common name records the crossing: Almagest is Latin for al-Majisti, the Arabic rendering of a Greek superlative, 'the greatest'.
Greek Arabic LatinOn Simple Drugs
Galen's eleven-book theory of what individual drugs do and why. It stands here for the whole Galenic corpus, whose passage through Syriac into Arabic was the largest single undertaking of the translation movement.
Greek Syriac ArabicEnneads
Plotinus' collected treatises, edited after his death by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. In Arabic, selections from the last three Enneads circulated under the wrong name, as the Theology of Aristotle, and that error organized centuries of philosophy.
Greek ArabicPanchatantra
The Sanskrit mirror for princes told through animal fables, traditionally ascribed to the sage Vishnu Sharma. The surviving text dates to around 300 CE; the material is older. No secular book before print crossed more languages.
Sanskrit Middle Persian Syriac Arabic Hebrew Castilian LatinBrahmasphutasiddhanta
Brahmagupta's treatise of 628: planetary astronomy, and the first surviving systematic arithmetic of zero and negative numbers. Its school's methods reached Baghdad with an Indian embassy and became the Arabic Sindhind tradition.
Sanskrit Arabic LatinAlgebra
Al-Khwarizmi's compendium on solving equations by completion and balancing, written in Baghdad with al-Ma'mun's encouragement. The discipline it founded still carries the first noun of its title: al-jabr, algebra.
Arabic LatinCanon of Medicine
Ibn Sina's complete system of medicine, begun at Jurjan, continued at Rayy and finished at Hamadan around 1024, in the gaps of a political career. In Latin it organized European medical teaching into the 17th century.
Arabic Latin HebrewAims of the Philosophers
Al-Ghazali's lucid survey of the philosophers' doctrines, adapted from Ibn Sina's Persian. Tradition read it as the warm-up for his demolition of those same doctrines in the Incoherence of the Philosophers; recent scholarship questions that tidy story. Latin Europe read it without the ending either way.
Arabic LatinHayy ibn Yaqzan
A philosophical novel about a child who grows up alone on an island and reasons his way, unaided, to physics, metaphysics and God. Written in 12th-century al-Andalus; rediscovered by 17th-century Europe at exactly the moment Europe was arguing about innate ideas.
Arabic Latin Dutch EnglishReclamation of the Freedom of Thought
Fichte's anonymous 1793 speech demanding back the freedom of thought from the princes of Europe, quoting Rousseau that every honest man must acknowledge what he has written.
German EnglishDiwan-e-Ghalib
The published divan of the greatest Urdu ghazal poet, translated in parts for a century and a half by everyone who loved it, and carried here entire.
Urdu EnglishTraité de législation
Comte's four-volume study of how laws actually shape peoples, written by a man the Restoration's censors had already chased across two borders.
French EnglishNouveau traité d'économie sociale
Dunoyer's treatise on liberty as the condition of all production, the other half of the Censeur project, untranslated for as long as its twin.
French EnglishOr follow the people: the carriers, the cities, the languages, and the whole relay on one timeline.
The grades
In hadith scholarship a report is only as strong as its isnad, the chain of named people who carried it. The atlas borrows that standard: every link names its carriers and cites the scholarship in the bibliography, and every link carries a grade. Where the record is thin, the atlas says so instead of smoothing it over. The method, and what the checking changed, is on the about page; the data model is on the ontology page.
For machine readers
The dataset is open (CC BY 4.0) and machine-legible: every work, carrier and place
page has a markdown sibling (append .md to the URL), and the full graph
ships at /atlas/graph.json. The same discipline runs
the rest of Falsafa; see the engine room.