{ "name": "Naql", "description": "An atlas of how books crossed languages.", "license": "CC BY 4.0", "stats": { "works": 27, "transmissions": 77, "people": 99, "languages": 13, "places": 21, "sources": 69, "earliestComposed": -750, "earliest": 300, "latest": 2026 }, "languages": [ { "id": "greek", "name": "Greek", "endonym": "Ἑλληνική", "script": "greek", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "grc", "hue": "#3d6b9e", "note": "The language most of this atlas flows out of. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics and astronomy were composed in it between the 5th century BCE and the 3rd century CE, then carried east before they were carried west." }, { "id": "sanskrit", "name": "Sanskrit", "endonym": "संस्कृतम्", "script": "devanagari", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "sa", "hue": "#a34a2a", "note": "The second great source language of the atlas. Indian astronomy and story literature entered the Islamic world through it, decades before most of the Greek corpus did." }, { "id": "middle-persian", "name": "Middle Persian", "endonym": "Pārsīg", "script": "pahlavi", "dir": "rtl", "bcp47": "pal", "hue": "#2e7d72", "note": "The court language of Sasanian Iran and the bridge between India and the Arabic world. Almost everything written in it is lost; its translations survive through their own descendants." }, { "id": "syriac", "name": "Syriac", "endonym": "ܣܘܪܝܝܐ", "script": "syriac", "dir": "rtl", "bcp47": "syc", "hue": "#74682a", "note": "The workshop language of the eastern churches. Syriac-speaking Christian physicians and monks made the first translations of Greek science, and the 9th-century Arabic translators often worked through Syriac rather than directly from Greek." }, { "id": "arabic", "name": "Arabic", "endonym": "العربية", "script": "arabic", "dir": "rtl", "bcp47": "ar", "hue": "#1f6b4a", "note": "The center of gravity. For about three centuries from the founding of Baghdad, Arabic absorbed Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit and Persian learning, reworked it, and became the language Europe translated science out of." }, { "id": "hebrew", "name": "Hebrew", "endonym": "עברית", "script": "hebrew", "dir": "rtl", "bcp47": "he", "hue": "#8a6420", "note": "Jewish translators in Iberia, Provence and Italy carried Arabic philosophy and medicine into Hebrew, and sometimes onward into Latin. Several Arabic works now survive in Hebrew better than in Arabic." }, { "id": "latin", "name": "Latin", "endonym": "Latina", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "la", "hue": "#7d2f35", "note": "The destination language of the 12th-century translation movement. Toledo, Sicily and Monte Cassino turned Arabic learning into the curriculum of the new European universities." }, { "id": "castilian", "name": "Castilian", "endonym": "Castellano", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "osp", "hue": "#b06c28", "note": "One of the first European vernaculars to translate directly from Arabic, at the court of Alfonso X of Castile and in the decades before his reign." }, { "id": "dutch", "name": "Dutch", "endonym": "Nederlands", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "nl", "hue": "#56683b", "note": "One crossing in this atlas, and a disputed one: the anonymous 1672 translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan associated with Spinoza's circle in Amsterdam." }, { "id": "english", "name": "English", "endonym": "English", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "en", "hue": "#4a5468", "note": "A late arrival. English readers met the Arabic philosophical tradition through 17th and 18th century Oxford and London, where this atlas currently ends." }, { "id": "french", "name": "French", "endonym": "français", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "fr", "hue": "#3d5a80", "note": "The language of the post-revolutionary political economy that Comte and Dunoyer wrote, and of the long nineteenth century in which their books stayed home." }, { "id": "german", "name": "German", "endonym": "Deutsch", "script": "latin", "dir": "ltr", "bcp47": "de", "hue": "#6b4d57", "note": "The language of the late Enlightenment pamphlet wars, including Fichte's anonymous defense of the freedom of thought." }, { "id": "urdu", "name": "Urdu", "endonym": "اردو", "script": "arabic", "dir": "rtl", "bcp47": "ur", "hue": "#2e6e5a", "note": "The court and street language of late Mughal Delhi, whose ghazal tradition reached its height with Ghalib and Zauq." } ], "places": [ { "id": "athens", "name": "Athens", "modern": "Athens, Greece", "note": "Aristotle taught at the Lyceum here in the 4th century BCE. The school texts that came out of it spent the next two thousand years being copied, carried and translated." }, { "id": "alexandria", "name": "Alexandria", "modern": "Alexandria, Egypt", "note": "The Hellenistic research city. Euclid compiled the Elements here around 300 BCE and Ptolemy completed the Almagest here around 150 CE. Its curriculum, especially the medical one, set the pattern that Syriac and Arabic teaching later inherited." }, { "id": "rome", "name": "Rome", "modern": "Rome, Italy", "note": "Galen wrote most of his enormous corpus here as physician to emperors, and Plotinus taught here in the 260s. A thousand years later Rome was a translation site again: Nathan ha-Me'ati made the Hebrew Canon of Medicine here in 1279, and the Medici Oriental Press printed the Arabic text of the Canon here in 1593." }, { "id": "bhillamala", "name": "Bhillamala", "modern": "Bhinmal, Rajasthan, India", "note": "Capital of the Gurjara kingdom, where Brahmagupta composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE. The astronomy worked out here reached Baghdad within a century and a half." }, { "id": "baghdad", "name": "Baghdad", "modern": "Baghdad, Iraq", "note": "Founded in 762 as the Abbasid capital and, for the next two centuries, the engine room of the translation movement. Caliphs, viziers and private families paid for Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit and Persian books to be turned into Arabic at rates no city had ever sustained." }, { "id": "hamadan", "name": "Hamadan", "modern": "Hamadan, Iran", "note": "Where Ibn Sina, working as a vizier by day and writing by night, completed the Canon of Medicine around 1024 after beginning it at Jurjan and continuing it at Rayy." }, { "id": "cordoba", "name": "Cordoba", "modern": "Córdoba, Spain", "note": "Capital of Umayyad al-Andalus and the western pole of Arabic science. A Byzantine gift manuscript was studied here by a Jewish vizier, a Greek monk and Muslim physicians in the 950s, and around 1000 the city's astronomers refit Baghdad's star tables to their own meridian." }, { "id": "al-andalus", "name": "al-Andalus", "region": "Islamic Spain", "note": "The Iberian world in which Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd worked under the Almohads. Its libraries, captured city by city during the Reconquista, supplied the Latin translators of the 12th century." }, { "id": "toledo", "name": "Toledo", "modern": "Toledo, Spain", "note": "Taken by Castile in 1085 with its Arabic libraries intact. For the next century it was Europe's translation office: Gerard of Cremona alone turned more than seventy Arabic works into Latin here, usually with local Mozarab and Jewish collaborators." }, { "id": "segovia", "name": "Segovia", "modern": "Segovia, Spain", "note": "Where Robert of Chester finished the first Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi's algebra in 1145, dating the colophon by the Spanish era." }, { "id": "monte-cassino", "name": "Monte Cassino", "modern": "Monte Cassino, Italy", "note": "The mother abbey of the Benedictines. Constantine the African worked here in the late 11th century, turning Arabic medicine into the Latin texts that transformed the nearby school of Salerno." }, { "id": "venice", "name": "Venice", "modern": "Venice, Italy", "note": "The printing capital of the late 15th century. Euclid was printed here for the first time in 1482, in a Latin text descended from the Arabic line rather than the Greek." }, { "id": "strasbourg", "name": "Strasbourg", "modern": "Strasbourg, France", "note": "Where the Canon of Medicine is usually thought to have been first printed, around 1473, four centuries after Gerard translated it." }, { "id": "oxford", "name": "Oxford", "modern": "Oxford, England", "note": "Home of the Bodleian Library and of England's first chair of Arabic. The Pocockes, father and son, edited and translated Hayy ibn Yaqzan here in 1671 from a manuscript bought in Aleppo." }, { "id": "london", "name": "London", "modern": "London, England", "note": "Where Simon Ockley published his 1708 English translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, made directly from the Arabic." }, { "id": "amsterdam", "name": "Amsterdam", "modern": "Amsterdam, Netherlands", "note": "The freest publishing city of 17th-century Europe. An anonymous Dutch Hayy ibn Yaqzan appeared here in 1672, usually placed in Spinoza's circle." }, { "id": "florence", "name": "Florence", "modern": "Florence, Italy", "note": "The city where Boccaccio housed a Calabrian Greek so Homer could speak Latin again, and where Ficino's Plato was printed in 1484." }, { "id": "paris", "name": "Paris", "modern": "Paris, France", "note": "Where Comte and Dunoyer printed Le Censeur and the treatises the censors chased, and the capital their books never left in their own century." }, { "id": "calcutta", "name": "Calcutta", "modern": "Kolkata, India", "note": "Capital of British Bengal, where the Asiatic Society and William Jones's translation projects made Sanskrit books answerable in English." }, { "id": "new-delhi", "name": "New Delhi", "modern": "New Delhi, India", "note": "Ghalib's Delhi and, two centuries on, the city where Thothica's AI-assisted crossings of this atlas's newest chains are made." }, { "id": "boston", "name": "Boston", "modern": "Boston, USA", "note": "Publishing center of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American classicism, where Theodore Williams's Aeneid appeared." } ], "people": [ { "id": "aristotle", "name": "Aristotle", "original": { "text": "Ἀριστοτέλης", "lang": "greek" }, "born": -384, "died": -322, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Philosopher of Stagira and teacher at the Lyceum in Athens. No author in this atlas was carried further: his school texts crossed into Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin, and for centuries 'the Philosopher' needed no name.", "sources": [ { "source": "dancona-sep" } ] }, { "id": "euclid", "name": "Euclid", "original": { "text": "Εὐκλείδης", "lang": "greek" }, "fl": "fl. c. 300 BCE, Alexandria", "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Compiler of the Elements, the most copied mathematical text in history. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond his city and his book.", "sources": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "ptolemy", "name": "Ptolemy", "original": { "text": "Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος", "lang": "greek" }, "born": 100, "died": 170, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Alexandrian astronomer whose Mathematike Syntaxis became, through its Arabic name, the Almagest. His mathematical model of the heavens held for fourteen hundred years.", "sources": [ { "source": "pal-project" } ] }, { "id": "galen", "name": "Galen", "original": { "text": "Γαληνός", "lang": "greek" }, "born": 129, "died": 216, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Physician of Pergamon who wrote most of his vast corpus in Rome as doctor to emperors. Medieval medicine in Syriac, Arabic and Latin is, to a first approximation, commentary on him.", "sources": [ { "source": "pormann-savage-smith-2007" } ] }, { "id": "dioscorides", "name": "Dioscorides", "original": { "text": "Διοσκουρίδης", "lang": "greek" }, "fl": "fl. mid-1st century CE", "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Greek army physician from Anazarbus in Cilicia. His catalogue of drugs and the plants they come from stayed in working use, in one language or another, for over fifteen hundred years.", "sources": [ { "source": "pormann-savage-smith-2007" } ] }, { "id": "hippocrates", "name": "Hippocrates", "original": { "text": "Ἱπποκράτης", "lang": "greek" }, "born": -460, "died": -370, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Physician of Cos and the name under which Greek medicine's founding texts travel. The Aphorisms attributed to him opened medical curricula from Alexandria to Salerno.", "sources": [ { "source": "overwien-2015" } ] }, { "id": "plotinus", "name": "Plotinus", "original": { "text": "Πλωτῖνος", "lang": "greek" }, "born": 204, "died": 270, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "The founder of Neoplatonism, who taught in Rome and wrote the treatises his student Porphyry arranged as the Enneads. In Arabic, by a famous accident, much of him circulated under Aristotle's name.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" } ] }, { "id": "porphyry", "name": "Porphyry", "original": { "text": "Πορφύριος", "lang": "greek" }, "born": 234, "died": 305, "ca": true, "roles": [ "editor" ], "note": "Plotinus' student and editor. He arranged his teacher's treatises into six groups of nine, the Enneads, and that editorial shape is what every later tradition received.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" } ] }, { "id": "brahmagupta", "name": "Brahmagupta", "original": { "text": "ब्रह्मगुप्त", "lang": "sanskrit" }, "born": 598, "died": 668, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Astronomer and mathematician of Bhillamala in western India. His Brahmasphutasiddhanta of 628 treats zero as a number with rules of its own, and his school's astronomy reached Baghdad within 150 years.", "sources": [ { "source": "pingree-1970" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-sina", "name": "Ibn Sina", "original": { "text": "ابن سينا", "lang": "arabic" }, "aka": [ "Avicenna" ], "born": 980, "died": 1037, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Philosopher and physician of Bukhara, Jurjan, Rayy, Hamadan and Isfahan, usually while employed as a court vizier. He wrote the Canon of Medicine in stages across those cities; Europe knew him as Avicenna and taught him for six centuries.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-sep-ibn-sina" } ] }, { "id": "al-ghazali", "name": "al-Ghazali", "original": { "text": "أبو حامد الغزالي", "lang": "arabic" }, "aka": [ "Algazel" ], "born": 1058, "died": 1111, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Jurist, theologian and Sufi of Tus and Baghdad, the most influential critic of the Aristotelian philosophers in Islam. Latin Europe, reading his survey of their doctrines without its preface, took him for their loyal disciple and called him Algazel.", "sources": [ { "source": "griffel-sep" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-tufayl", "name": "Ibn Tufayl", "original": { "text": "ابن طفيل", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 1110, "died": 1185, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Physician and vizier to the Almohad caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, and Ibn Rushd's patron at court. His philosophical tale of a self-taught child alone on an island became, five centuries later, an unlikely best seller in Latin, Dutch and English. He died in Marrakesh in 1185 or 1186.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011" } ] }, { "id": "al-khwarizmi", "name": "al-Khwarizmi", "original": { "text": "محمد بن موسى الخوارزمي", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 780, "died": 850, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Mathematician and astronomer in al-Ma'mun's Baghdad. Two common nouns descend from his output: algebra, from the title of his book on equations, and algorithm, from the Latin rendering of his name.", "sources": [ { "source": "toomer-1973" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-rushd", "name": "Ibn Rushd", "original": { "text": "ابن رشد", "lang": "arabic" }, "aka": [ "Averroes", "the Commentator" ], "born": 1126, "died": 1198, "roles": [ "author", "commentator" ], "note": "Judge of Cordoba and Seville, court physician to the Almohads, and the most thorough commentator Aristotle ever had. Latin universities knew him simply as the Commentator. He died in Marrakesh in December 1198, out of favor and far from his books.", "sources": [ { "source": "sep-ibn-rushd" } ] }, { "id": "hunayn-ibn-ishaq", "name": "Hunayn ibn Ishaq", "original": { "text": "حنين بن إسحاق", "lang": "arabic" }, "aka": [ "Johannitius" ], "born": 808, "died": 873, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator", "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "The greatest of the Baghdad translators: an Arab Christian of the Church of the East, born in al-Hira, who catalogued 129 works of Galen and translated about a hundred of them into Syriac or Arabic himself. He hunted manuscripts across Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, graded earlier translations like an examiner, and served al-Mutawakkil as court physician. Some traditions place his death in 877. His paymasters were mostly private patrons, against the later legend that a caliphal House of Wisdom employed him.", "sources": [ { "source": "strohmaier-ei2" }, { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "ishaq-ibn-hunayn", "name": "Ishaq ibn Hunayn", "original": { "text": "إسحاق بن حنين", "lang": "arabic" }, "died": 910, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Hunayn's son and the philosophical specialist of the family workshop. Where his father concentrated on Galen, Ishaq turned Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy into Arabic. He died in 910 or 911.", "sources": [ { "source": "fihrist" }, { "source": "treiger-2017" } ] }, { "id": "hubaysh", "name": "Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan", "fl": "fl. later 9th century, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Hunayn's nephew and one of the main hands of his school. Much of the Arabic Galen that circulates under Hunayn's name was Hubaysh's work from his uncle's Syriac versions, a division of labor the Risala records candidly.", "sources": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "strohmaier-ei2" } ] }, { "id": "thabit-ibn-qurra", "name": "Thabit ibn Qurra", "original": { "text": "ثابت بن قرة", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 836, "died": 901, "roles": [ "reviser", "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Mathematician from Harran, a pagan Sabian in a city of star worshippers, recruited to Baghdad by the Banu Musa. He revised the Arabic Euclid and Ptolemy with a mathematician's eye, which is why later readers preferred the versions he touched.", "sources": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" }, { "source": "pal-project" } ] }, { "id": "al-hajjaj", "name": "al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar", "original": { "text": "الحجاج بن يوسف بن مطر", "lang": "arabic" }, "fl": "fl. 786-833, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator", "reviser" ], "note": "The first known Arabic translator of Euclid's Elements and one of the first of the Almagest. He translated Euclid once for the Barmakid vizier Yahya ibn Khalid and again, leaner, for al-Ma'mun, saying he had cut the superfluities and corrected the errors.", "sources": [ { "source": "bea-2007" }, { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "sergius-of-reshaina", "name": "Sergius of Reshaina", "died": 536, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Chief physician of Reshaina in Mesopotamia, trained in Alexandria under Ammonius, and the first great translator of Greek medicine into Syriac. Hunayn's Risala names twenty-six works of Galen in his versions, three centuries before Hunayn graded and replaced them. He died in Constantinople.", "sources": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "bhayro-2017" } ] }, { "id": "istifan-ibn-basil", "name": "Istifan ibn Basil", "fl": "fl. mid-9th century, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Translator of Dioscorides into Arabic in Hunayn's circle. Where he could not identify a plant he left its Greek name standing in Arabic letters, an honest gap that took a century and a Byzantine manuscript to close.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" }, { "source": "pormann-savage-smith-2007" } ] }, { "id": "nicholas-the-monk", "name": "Nicholas the monk", "fl": "fl. 951-961, Cordoba", "roles": [ "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "A Greek monk sent from Constantinople after the caliph of Cordoba admitted that nobody in al-Andalus could read the illustrated Dioscorides the emperor had sent. He worked with the city's physicians to pin the Greek plant names to real Andalusian drugs, and died early in al-Hakam II's reign.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" } ] }, { "id": "hasdai-ibn-shaprut", "name": "Hasdai ibn Shaprut", "original": { "text": "חסדאי אבן שפרוט", "lang": "hebrew" }, "born": 915, "died": 970, "ca": true, "roles": [ "scholar", "patron" ], "note": "Jewish physician, diplomat and de facto foreign minister to Abd al-Rahman III, and head of Iberia's Jewish community. He presided over the Cordoba circle that corrected the Arabic Dioscorides against the Byzantine gift manuscript.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-juljul-person", "name": "Ibn Juljul", "born": 944, "died": 994, "ca": true, "roles": [ "scholar" ], "note": "Cordoban physician and historian of medicine. He took part in the Dioscorides revision as a young man and later wrote the Generations of Physicians, the book through which we know the whole episode.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" } ] }, { "id": "burzoy", "name": "Burzoy", "aka": [ "Burzoe", "Borzuya" ], "fl": "fl. mid-6th century, court of Khosrow I", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Physician to Khosrow I Anushirvan. The story the book tells about him says he went to India for a herb that raises the dead and came back having understood that the herb was a book. His Middle Persian Kalila compilation is lost; everything west of India descends from it.", "sources": [ { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "bud-the-periodeutes", "name": "Bud the periodeutes", "fl": "fl. c. 570", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "An itinerant supervising cleric of the Church of the East, a rank above priest and below bishop, who made the Old Syriac Kalilag and Damnag from Burzoy's Persian. His translation is the oldest surviving witness to the lost Pahlavi book.", "sources": [ { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-al-muqaffa", "name": "Ibn al-Muqaffa", "original": { "text": "عبد الله بن المقفع", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 720, "died": 757, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator", "author" ], "note": "Persian convert to Islam, state secretary, and the founder of Arabic literary prose. His Kalila wa-Dimna is less a translation than a reinvention; it became one of the most copied books in Arabic. He was executed around 756-759, still in his thirties.", "sources": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" }, { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "rabbi-joel", "name": "Rabbi Joel", "fl": "fl. 12th century", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "The Hebrew translator of Kalila wa-Dimna, known only because John of Capua says he worked from Rabbi Joel's version. A carrier whose entire biography is one sentence in someone else's preface.", "sources": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "john-of-capua", "name": "John of Capua", "fl": "fl. 1263-1278, Rome", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "A Jewish convert to Christianity who translated the Hebrew Kalila into Latin as the Directorium humanae vitae, the version through which the fables entered most European vernaculars.", "sources": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "alfonso-x", "name": "Alfonso X of Castile", "aka": [ "Alfonso the Learned", "el Sabio" ], "born": 1221, "died": 1284, "roles": [ "commissioner", "patron" ], "note": "King of Castile from 1252 and patron of a court translation industry that moved Arabic learning into Castilian rather than Latin. The Calila e Dimna of 1251 was made at his order while he was still crown prince.", "sources": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "al-fazari", "name": "al-Fazari", "fl": "fl. 770s, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Astronomer at al-Mansur's court who, with Yaqub ibn Tariq, turned the Sanskrit astronomy brought by an Indian embassy into the Arabic Zij al-Sindhind. Medieval biographers split him into a father and son; modern scholarship reads the reports as one man, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Fazari.", "sources": [ { "source": "pingree-1970" }, { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "yaqub-ibn-tariq", "name": "Yaqub ibn Tariq", "fl": "fl. 770s, Baghdad", "roles": [ "scholar", "translator" ], "note": "Al-Fazari's collaborator on the Arabic Sindhind, said to have worked directly with the visiting Indian astronomer on the parameters.", "sources": [ { "source": "pingree-1970" } ] }, { "id": "maslama-al-majriti", "name": "Maslama al-Majriti", "original": { "text": "مسلمة المجريطي", "lang": "arabic" }, "died": 1007, "ca": true, "roles": [ "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "The leading astronomer of Umayyad Cordoba, from Madrid when Madrid was a frontier town. Around 1000 he and his pupil Ibn al-Saffar recomputed al-Khwarizmi's Baghdad tables for the meridian of Cordoba and the Islamic calendar, the version Europe would later receive.", "sources": [ { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-al-saffar", "name": "Ibn al-Saffar", "died": 1035, "roles": [ "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "Maslama al-Majriti's pupil and collaborator on the Cordoba revision of al-Khwarizmi's tables.", "sources": [ { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "adelard-of-bath", "name": "Adelard of Bath", "born": 1080, "died": 1152, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "England's first Arabist, who traveled the Norman Mediterranean for seven years and came home urging readers to follow reason rather than authority. His Latin Euclid of c. 1120 and his 1126 version of al-Khwarizmi's tables opened Arabic mathematics to the Latin schools.", "sources": [ { "source": "mercier-1987" }, { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "robert-of-chester", "name": "Robert of Chester", "fl": "fl. 1140s, Spain", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "The Englishman who finished the first Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi's algebra at Segovia in 1145. Whether he is the same man as Robert of Ketton, who had translated the Qur'an for Peter the Venerable two years earlier, is a live scholarly question; if so, one translator carried both the Qur'an and algebra into Latin.", "sources": [ { "source": "hughes-1989" }, { "source": "burnett-2004" } ] }, { "id": "gerard-of-cremona", "name": "Gerard of Cremona", "born": 1114, "died": 1187, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "The most prolific translator of the Middle Ages. His students say he went to Toledo for love of the Almagest, which no Latin library had, learned Arabic there, and stayed for life. He never signed his work; after his death his students listed the seventy-plus books he had translated, working with local collaborators like the Mozarab Galib.", "sources": [ { "source": "lemay-1978" }, { "source": "burnett-2001" } ] }, { "id": "michael-scot", "name": "Michael Scot", "born": 1175, "died": 1236, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Scottish scholar and court astrologer, in Toledo by 1217, then Bologna, the papal curia, and from about 1227 the court of Frederick II. He carried Averroes into Latin; only one of those translations bears his name, and stylometry credits him with the rest. Dante put him among the diviners in hell.", "sources": [ { "source": "burnett-1994" }, { "source": "hasse-2010" } ] }, { "id": "zerahyah-hen", "name": "Zerahyah ben Isaac Hen", "fl": "fl. 1277-1291, Rome", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Barcelona-born Hebrew translator working in Rome. His 1284 Hebrew De Anima, made from the Arabic, is one of the surviving witnesses to Ishaq ibn Hunayn's lost translation.", "sources": [ { "source": "treiger-2017" } ] }, { "id": "gundissalinus", "name": "Dominicus Gundissalinus", "fl": "fl. 1162-1181, Toledo", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Archdeacon at Toledo and the philosophical specialist among its translators, usually working in tandem with Arabic-speaking collaborators. His Latin Ghazali, made with Magister Iohannes, accidentally manufactured a phantom Aristotelian named Algazel.", "sources": [ { "source": "minnema-2014" }, { "source": "burnett-2001" } ] }, { "id": "magister-iohannes", "name": "Magister Iohannes", "aka": [ "Iohannes Hispanus" ], "died": 1215, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Toledan master, later dean of the cathedral, who collaborated with Gundissalinus on translations from Arabic. Long confused with the earlier translator John of Seville; Charles Burnett untangled the two.", "sources": [ { "source": "minnema-2014" } ] }, { "id": "constantine-the-african", "name": "Constantine the African", "died": 1098, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "A merchant or scholar from Ifriqiya, probably a Muslim convert to Christianity, who became a monk at Monte Cassino around 1077 and spent two decades turning Arabic medicine into Latin. He presented much of it under his own name, which contemporaries already complained about. He died before 1098 or 1099.", "sources": [ { "source": "burnett-jacquart-1994" } ] }, { "id": "athanasius-of-balad", "name": "Athanasius of Balad", "died": 687, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Syriac Orthodox patriarch trained at the monastery of Qenneshre on the Euphrates, the powerhouse of Greek learning in the early Islamic Middle East. His seventh-century translations completed the Syriac Organon a century before the caliphs wanted it in Arabic.", "sources": [ { "source": "tannous-2018" } ] }, { "id": "timothy-i", "name": "Timothy I", "born": 740, "died": 823, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Patriarch of the Church of the East from 780, resident in Baghdad and at ease at the caliph's court. His surviving letters show him hunting Syriac Aristotle manuscripts in monastery libraries to fulfill al-Mahdi's commission for an Arabic Topics.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "abu-nuh", "name": "Abu Nuh al-Anbari", "fl": "fl. c. 780, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Christian secretary to the governor of Mosul and Timothy I's collaborator on the Arabic Topics.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "ibn-naima-al-himsi", "name": "Ibn Na'ima al-Himsi", "fl": "fl. early 9th century, Baghdad", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Translator from Homs in al-Kindi's circle. His Arabic Plotinus, reworked and prefaced, became the Theology of Aristotle; the preface names him honestly even though the title does not.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" } ] }, { "id": "al-kindi", "name": "al-Kindi", "original": { "text": "الكندي", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 801, "died": 870, "ca": true, "roles": [ "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "The first philosopher of the Arabs, tutor to the Abbasid prince Ahmad ibn al-Mu'tasim, and impresario of a translation circle that put Greek metaphysics into Arabic. He corrected the Arabic Plotinus paraphrase for his student; the result carried Aristotle's name and Neoplatonism's content.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" }, { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "ahmad-ibn-al-mutasim", "name": "Ahmad ibn al-Mu'tasim", "fl": "fl. 833-842, Baghdad", "roles": [ "patron" ], "note": "Abbasid prince, son of the caliph al-Mu'tasim and al-Kindi's student, dedicatee of the Theology of Aristotle. The dedication is what lets scholars date the book.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" } ] }, { "id": "nathan-ha-meati", "name": "Nathan ha-Me'ati", "fl": "fl. 1279-1283, Rome", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Hebrew translator in Rome, called the prince of translators by later tradition. His complete Hebrew Canon of Medicine, finished in 1279, made Ibn Sina a working author inside European Jewish medicine.", "sources": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" } ] }, { "id": "campanus-of-novara", "name": "Campanus of Novara", "born": 1220, "died": 1296, "ca": true, "roles": [ "reviser", "scholar" ], "note": "Chaplain to popes and mathematician. His mid-13th-century reworking of the Latin Euclid, built on the Adelard tradition, became the standard university text and, in 1482, the first Euclid ever printed.", "sources": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "erhard-ratdolt", "name": "Erhard Ratdolt", "born": 1442, "died": 1528, "ca": true, "roles": [ "editor" ], "note": "Augsburg printer working in Venice who solved the problem nobody had solved in twenty-five years of printing: how to set geometric diagrams in type. His 1482 Elements is one of the most beautiful scientific books ever made.", "sources": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "adolf-rusch", "name": "Adolf Rusch", "born": 1435, "died": 1489, "ca": true, "roles": [ "editor" ], "note": "Strasbourg printer usually credited with the first printed edition of the Latin Canon of Medicine, around 1473.", "sources": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" } ] }, { "id": "raimondi", "name": "Giovanni Battista Raimondi", "born": 1536, "died": 1614, "ca": true, "roles": [ "editor" ], "note": "Director of the Medici Oriental Press in Rome, which cut Arabic type good enough to print the Canon in its own language in 1593, mostly for export back to the lands that wrote it.", "sources": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" } ] }, { "id": "edward-pococke-elder", "name": "Edward Pococke the elder", "born": 1604, "died": 1691, "roles": [ "editor", "scholar" ], "note": "England's first professor of Arabic, at Oxford from 1636. As Levant Company chaplain in Aleppo in the 1630s he bought the manuscript of Hayy ibn Yaqzan that his son would translate; he edited the Arabic and wrote the preface of the 1671 edition.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" } ] }, { "id": "edward-pococke-younger", "name": "Edward Pococke the younger", "born": 1648, "died": 1727, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Translated Ibn Tufayl into Latin at twenty-three, as Philosophus Autodidactus, in the bilingual Oxford edition of 1671 that he produced with his father.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" } ] }, { "id": "george-keith", "name": "George Keith", "born": 1638, "died": 1716, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Quaker preacher who Englished the Philosophus Autodidactus in 1674, three years after the Latin appeared. The Quakers read the self-taught islander as a parable of the inner light.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" } ] }, { "id": "simon-ockley", "name": "Simon Ockley", "born": 1678, "died": 1720, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Cambridge Arabist, professor of Arabic from 1711, chronically poor and partly writing from debtors' prison. His 1708 Improvement of Human Reason translated Ibn Tufayl directly from the Arabic for English readers.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011" } ] }, { "id": "johannes-bouwmeester", "name": "Johannes Bouwmeester", "born": 1634, "died": 1680, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Amsterdam physician, close friend of Spinoza and co-founder of the literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum. The anonymous 1672 Dutch Hayy ibn Yaqzan is usually laid at his door, without proof.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011" } ] }, { "id": "yahya-ibn-khalid", "name": "Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmaki", "died": 805, "roles": [ "patron", "commissioner" ], "note": "Barmakid vizier to Harun al-Rashid and one of the earliest great patrons of translation, commissioning the first Arabic Euclid and promoting the first Arabic Almagest before his family's spectacular fall.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" }, { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "al-mansur", "name": "al-Mansur", "born": 714, "died": 775, "ca": true, "roles": [ "patron", "commissioner" ], "note": "Second Abbasid caliph, founder of Baghdad, and the ruler whose court received the Indian embassy of the early 770s. Astrology convinced him; the Arabic Sindhind was the result.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" }, { "source": "pingree-1970" } ] }, { "id": "al-mahdi", "name": "al-Mahdi", "born": 744, "died": 785, "ca": true, "roles": [ "commissioner", "patron" ], "note": "Third Abbasid caliph. Needing Aristotle's manual of dialectic for staged debates with theologians of other faiths, he commissioned the patriarch Timothy I to produce an Arabic Topics around 782.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "al-mamun", "name": "al-Ma'mun", "original": { "text": "المأمون", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 786, "died": 833, "roles": [ "patron" ], "note": "Seventh Abbasid caliph and the translation movement's most famous patron. Al-Khwarizmi dedicated the algebra to him; al-Hajjaj made his second Euclid and his Almagest under him. Later legend inflated his library into a formal academy.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" } ] }, { "id": "khosrow-i", "name": "Khosrow I Anushirvan", "died": 579, "roles": [ "patron", "commissioner" ], "note": "Sasanian king of kings, reigned 531-579, remembered in Persian tradition as the just king and collector of the world's wisdom. He sent his physician Burzoy to India, and the Kalila tradition is the most durable thing his court produced.", "sources": [ { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "abd-al-rahman-iii", "name": "Abd al-Rahman III", "original": { "text": "عبد الرحمن الثالث", "lang": "arabic" }, "born": 891, "died": 961, "roles": [ "patron" ], "note": "First Umayyad caliph of Cordoba, reigned 912-961. When Constantinople sent him a luxury Dioscorides nobody in al-Andalus could read, he wrote back asking for a Greek tutor, and got one.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" } ] }, { "id": "homer", "name": "Homer", "original": { "text": "Ὅμηρος", "lang": "greek" }, "ca": true, "fl": "8th century BCE", "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "The name the Greek tradition attached to the Iliad and Odyssey. Whether it names one singer or a whole craft is the oldest open question in classical scholarship.", "sources": [ { "source": "reynolds-wilson-2013" } ] }, { "id": "plato", "name": "Plato", "original": { "text": "Πλάτων", "lang": "greek" }, "born": -428, "died": -348, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Athenian philosopher. His dialogues survived antiquity complete, which makes him the rare author in this atlas whose chain is about translation rather than rescue.", "sources": [ { "source": "hankins-1990" } ] }, { "id": "thucydides", "name": "Thucydides", "original": { "text": "Θουκυδίδης", "lang": "greek" }, "born": -460, "died": -400, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Athenian general, exiled mid-war, who wrote the war he lost as a possession for all time.", "sources": [ { "source": "hobbes-1629" } ] }, { "id": "herodotus", "name": "Herodotus", "original": { "text": "Ἡρόδοτος", "lang": "greek" }, "born": -484, "died": -425, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Historian of Halicarnassus, the inquiry made prose. The West read him in Latin for half a century before printing him in Greek.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "lucretius", "name": "Lucretius", "original": { "text": "Titus Lucretius Carus", "lang": "latin" }, "born": -99, "died": -55, "ca": true, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Roman Epicurean poet. His one book spent the Middle Ages asleep in a handful of monastic copies, which is why its chain begins with a manuscript hunter.", "sources": [ { "source": "reynolds-wilson-2013" } ] }, { "id": "virgil", "name": "Virgil", "original": { "text": "Publius Vergilius Maro", "lang": "latin" }, "born": -70, "died": -19, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Rome's national poet. The Aeneid never needed rescue, only re-voicing, century after century.", "sources": [ { "source": "dryden-1697" } ] }, { "id": "manu", "name": "Manu", "original": { "text": "मनु", "lang": "sanskrit" }, "ca": true, "fl": "traditional", "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "The traditional name over the Manusmriti, as Bidpai stands over the fables: an attribution, not a biography.", "sources": [ { "source": "buhler-1886" } ] }, { "id": "mirza-ghalib", "name": "Mirza Ghalib", "original": { "text": "مرزا غالب", "lang": "urdu" }, "born": 1797, "died": 1869, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "The great ghazal poet of late Mughal Delhi, who watched the world that read him burn in 1857 and kept writing letters about it.", "sources": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "charles-comte", "name": "Charles Comte", "born": 1782, "died": 1837, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Co-founder of Le Censeur, prosecuted under the Restoration, son-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Say. His treatises on legislation and property were praised, cited and left untranslated for two centuries.", "sources": [ { "source": "hart-dlp" } ] }, { "id": "charles-dunoyer", "name": "Charles Dunoyer", "born": 1786, "died": 1862, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Comte's partner at Le Censeur and theorist of liberty as the condition of all production. Like Comte, famous in citation and absent in English.", "sources": [ { "source": "hart-dlp" } ] }, { "id": "fichte", "name": "Johann Gottlieb Fichte", "born": 1762, "died": 1814, "roles": [ "author" ], "note": "Post-Kantian philosopher. His 1793 defense of the freedom of thought was published anonymously while he argued, in its own pages, that every honest man must acknowledge what he has written.", "sources": [ { "source": "schmidt-1996" } ] }, { "id": "leontius-pilatus", "name": "Leontius Pilatus", "original": { "text": "Leontius Pilatus", "lang": "latin" }, "died": 1366, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Calabrian Greek scholar whom Boccaccio housed in Florence so that Homer could be turned into Latin, the first complete crossing of the epics into a Western tongue in the medieval West.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "boccaccio", "name": "Giovanni Boccaccio", "born": 1313, "died": 1375, "roles": [ "patron", "scholar" ], "note": "Author of the Decameron and host of the project: he lodged Pilatus, procured the Greek, and pressed the work on, with Petrarch cheering from Milan.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "george-chapman", "name": "George Chapman", "born": 1559, "died": 1634, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Elizabethan playwright whose Homer, finished in 1616, was the first complete one in English. Two centuries later a sonnet about first looking into it became more famous than the translation.", "sources": [ { "source": "chapman-1611" }, { "source": "chapman-1616" } ] }, { "id": "alexander-pope", "name": "Alexander Pope", "born": 1688, "died": 1744, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "His subscription Iliad made translation pay like almost nothing in English publishing had before; the Odyssey that followed quietly employed two collaborators.", "sources": [ { "source": "pope-1715" }, { "source": "pope-1725" } ] }, { "id": "samuel-butler", "name": "Samuel Butler", "born": 1835, "died": 1902, "roles": [ "translator", "author" ], "note": "Novelist of Erewhon who put both epics into plain prose at the century's end, convinced the Odyssey was written by a woman. His Homer is the one this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "butler-1898" }, { "source": "butler-1900" } ] }, { "id": "marsilio-ficino", "name": "Marsilio Ficino", "born": 1433, "died": 1499, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "The Medici's Platonist, who turned the whole of Plato into Latin and saw it printed in Florence in 1484.", "sources": [ { "source": "hankins-1990" }, { "source": "ficino-1484" } ] }, { "id": "benjamin-jowett", "name": "Benjamin Jowett", "born": 1817, "died": 1893, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Master of Balliol whose Plato became the anglophone default for a hundred years.", "sources": [ { "source": "jowett-1871" } ] }, { "id": "paul-shorey", "name": "Paul Shorey", "born": 1857, "died": 1934, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Chicago Platonist; his Loeb Republic is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "shorey-1930" } ] }, { "id": "robert-grosseteste", "name": "Robert Grosseteste", "born": 1175, "died": 1253, "ca": true, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Bishop of Lincoln and one of the first Western scholars to retranslate Aristotle from the Greek rather than through Arabic, completing the first full Latin Ethics around 1246-47.", "sources": [ { "source": "dod-1982" } ] }, { "id": "harris-rackham", "name": "Harris Rackham", "born": 1868, "died": 1944, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Cambridge classicist; his Loeb Ethics is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "rackham-1926" } ] }, { "id": "lorenzo-valla", "name": "Lorenzo Valla", "born": 1407, "died": 1457, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "The humanist who proved the Donation of Constantine a forgery and gave the papal court its Latin Thucydides and Herodotus.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "nicholas-v", "name": "Pope Nicholas V", "born": 1397, "died": 1455, "roles": [ "patron", "commissioner" ], "note": "The founding patron of the Vatican Library, who paid humanists to bring the Greek historians into Latin.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "thomas-hobbes", "name": "Thomas Hobbes", "born": 1588, "died": 1679, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Translated Thucydides directly from the Greek in 1629, he said, so that England might read what democracy does in wartime, then spent the rest of his life on that theme.", "sources": [ { "source": "hobbes-1629" } ] }, { "id": "henry-dale", "name": "Henry Dale", "fl": "1840s", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Victorian schoolmaster-translator whose literal Thucydides for Bohn's Classical Library is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "dale-1848" } ] }, { "id": "thomas-creech", "name": "Thomas Creech", "born": 1659, "died": 1700, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Oxford fellow whose 1682 verse Lucretius was the first complete one in English.", "sources": [ { "source": "creech-1682" } ] }, { "id": "william-ellery-leonard", "name": "William Ellery Leonard", "born": 1876, "died": 1944, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Wisconsin poet-professor; his verse De Rerum Natura is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "leonard-1916" } ] }, { "id": "john-dryden", "name": "John Dryden", "born": 1631, "died": 1700, "roles": [ "translator", "author" ], "note": "Poet laureate whose subscription Virgil of 1697 set the model Pope would follow with Homer.", "sources": [ { "source": "dryden-1697" } ] }, { "id": "theodore-williams", "name": "Theodore C. Williams", "born": 1854, "died": 1925, "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Boston minister and schoolmaster; his verse Aeneid is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "williams-1910" } ] }, { "id": "william-jones", "name": "William Jones", "born": 1746, "died": 1794, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Judge of the Calcutta supreme court and founder of the Asiatic Society, who learned Sanskrit from Bengal's pandits and died the year his Manu appeared.", "sources": [ { "source": "cannon-1990" }, { "source": "jones-1794" } ] }, { "id": "georg-buhler", "name": "Georg Buhler", "born": 1837, "died": 1898, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Vienna Sanskritist whose Laws of Manu in the Sacred Books of the East replaced Jones as the scholarly standard.", "sources": [ { "source": "buhler-1886" } ] }, { "id": "arthur-godley", "name": "A. D. Godley", "born": 1856, "died": 1925, "roles": [ "translator", "scholar" ], "note": "Oxford classicist and comic poet; his Loeb Herodotus is the English carried in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "godley-1920" } ] }, { "id": "david-hart", "name": "David M. Hart", "fl": "1990s-2020s", "roles": [ "scholar", "editor" ], "note": "Historian of the French classical liberals, long-time director of Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty, whose Digital Library of Liberty and Power keeps the Censeur circle's books scanned, cataloged and findable. The French and German editions behind this library's newest crossings came through his shelves.", "sources": [ { "source": "hart-dlp" } ] }, { "id": "adnan-abbasi", "name": "Adnan Abbasi", "fl": "2020s", "roles": [ "editor", "patron" ], "note": "Founder of Thothica, the studio behind this library and atlas. The newest crossings here are AI-assisted translations made under his curation in New Delhi, which makes him the first carrier in this atlas able to read his own entry.", "sources": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "ustath", "name": "Ustath", "aka": [ "Eustathius" ], "ca": true, "fl": "early 9th century", "roles": [ "translator" ], "note": "Translator of al-Kindi's circle, a generation before the Hunayn workshop. Books V-X of the surviving Arabic Nicomachean Ethics are his.", "sources": [ { "source": "akasoy-fidora-2005" } ] } ], "works": [ { "id": "de-anima", "title": "On the Soul", "original": { "text": "Περὶ Ψυχῆς", "translit": "Peri Psychēs", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "aristotle", "composed": { "from": -350, "ca": true, "place": "athens" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The chain doubles back on itself. Ishaq ibn Hunayn's 9th-century Arabic translation is lost, and Averroes' Long Commentary survives complete only in Michael Scot's Latin. So modern scholars reconstruct Baghdad's Arabic De Anima out of the Latin lemmata of this very translation, with help from a Hebrew version of 1284. A marginal note in the tradition even records the seam where Ishaq's first, unfinished version stopped.", "sources": [ { "source": "treiger-2017" }, { "source": "taylor-2009" } ] }, { "id": "elements", "title": "Elements", "read_slug": "euclid-elements-d711e4", "original": { "text": "Στοιχεῖα", "translit": "Stoicheia", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "euclid", "composed": { "from": -300, "ca": true, "place": "alexandria" }, "field": "mathematics", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Europe read Euclid through Arabic for roughly four centuries. The first printed Elements, set in Venice in 1482 with diagrams nobody else had managed to print, descends through Campanus from the Adelard line, which rests on al-Hajjaj's Baghdad Arabic. A printed Greek text appeared only in 1533, in Basel.", "sources": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" }, { "source": "busard-folkerts-1992" } ] }, { "id": "almagest", "title": "Almagest", "original": { "text": "Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις", "translit": "Mathēmatikē Syntaxis", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "ptolemy", "composed": { "from": 150, "ca": true, "place": "alexandria" }, "field": "astronomy", "summary": "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'.", "detail": "One book pulled the most prolific translator of the Middle Ages across Europe. Gerard of Cremona's students wrote that he went to Toledo 'for love of the Almagest, which he could not find at all among the Latins', learned Arabic there, and stayed for life. Daniel of Morley, who heard him dispute in public at Toledo, identifies him in passing as the man who Latinized the Almagest 'with Galib the Mozarab interpreting'.", "sources": [ { "source": "pal-project" }, { "source": "kunitzsch-1974" }, { "source": "lemay-1978" } ] }, { "id": "on-simple-drugs", "title": "On Simple Drugs", "original": { "text": "Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκων", "translit": "Peri kraseōs kai dynameōs tōn haplōn pharmakōn", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "galen", "composed": { "from": 170, "to": 200, "ca": true, "place": "rome" }, "field": "pharmacology", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Sergius of Reshaina's 6th-century Syriac version, which Hunayn graded and revised three centuries later, was eventually scraped down and overwritten with hymns. The undertext came back only in the 2010s, when multispectral imaging recovered the Syriac Galen Palimpsest, letter by letter, from under the liturgy.", "sources": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "bhayro-2017" }, { "source": "lamoreaux-2016" } ] }, { "id": "materia-medica", "title": "De Materia Medica", "original": { "text": "Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς", "translit": "Peri hylēs iatrikēs", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "dioscorides", "composed": { "from": 50, "to": 70, "ca": true }, "field": "pharmacology", "summary": "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.", "detail": "When a lavishly illustrated Greek copy reached Cordoba as a Byzantine state gift, the accompanying note warned that it was useless without someone who could read Greek, and nobody in al-Andalus could. The caliph wrote back to Constantinople for help. The result was a working group of a Jewish vizier, a Byzantine monk and Muslim physicians, matching Greek plant pictures to real Andalusian drugs.", "sources": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul" }, { "source": "pormann-savage-smith-2007" } ] }, { "id": "aphorisms", "title": "Aphorisms", "read_slug": "hippocrates-aphorisms-55e562", "original": { "text": "Ἀφορισμοί", "translit": "Aphorismoi", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "hippocrates", "composed": { "from": -400, "ca": true }, "field": "medicine", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Latin Europe already had a late antique Aphorisms, translated from Greek around the 5th or 6th century. Constantine the African's new version from the Arabic, carrying Galen's commentary with it, displaced that older text and entered the Articella, the bundle of treatises on which European medical examinations were built for centuries.", "sources": [ { "source": "overwien-2015" }, { "source": "burnett-jacquart-1994" } ] }, { "id": "enneads", "title": "Enneads", "original": { "text": "Ἐννεάδες", "translit": "Enneades", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "plotinus", "composed": { "from": 253, "to": 270, "place": "rome" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The Theology opens with 'Aristotle' recounting, in the first person, Plotinus' out-of-body ascent: often have I been alone with my soul, and have doffed my body and laid it aside. For centuries Arabic readers believed the sober logician of the Organon had personally reported an ecstatic ascent to the intelligible world. The preface, honestly, names the real translator, the corrector and the patron all along.", "sources": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" }, { "source": "zimmermann-1986" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra", "title": "Panchatantra", "original": { "text": "पञ्चतन्त्र", "translit": "Pañcatantra", "lang": "sanskrit" }, "author": null, "attribution": "traditional", "composed": { "from": 300, "ca": true }, "field": "fables", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The two jackals of the Sanskrit frame story, Karataka and Damanaka, fossilize phonetically through every language of the chain: Kalilag and Damnag in Syriac, Kalila and Dimna in Arabic, Calila e Dimna in Castilian. The title of the medieval world's most translated storybook still carries the sound of its Sanskrit characters.", "sources": [ { "source": "olivelle-1997" }, { "source": "de-blois-1990" }, { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "brahmasphutasiddhanta", "title": "Brahmasphutasiddhanta", "original": { "text": "ब्राह्मस्फुटसिद्धान्त", "translit": "Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta", "lang": "sanskrit" }, "author": "brahmagupta", "composed": { "from": 628, "place": "bhillamala" }, "field": "astronomy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The Baghdad adaptation is lost, and survives only as the Latin translation of an Andalusi revision: a book born in 7th-century Rajasthan reaches us as a 1126 Latin text of a Cordoba reworking of a vanished Arabic original. Even the name fossilized the route. Sindhind is Sanskrit siddhanta worn smooth by Arabic mouths, and later bibliographers, no longer recognizing the word, solemnly glossed it as 'the perpetual eternity'.", "sources": [ { "source": "pingree-1970" }, { "source": "bea-2007" }, { "source": "mercier-1987" } ] }, { "id": "topics", "title": "Topics", "original": { "text": "Τοπικά", "translit": "Topika", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "aristotle", "composed": { "from": -350, "ca": true, "place": "athens" }, "field": "logic", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The commission is documented from the inside. Timothy I's own letters survive, and in them the patriarch of the Church of the East can be watched writing to fellow clerics, asking them to ransack the library of the Mar Mattai monastery for Syriac versions of the later Organon to serve the caliph al-Mahdi's order. A caliph, a patriarch, and a century-old monastery shelf: the whole translation movement in one episode.", "sources": [ { "source": "gutas-1998" }, { "source": "dancona-sep" } ] }, { "id": "al-jabr", "title": "Algebra", "original": { "text": "الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة", "translit": "al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala", "lang": "arabic" }, "author": "al-khwarizmi", "composed": { "from": 813, "to": 833, "ca": true, "place": "baghdad" }, "field": "mathematics", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The moment algebra entered Latin is dated in a calendar nobody outside Iberia used. Robert of Chester's colophon says he finished at Segovia in 'era 1183', the Spanish era, which runs 38 years ahead of Anno Domini. The famous date 1145 is itself a conversion. And if Robert of Chester is the same man as Robert of Ketton, the same Englishman had translated the Qur'an into Latin two years before.", "sources": [ { "source": "hughes-1989" }, { "source": "toomer-1973" } ] }, { "id": "qanun", "title": "Canon of Medicine", "original": { "text": "القانون في الطب", "translit": "al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb", "lang": "arabic" }, "author": "ibn-sina", "composed": { "from": 1012, "to": 1025, "ca": true, "place": "hamadan" }, "field": "medicine", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Gerard of Cremona never signed his translations. When he died in 1187 his students, afraid his name would vanish, appended to one of his manuscripts a short life and a list of his seventy-plus translations. The Canon is item 63. It was printed about 15 times before 1500 and in some 60 further editions between 1500 and 1674, and was still taught at Montpellier and Louvain around 1650.", "sources": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" }, { "source": "lemay-1978" }, { "source": "gutas-sep-ibn-sina" } ] }, { "id": "maqasid", "title": "Aims of the Philosophers", "original": { "text": "مقاصد الفلاسفة", "translit": "Maqāṣid al-falāsifa", "lang": "arabic" }, "author": "al-ghazali", "composed": { "from": 1093, "to": 1094, "ca": true, "place": "baghdad" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The prologue in which al-Ghazali says he is only reporting doctrines in order to refute them was translated into Latin, then lost from the circulating text. It survives in exactly one manuscript in Paris. Every other copy opened cold with the doctrines, so for four centuries Latin readers took Islam's most famous critic of philosophy for Avicenna's loyal epitomist, while nervous copyists scrawled 'cave hic', beware here, in the margins of some forty manuscripts.", "sources": [ { "source": "minnema-2014" }, { "source": "griffel-sep" } ] }, { "id": "hayy-ibn-yaqzan", "title": "Hayy ibn Yaqzan", "original": { "text": "حي بن يقظان", "translit": "Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān", "lang": "arabic" }, "author": "ibn-tufayl", "composed": { "from": 1163, "to": 1184, "ca": true, "place": "al-andalus" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The whole European career of the book runs through one physical object: a manuscript copied in 1303, bought in Aleppo in the 1630s by Edward Pococke the elder, and shelved in the Bodleian. His son's Latin translation came off the Oxford press in 1671, the very year John Locke, a colleague and friend of both Pocockes, drafted the first versions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The self-taught islander and the tabula rasa met in the same building.", "sources": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011" } ] }, { "id": "iliad", "title": "Iliad", "read_slug": "homer-iliad-056ee9", "original": { "text": "Ἰλιάς", "translit": "Ilias", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "homer", "composed": { "from": -750, "ca": true }, "field": "poetry", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Unlike most books in this atlas, the Iliad never crossed into Arabic or Latin in antiquity entire; the medieval West knew Troy through Latin digests and romances while the Greek text lived in Byzantium. Its first complete Western crossing came absurdly late, in 1360s Florence, from a Calabrian Greek lodged in Boccaccio's house. After that the chain runs through London: Chapman's thunder, Pope's subscription rolls, and Butler's plain prose, which is the Iliad this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" }, { "source": "reynolds-wilson-2013" } ] }, { "id": "odyssey", "title": "Odyssey", "read_slug": "homer-odyssey-34e6a4", "original": { "text": "Ὀδύσσεια", "translit": "Odysseia", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "homer", "composed": { "from": -725, "ca": true }, "field": "poetry", "summary": "The homecoming epic, carried west in the same Florentine project that moved the Iliad, and re-voiced in English in every century since.", "detail": "Pilatus turned it into Latin alongside the Iliad for Boccaccio's circle. Chapman completed the pair in 1616; Pope followed with collaborators he did not loudly advertise; Butler, who suspected a woman wrote it, gave it the prose this library reads.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "republic", "title": "Republic", "read_slug": "plato-republic-2bf014", "original": { "text": "Πολιτεία", "translit": "Politeia", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "plato", "composed": { "from": -380, "to": -370, "ca": true, "place": "athens" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The Republic is the strange inverse of this atlas's Aristotle chains: no complete Arabic translation survives and scholars doubt one ever existed, so the Arabs knew the book chiefly through Galen's synopsis, and Averroes, lacking the Politics, wrote his political commentary on the Republic instead, a work that now survives through Samuel ben Judah's Hebrew of 1320-22. The complete book reached Latin with Ficino in Florence and English with Spens and then Jowett; the Loeb English of Paul Shorey is the one this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "hankins-1990" }, { "source": "shorey-1930" } ] }, { "id": "nicomachean-ethics", "title": "Nicomachean Ethics", "read_slug": "aristotle-nicomachean-ethics-ac98dd", "original": { "text": "Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια", "translit": "Ethika Nikomacheia", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "aristotle", "composed": { "from": -340, "ca": true, "place": "athens" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The Arabic Ethics survives in a single Fez manuscript, its translator credits tangled enough that scholarship still argues over which books are Ishaq ibn Hunayn's and which belong to the older Ustath tradition. The Latin West read fragments (the Ethica vetus and nova) until Robert Grosseteste produced the first complete translation from the Greek around 1246-47. The Loeb English of Harris Rackham is the one this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "akasoy-fidora-2005" }, { "source": "dod-1982" } ] }, { "id": "peloponnesian-war", "title": "History of the Peloponnesian War", "read_slug": "thucydides-history-of-the-peloponnesian-war-af5aa9", "original": { "text": "Ἱστορίαι", "translit": "Historiai", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "thucydides", "composed": { "from": -410, "to": -400, "ca": true }, "field": "history", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The medieval West did not read Thucydides; he returned through papal Rome, where Valla turned him into Latin for Nicholas V around 1452. The first English (Nicolls, 1550) was made from a French version of Valla's Latin, at third hand. Hobbes went back to the Greek in 1629 because, he said, Thucydides best showed how democracies fare in war. The Victorian crib of Henry Dale is the English this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" }, { "source": "hobbes-1629" } ] }, { "id": "histories-herodotus", "title": "The Histories", "read_slug": "herodotus-the-histories-ecffbd", "original": { "text": "Ἱστορίαι", "translit": "Historiai", "lang": "greek" }, "author": "herodotus", "composed": { "from": -430, "ca": true }, "field": "history", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Herodotus came back to the West in the 1450s through Valla's Latin, finished for the same Roman patronage that paid for Thucydides. The Loeb English of A. D. Godley is the one this library carries, complete with Halicarnassus restored to its own name.", "sources": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" }, { "source": "godley-1920" } ] }, { "id": "de-rerum-natura", "title": "De Rerum Natura", "read_slug": "lucretius-de-rerum-natura-4543ca", "original": { "text": "De rerum natura", "lang": "latin" }, "author": "lucretius", "composed": { "from": -55, "ca": true, "place": "rome" }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Carolingian monks copied the poem in the ninth century and then the world forgot to read it; two of those copies, the Oblongus and the Quadratus, sleep through the whole story in northern libraries, unknown to the humanists. In January 1417 Poggio Bracciolini, hunting manuscripts on leave from the Council of Constance, found a descendant of that copying in a German monastery he never named, probably Fulda. His find is lost; the transcription Niccoli made from it survives in Florence, along with Poggio's letters demanding his book back for fourteen years. Creech gave the poem published English verse in 1682; the Leonard verse translation of 1916 is the one this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "reynolds-wilson-2013" }, { "source": "leonard-1916" } ] }, { "id": "aeneid", "title": "Aeneid", "read_slug": "virgil-aeneid-659242", "original": { "text": "Aeneis", "lang": "latin" }, "author": "virgil", "composed": { "from": -29, "to": -19, "place": "rome" }, "field": "poetry", "summary": "Rome's founding epic, never lost and never done: every age of English has felt obliged to make its own.", "detail": "The Aeneid is the atlas's control case: a book that survived continuously and still kept crossing. Gavin Douglas finished a complete Scots Eneados in 1513, the first in any Anglic tongue; Dryden's 1697 subscription Virgil ruled for a century; the Boston verse of Theodore Williams is the English this library carries.", "sources": [ { "source": "dryden-1697" }, { "source": "williams-1910" } ] }, { "id": "manusmriti", "title": "Manusmriti", "read_slug": "unknown-manusmrti-347b76", "original": { "text": "मनुस्मृति", "translit": "Manusmrti", "lang": "sanskrit" }, "author": "manu", "attribution": "traditional", "composed": { "from": -200, "to": 200, "ca": true }, "field": "law", "summary": "The ordinances of Manu: dharma codified. Its English chain begins with a Calcutta judge who needed the law he was supposed to administer.", "detail": "William Jones translated the Manusmriti because British courts in Bengal claimed to apply Hindu law without being able to read it; he worked with the pandits of the Asiatic Society's circle and published the Institutes of Hindu Law in Calcutta in 1794, the year he died. Buhler's Sacred Books of the East version replaced it for scholars in 1886. This library carries the smriti corpus in fresh AI-assisted translation alongside the atlas of its first crossing.", "sources": [ { "source": "jones-1794" }, { "source": "cannon-1990" }, { "source": "buhler-1886" } ] }, { "id": "traite-de-legislation", "title": "Traité de législation", "read_slug": "charles-comte-traite-de-legislation-vol-i-7e62a2", "original": { "text": "Traité de législation, ou exposition des lois générales", "lang": "french" }, "author": "charles-comte", "composed": { "from": 1826, "to": 1827, "place": "paris" }, "field": "law", "summary": "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.", "detail": "This is the atlas's newest kind of chain: a book famous in citation and absent in translation. Economists and historians of liberalism cited the Traité for two centuries while no complete English existed. The crossing finally happened in New Delhi in 2026, an AI-assisted translation made by Thothica from the editions kept findable by David Hart's digital library; this library is where it lives.", "sources": [ { "source": "hart-dlp" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "nouveau-traite-deconomie", "title": "Nouveau traité d'économie sociale", "read_slug": "charles-dunoyer-nouveau-traite-deconomie-vol-i-6da8ce", "original": { "text": "Nouveau traité d'économie sociale", "lang": "french" }, "author": "charles-dunoyer", "composed": { "from": 1830, "place": "paris" }, "field": "economics", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Dunoyer opens by setting aside the free-will debate in a sentence and getting to work, which is the book in miniature. Like Comte's treatises it traveled as reputation rather than text until the same New Delhi crossing of 2026 carried it into English in this library.", "sources": [ { "source": "hart-dlp" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "zuruckforderung-der-denkfreiheit", "title": "Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought", "read_slug": "johann-gottlieb-fichte-zuruckforderung-der-denkfreiheit-bookde", "original": { "text": "Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europens", "lang": "german" }, "author": "fichte", "composed": { "from": 1793 }, "field": "philosophy", "summary": "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.", "detail": "The pamphlet appeared anonymously at the height of the censorship panic after the French Revolution. English readers had access to a translation in James Schmidt's 1996 Enlightenment anthology; the complete crossing carried in this library was made in New Delhi in 2026.", "sources": [ { "source": "schmidt-1996" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "diwan-e-ghalib", "title": "Diwan-e-Ghalib", "read_slug": "mirza-ghalib-diwan-e-ghalib-74ed4c", "original": { "text": "دیوانِ غالب", "translit": "Diwan-e-Ghalib", "lang": "urdu" }, "author": "mirza-ghalib", "composed": { "from": 1816, "to": 1841, "ca": true, "place": "new-delhi" }, "field": "poetry", "summary": "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.", "detail": "Ghalib pruned his own divan ruthlessly for its first Delhi lithograph of October 1841; the rejected verses fill scholarly editions to this day. English nibbled for a century and a half, a ghazal here, ten there, because the radif, the repeated end-phrase every couplet must land on, defeats translators; complete versions arrived only with Niazi (2002) and Rahman (2003). The AI-assisted crossing in this library differs in form and address: it keeps the radif, and every line travels with its original and transliteration. In its first ghazal every couplet still lands on 'it is not there'.", "sources": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] } ], "transmissions": [ { "id": "de-anima-arabic-ishaq", "work": "de-anima", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "ishaq-ibn-hunayn", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 870, "to": 900, "ca": true }, "note": "Ishaq translated the work twice; the Fihrist reports the first version was left slightly unfinished. His Arabic is lost as an independent text. An older anonymous Arabic version also circulated, which Averroes quotes in nine passages as 'the other translation'.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "fihrist", "detail": "reports the double translation, the first incomplete" }, { "source": "treiger-2017", "detail": "reconstruction of the lost translation from its descendants" } ] }, { "id": "de-anima-commentary-ibn-rushd", "work": "de-anima", "from": "de-anima-arabic-ishaq", "language": "arabic", "kind": "commentary", "people": [ { "person": "ibn-rushd", "role": "commentator" } ], "date": { "from": 1186, "ca": true }, "note": "The Long Commentary quotes Ishaq's translation in full as its lemmata, which is why the lost Arabic survives inside it. Where it was written is not documented; Averroes was then moving between al-Andalus and the Almohad court in Marrakesh.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "taylor-2009", "detail": "dating to c. 1186, within a range of roughly 1181-1190" }, { "source": "sep-ibn-rushd" } ] }, { "id": "de-anima-latin-scot", "work": "de-anima", "from": "de-anima-commentary-ibn-rushd", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "michael-scot", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1220, "to": 1224, "ca": true }, "note": "In use in Paris by about 1225, where Averroes became simply 'the Commentator' within a decade. The unicity-of-intellect reading drawn from this book was condemned at Paris in 1270 and 1277. Only a few of the fifty-plus manuscripts name Scot; stylometry supports the attribution.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "hasse-2010", "detail": "stylometric case for Scot's authorship of the anonymous Averroes translations" }, { "source": "hasse-sep" } ] }, { "id": "de-anima-hebrew-zerahyah", "work": "de-anima", "from": "de-anima-arabic-ishaq", "language": "hebrew", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "zerahyah-hen", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "rome", "date": { "from": 1284 }, "note": "Made from the Arabic in Rome. Together with the Latin lemmata, it is one of the witnesses from which Ishaq's lost translation is reconstructed. Its closing section follows a different Arabic version that completed Ishaq's unfinished text, as the Hebrew preface itself records.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "treiger-2017" } ] }, { "id": "elements-arabic-hajjaj", "work": "elements", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "al-hajjaj", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "yahya-ibn-khalid", "role": "commissioner" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 786, "to": 805, "ca": true }, "note": "The first known Arabic Euclid, made for the Barmakid vizier during Harun al-Rashid's reign. It survives only indirectly, through the preface and readings preserved with al-Nayrizi's commentary.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "fihrist" }, { "source": "murdoch-1971", "detail": "the transmission history of both al-Hajjaj recensions" } ] }, { "id": "elements-arabic-hajjaj-mamun", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-arabic-hajjaj", "language": "arabic", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "al-hajjaj", "role": "reviser" }, { "person": "al-mamun", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 813, "to": 833, "ca": true }, "note": "A second, deliberately leaner recension to win the favor of the new caliph. Al-Hajjaj said he left out the superfluities, filled up the gaps and corrected the errors, for an edition aimed at specialists.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971", "detail": "quoting the preface preserved in the Leiden al-Nayrizi codex" } ] }, { "id": "elements-arabic-ishaq", "work": "elements", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "ishaq-ibn-hunayn", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 875, "to": 900, "ca": true }, "note": "A fresh translation from the Greek, made in the Hunayn workshop two generations after al-Hajjaj.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "fihrist" }, { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "elements-arabic-thabit", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-arabic-ishaq", "language": "arabic", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "thabit-ibn-qurra", "role": "reviser" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 880, "to": 901, "ca": true }, "note": "Thabit collated Ishaq's text against Greek manuscripts and earlier versions. The Ishaq-Thabit recension became the preferred Arabic Elements.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "elements-latin-adelard", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-arabic-hajjaj", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adelard-of-bath", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1120, "ca": true }, "note": "Adelard's Version I, the true translation, made from the al-Hajjaj tradition; which of the two recensions he had is debated. The far more popular Version II, long credited to him, is now attributed to Robert of Chester.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "busard-folkerts-1992", "detail": "reattribution of Version II to Robert of Chester" }, { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "elements-latin-gerard", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-arabic-thabit", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "gerard-of-cremona", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "toledo", "date": { "from": 1150, "to": 1187, "ca": true }, "note": "Made from the Ishaq-Thabit recension as part of Gerard's Toledo program, alongside his Almagest and Canon.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" }, { "source": "lemay-1978" } ] }, { "id": "elements-latin-campanus", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-latin-adelard", "language": "latin", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "campanus-of-novara", "role": "reviser" } ], "date": { "from": 1255, "to": 1261, "ca": true }, "note": "Campanus reworked the Adelard-tradition text with fuller proofs and additions of his own. His redaction became the standard university Euclid for two centuries.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "elements-edition-ratdolt", "work": "elements", "from": "elements-latin-campanus", "language": "latin", "kind": "edition", "people": [ { "person": "erhard-ratdolt", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "venice", "date": { "from": 1482 }, "note": "The first printed Euclid, and the first book to solve the printing of geometric diagrams. Through Campanus and Adelard it descends from the Arabic line; a printed Greek text appeared only in 1533.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "murdoch-1971" } ] }, { "id": "almagest-arabic-hajjaj", "work": "almagest", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "title": { "text": "المجسطي", "translit": "al-Majisṭī" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "al-hajjaj", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "al-mamun", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 827, "to": 828 }, "note": "The earliest surviving Arabic Almagest, dated 212 of the Hijra. Lost Syriac and 'old Arabic' versions of around 800, promoted by the Barmakids, preceded it.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pal-project", "detail": "work entry for the al-Hajjaj version" }, { "source": "kunitzsch-1974" } ] }, { "id": "almagest-arabic-ishaq", "work": "almagest", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "ishaq-ibn-hunayn", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 879, "to": 890, "ca": true }, "note": "The second surviving Arabic translation, made half a century after al-Hajjaj's.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pal-project" } ] }, { "id": "almagest-arabic-thabit", "work": "almagest", "from": "almagest-arabic-ishaq", "language": "arabic", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "thabit-ibn-qurra", "role": "reviser" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 890, "to": 901, "ca": true }, "note": "Completed before Thabit's death in 901. The Ishaq-Thabit Almagest became the standard eastern text.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pal-project" } ] }, { "id": "almagest-latin-gerard", "work": "almagest", "from": "almagest-arabic-hajjaj", "language": "latin", "title": { "text": "Almagesti" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "gerard-of-cremona", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "toledo", "date": { "from": 1140, "to": 1175, "ca": true }, "note": "Completed by 1175: a colophon records a copy made on 11 August of that year, and the work may have begun decades earlier. This edge follows the al-Hajjaj version for Books I-IX; Kunitzsch showed that Books X-XIII and the star catalogue follow the Ishaq-Thabit recension instead. A direct Greek-to-Latin translation made in Sicily in the mid-12th century circulated little.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pal-project", "detail": "'existed by 1175, but may have been made long before'" }, { "source": "kunitzsch-1974", "detail": "Books I-IX from al-Hajjaj, Books X-XIII and the star catalogue from Ishaq-Thabit" } ] }, { "id": "simple-drugs-syriac-sergius", "work": "on-simple-drugs", "from": "original", "language": "syriac", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "sergius-of-reshaina", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 500, "to": 536, "ca": true }, "note": "Part of the first sustained translation of Greek medicine into any language, made by the Alexandria-trained chief physician of Reshaina before his death in 536.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala", "detail": "Hunayn records and grades Sergius's Syriac versions" }, { "source": "bhayro-2017", "detail": "the surviving palimpsest witness of this translation" } ] }, { "id": "simple-drugs-syriac-hunayn", "work": "on-simple-drugs", "from": "simple-drugs-syriac-sergius", "language": "syriac", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "hunayn-ibn-ishaq", "role": "reviser" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 840, "to": 873, "ca": true }, "note": "Hunayn treated his predecessors like a strict examiner. The Risala records him grading Sergius's versions and revising or replacing them against better Greek manuscripts.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "lamoreaux-2016" } ] }, { "id": "simple-drugs-arabic-hunayn-school", "work": "on-simple-drugs", "from": "simple-drugs-syriac-hunayn", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "hunayn-ibn-ishaq", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "hubaysh", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 845, "to": 875, "ca": true }, "note": "The school's Arabic Galen was typically made from Hunayn's Syriac rather than directly from Greek, much of it by his nephew Hubaysh. The Risala records the division of hands work by work.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "hunayn-risala" }, { "source": "strohmaier-ei2" } ] }, { "id": "materia-medica-arabic-istifan", "work": "materia-medica", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "istifan-ibn-basil", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "hunayn-ibn-ishaq", "role": "reviser" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 847, "to": 861, "ca": true }, "note": "Made during al-Mutawakkil's reign and corrected by Hunayn. Where Istifan could not identify a plant, he left its Greek name standing in Arabic letters rather than guess.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul", "detail": "the primary account of the translation and its revision" }, { "source": "pormann-savage-smith-2007" } ] }, { "id": "materia-medica-revision-cordoba", "work": "materia-medica", "from": "materia-medica-arabic-istifan", "language": "arabic", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "nicholas-the-monk", "role": "reviser" }, { "person": "hasdai-ibn-shaprut", "role": "scholar" }, { "person": "ibn-juljul-person", "role": "scholar" }, { "person": "abd-al-rahman-iii", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "cordoba", "date": { "from": 951, "to": 962, "ca": true }, "note": "An illustrated Greek codex arrived from Constantinople around 948 as a state gift; the monk Nicholas followed around 951, after the caliph asked for someone who could read it. The circle did not retranslate: it identified the transliterated Greek drug names against the pictures and the pharmacies of al-Andalus.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "ibn-juljul", "detail": "written by a participant in the circle" } ] }, { "id": "aphorisms-arabic-hunayn", "work": "aphorisms", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "title": { "text": "الفصول", "translit": "Kitāb al-Fuṣūl" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "hunayn-ibn-ishaq", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 840, "to": 873, "ca": true }, "note": "Made from the Greek through Hunayn's own Syriac, and carried as the lemmata of his translation of Galen's commentary, which is how the freestanding Arabic text circulated.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "overwien-2015", "detail": "the Greek-Syriac-Arabic working method reconstructed" } ] }, { "id": "aphorisms-latin-constantine", "work": "aphorisms", "from": "aphorisms-arabic-hunayn", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "constantine-the-african", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "monte-cassino", "date": { "from": 1077, "to": 1098, "ca": true }, "note": "Translated with Galen's commentary during Constantine's Monte Cassino years. It displaced the late antique Latin version that had circulated since Ravenna, entered the Articella, and gave Salerno's practical school its theoretical backbone.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "burnett-jacquart-1994" } ] }, { "id": "enneads-edition-porphyry", "work": "enneads", "from": "original", "language": "greek", "kind": "edition", "people": [ { "person": "porphyry", "role": "editor" } ], "date": { "from": 300, "to": 305, "ca": true }, "note": "Porphyry arranged his teacher's treatises into six enneads, groups of nine, some thirty years after Plotinus died. Every later tradition received the book in this editorial shape.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "adamson-sep" } ] }, { "id": "enneads-arabic-theology", "work": "enneads", "from": "enneads-edition-porphyry", "language": "arabic", "title": { "text": "أثولوجيا أرسطاطاليس", "translit": "Uthūlūjiyā Arisṭāṭālīs" }, "kind": "adaptation", "people": [ { "person": "ibn-naima-al-himsi", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "al-kindi", "role": "reviser" }, { "person": "ahmad-ibn-al-mutasim", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 833, "to": 842, "ca": true }, "note": "A rearranged, interpretively expanded paraphrase of selections from Enneads IV-VI, circulating as the Theology of Aristotle. The preface names the production team honestly; the Aristotle label may be a later addition rather than a forgery. Ibn Sina found the attribution 'somewhat suspect' and commented on the book anyway.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "adamson-sep", "detail": "the dedication to Ahmad dates the redaction to 833-842" }, { "source": "zimmermann-1986" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-pahlavi-burzoy", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "original", "language": "middle-persian", "title": { "translit": "Karīrak ud Damanak" }, "kind": "adaptation", "people": [ { "person": "burzoy", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "khosrow-i", "role": "commissioner" } ], "date": { "from": 550, "to": 570, "ca": true }, "note": "Burzoy's compilation joined the five Panchatantra books with chapters from the Mahabharata and other Indian sources. The book's own frame story says he was sent to India for a herb that revives the dead and learned that the herb was a book. The Pahlavi text is lost; everything west of India descends from it.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "de-blois-1990", "detail": "analysis of the five versions of the voyage narrative" }, { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-syriac-bud", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "panchatantra-pahlavi-burzoy", "language": "syriac", "title": { "translit": "Kalilag and Damnag" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "bud-the-periodeutes", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 570, "ca": true }, "note": "The Old Syriac version, made from the Pahlavi by an itinerant cleric of the Church of the East. It is the oldest surviving witness to Burzoy's lost book.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-arabic-ibn-al-muqaffa", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "panchatantra-pahlavi-burzoy", "language": "arabic", "title": { "text": "كليلة ودمنة", "translit": "Kalīla wa-Dimna" }, "kind": "adaptation", "people": [ { "person": "ibn-al-muqaffa", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 750, "ca": true }, "note": "Less a translation than a reinvention, with chapters of Ibn al-Muqaffa's own added, including Dimna's trial. It founded Arabic literary prose; its translator was executed within the decade.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" }, { "source": "de-blois-1990" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-hebrew-joel", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "panchatantra-arabic-ibn-al-muqaffa", "language": "hebrew", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "rabbi-joel", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1100, "to": 1200, "ca": true }, "note": "The bridge between the Arabic and Latin Europe. Rabbi Joel is known only because the next translator in the chain says he worked from him.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "riedel-2010", "detail": "attested only through John of Capua's preface" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-latin-capua", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "panchatantra-hebrew-joel", "language": "latin", "title": { "text": "Directorium humanae vitae" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "john-of-capua", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1263, "to": 1278 }, "note": "The Directory of Human Life, made by a Jewish convert from Rabbi Joel's Hebrew. Most of the European vernacular versions, and through them La Fontaine's 'Pilpay', descend from this Latin.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "panchatantra-castilian", "work": "panchatantra", "from": "panchatantra-arabic-ibn-al-muqaffa", "language": "castilian", "title": { "text": "Calila e Dimna" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "alfonso-x", "role": "commissioner" } ], "date": { "from": 1251, "ca": true }, "note": "Translated directly from the Arabic at the order of Alfonso, then still crown prince; the translator's name is not recorded. The year 1251 is the accepted emendation of the colophon's era-year; the 15th-century reading of 1261 and its claim of a Latin intermediary are both rejected.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "riedel-2010" } ] }, { "id": "sindhind-arabic-fazari", "work": "brahmasphutasiddhanta", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "title": { "translit": "Zīj al-Sindhind al-kabīr" }, "kind": "adaptation", "people": [ { "person": "al-fazari", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "yaqub-ibn-tariq", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "al-mansur", "role": "commissioner" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 771, "to": 775, "ca": true }, "note": "An Indian embassy reached al-Mansur's court in 771 or 773 with an astronomer in its party. The Arabic Sindhind made from his text mixes Indian parameters with Persian and Greek material; the Sanskrit source was probably a sibling text of Brahmagupta's school rather than the Brahmasphutasiddhanta itself.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "pingree-1970", "detail": "reconstruction of the lost zij from quoted fragments" }, { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "sindhind-arabic-khwarizmi", "work": "brahmasphutasiddhanta", "from": "sindhind-arabic-fazari", "language": "arabic", "title": { "translit": "Zīj al-Sindhind" }, "kind": "adaptation", "people": [ { "person": "al-khwarizmi", "role": "author" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 820, "ca": true }, "note": "Al-Khwarizmi's own tables in the Sindhind tradition, drawn up under al-Ma'mun. The Arabic original is lost.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "toomer-1973" }, { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "sindhind-revision-maslama", "work": "brahmasphutasiddhanta", "from": "sindhind-arabic-khwarizmi", "language": "arabic", "kind": "revision", "people": [ { "person": "maslama-al-majriti", "role": "reviser" }, { "person": "ibn-al-saffar", "role": "reviser" } ], "place": "cordoba", "date": { "from": 1000, "ca": true }, "note": "Recomputed for the meridian of Cordoba and the Islamic calendar, around the turn of the millennium. This Andalusi recension is the only form in which al-Khwarizmi's tables survived.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "bea-2007" } ] }, { "id": "sindhind-latin-adelard", "work": "brahmasphutasiddhanta", "from": "sindhind-revision-maslama", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adelard-of-bath", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1126 }, "note": "Manuscript-dated to 1126, one family precisely to 26 January. The attribution reads 'presumably Adelard': two manuscripts intersperse chapters by Petrus Alfonsi, and a version of the tables is keyed to 1116, suggesting an earlier attempt he revised.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "mercier-1987", "detail": "the 1126 dating and the Petrus Alfonsi precursor question" } ] }, { "id": "topics-syriac-athanasius", "work": "topics", "from": "original", "language": "syriac", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "athanasius-of-balad", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 660, "to": 687, "ca": true }, "note": "Sixth-century Syriac logic had stopped at the early Prior Analytics, following the Alexandrian curriculum. Athanasius, trained at the monastery of Qenneshre, completed the Syriac Organon under Umayyad rule, a century before anyone needed it in Arabic.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "tannous-2018" }, { "source": "dancona-sep" } ] }, { "id": "topics-arabic-timothy", "work": "topics", "from": "topics-syriac-athanasius", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "timothy-i", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "abu-nuh", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "al-mahdi", "role": "commissioner" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 782, "ca": true }, "note": "Commissioned by the caliph for staged interreligious debate. Timothy's surviving letters show him asking fellow clerics to search the Mar Mattai monastery library for Syriac versions and commentaries on the later Organon. The Syriac exemplar is presumed to be Athanasius of Balad's version, the only one known; Timothy does not name it.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "gutas-1998", "detail": "the episode documented from Timothy's own correspondence" } ] }, { "id": "al-jabr-latin-robert", "work": "al-jabr", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "robert-of-chester", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "segovia", "date": { "from": 1145 }, "note": "The first Latin algebra, finished at Segovia in 'era 1183' of the Spanish calendar, which converts to 1145. The familiar title Liber algebrae et almucabola comes from a 1915 edition based on late copies, not from Robert's manuscripts.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "hughes-1989", "detail": "critical edition from the earliest manuscripts" }, { "source": "burnett-2004", "detail": "on the Robert of Chester and Robert of Ketton question" } ] }, { "id": "al-jabr-latin-gerard", "work": "al-jabr", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "gerard-of-cremona", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "toledo", "date": { "from": 1150, "to": 1187, "ca": true }, "note": "Gerard's independent translation, undated in the manuscripts, made in Toledo before his death in 1187. It circulated alongside Robert's and was the version most algebraists used.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "lemay-1978" }, { "source": "burnett-2001" } ] }, { "id": "qanun-latin-gerard", "work": "qanun", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "title": { "text": "Liber Canonis" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "gerard-of-cremona", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "toledo", "date": { "from": 1150, "to": 1187, "ca": true }, "note": "Made with his team of collaborators in Toledo. The attribution rests on the Commemoratio librorum, the list of translations his students compiled at his death, where the Canon is item 63. A rival attribution to a 13th-century 'Gerard de Sabloneta' has no medieval testimony behind it.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "lemay-1978", "detail": "item 63 in the students' list" }, { "source": "burnett-2001" } ] }, { "id": "qanun-hebrew-nathan", "work": "qanun", "from": "original", "language": "hebrew", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "nathan-ha-meati", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "rome", "date": { "from": 1279 }, "note": "The first complete Hebrew Canon, finished in Rome in 1279. The Hebrew text was printed at Naples in 1491-92, before the Arabic ever reached print.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" } ] }, { "id": "qanun-edition-princeps", "work": "qanun", "from": "qanun-latin-gerard", "language": "latin", "kind": "edition", "people": [ { "person": "adolf-rusch", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "strasbourg", "date": { "from": 1473, "ca": true }, "note": "The editio princeps, usually credited to Strasbourg around 1473, with Milan 1473 also claimed. About 15 editions followed by 1500, and some 60 more, whole or in part, between 1500 and 1674; Montpellier and Louvain still taught the book around 1650.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987", "detail": "census of the printed editions" } ] }, { "id": "qanun-edition-medici", "work": "qanun", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "edition", "people": [ { "person": "raimondi", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "rome", "date": { "from": 1593 }, "note": "The Medici Oriental Press printed the Arabic text itself in Rome, in type cut for the purpose, largely for export back to the lands that wrote it. The book had waited five and a half centuries for its own language to reach print.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "siraisi-1987" } ] }, { "id": "maqasid-latin-gundissalinus", "work": "maqasid", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "title": { "text": "Summa theoricae philosophiae" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "gundissalinus", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "magister-iohannes", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "toledo", "date": { "from": 1162, "to": 1180, "ca": true }, "note": "The translators omitted the prologue in which al-Ghazali announces he is reporting doctrines in order to demolish them; a Latin rendering survives in exactly one Paris manuscript. Read cold, the book made 'Algazel' a faithful Avicennian for four centuries. The print era fixed the error in place: Venice 1506, as Logica et philosophia Algazelis.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "minnema-2014", "detail": "manuscript census, the lone surviving prologue, and the 'cave hic' marginalia" }, { "source": "griffel-sep" } ] }, { "id": "hayy-latin-pococke", "work": "hayy-ibn-yaqzan", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "title": { "text": "Philosophus Autodidactus" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "edward-pococke-younger", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "edward-pococke-elder", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "oxford", "date": { "from": 1671 }, "note": "A bilingual Arabic-Latin edition, the son translating at twenty-three, the father supplying the Aleppo manuscript and the preface. Published the year Locke drafted the first versions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the same university.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "russell-1994" } ] }, { "id": "hayy-dutch-anonymous", "work": "hayy-ibn-yaqzan", "from": "hayy-latin-pococke", "language": "dutch", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "johannes-bouwmeester", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "amsterdam", "date": { "from": 1672 }, "note": "Published anonymously in 1672 and reissued in 1701. The translator is unnamed in the book; scholarship places the work in Spinoza's circle, with Bouwmeester the usual candidate, and even the source text, the Latin or the Arabic itself, is argued over.", "confidence": "disputed", "evidence": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011", "detail": "the Spinoza circle attribution and its limits" } ] }, { "id": "hayy-english-keith", "work": "hayy-ibn-yaqzan", "from": "hayy-latin-pococke", "language": "english", "title": { "text": "An Account of the Oriental Philosophy" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "george-keith", "role": "translator" } ], "date": { "from": 1674 }, "note": "The first English version, made from the Latin by the Quaker George Keith, whose movement read the self-taught islander as a parable of the inner light.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "russell-1994" } ] }, { "id": "hayy-english-ockley", "work": "hayy-ibn-yaqzan", "from": "original", "language": "english", "title": { "text": "The Improvement of Human Reason" }, "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "simon-ockley", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1708 }, "note": "Translated directly from the Arabic, bypassing the Latin. Eleven years before Robinson Crusoe, whose debt to the book is often suggested and still debated.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "russell-1994" }, { "source": "ben-zaken-2011" } ] }, { "id": "iliad-latin-pilatus", "work": "iliad", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "leontius-pilatus", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "boccaccio", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "florence", "date": { "from": 1360, "to": 1362, "ca": true }, "note": "The first complete Latin Homer of the medieval West, made line by line while Pilatus lodged in Boccaccio's house and lectured on Greek. Petrarch, who owned a Greek Homer he could not read, had begged for exactly this.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "wilson-1992", "detail": "Pilatus's Florentine Homer project for Boccaccio" } ] }, { "id": "iliad-english-chapman", "work": "iliad", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "george-chapman", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1598, "to": 1611 }, "note": "Issued in installments from 1598 and completed in 1611: the first full English Iliad. In 1816 a young apothecary's apprentice stayed up all night reading a borrowed copy and wrote a sonnet about it before breakfast.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "chapman-1611" } ] }, { "id": "iliad-english-pope", "work": "iliad", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "alexander-pope", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1715, "to": 1720 }, "note": "Sold by subscription in six volumes, it made Pope financially independent for life: the clearest case in this atlas of a translation as a business model.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pope-1715" } ] }, { "id": "iliad-english-butler", "work": "iliad", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "samuel-butler", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1898 }, "note": "Plain prose by the novelist of Erewhon. The text carried in this library is the Perseus revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores Greek names (Zeus for Jove, Odysseus for Ulysses).", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "butler-1898" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026", "detail": "the corpus copy and its provenance" } ] }, { "id": "odyssey-latin-pilatus", "work": "odyssey", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "leontius-pilatus", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "boccaccio", "role": "patron" } ], "place": "florence", "date": { "from": 1360, "to": 1362, "ca": true }, "note": "The companion crossing to the Latin Iliad, from the same household project.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "odyssey-english-chapman", "work": "odyssey", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "george-chapman", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1614, "to": 1615 }, "note": "Twelve books in 1614, the complete Odyssey in 1615; The Whole Works of Homer of 1616 collected the pair into the first complete English Homer.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "chapman-1616" } ] }, { "id": "odyssey-english-pope", "work": "odyssey", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "alexander-pope", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1725, "to": 1726 }, "note": "Half the books were quietly drafted by William Broome and Elijah Fenton under Pope's name and polish; the subscription model did not advertise the workshop.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "pope-1725" } ] }, { "id": "odyssey-english-butler", "work": "odyssey", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "samuel-butler", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1900 }, "note": "Butler's prose Odyssey, written by a man convinced the original was a young woman's book. The text carried in this library is the Perseus revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "butler-1900" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "republic-latin-ficino", "work": "republic", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "marsilio-ficino", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "florence", "date": { "from": 1469, "to": 1484, "ca": true }, "note": "Part of Ficino's complete Latin Plato for the Medici circle, printed at Florence in 1484: the first time the West could read the whole Republic since antiquity.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "hankins-1990" }, { "source": "ficino-1484" } ] }, { "id": "republic-english-jowett", "work": "republic", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "benjamin-jowett", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "oxford", "date": { "from": 1871 }, "note": "The Victorian Plato that schooled the anglophone world; earlier complete English versions (Spens 1763, Taylor and Sydenham 1804) never had its reach.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "jowett-1871" } ] }, { "id": "republic-english-shorey", "work": "republic", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "paul-shorey", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1930, "to": 1935 }, "note": "The Loeb facing-page English; the text carried in this library.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "shorey-1930" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "ethics-arabic", "work": "nicomachean-ethics", "from": "original", "language": "arabic", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "ishaq-ibn-hunayn", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "ustath", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "baghdad", "date": { "from": 870, "to": 910, "ca": true }, "note": "The Arabic Ethics survives in one Fez manuscript whose credits are composite: Books I-IV are Ishaq ibn Hunayn's, Books V-X belong to the earlier Ustath of al-Kindi's circle. The existence is attested; the seams are what scholarship keeps relitigating.", "confidence": "probable", "evidence": [ { "source": "akasoy-fidora-2005", "detail": "Dunlop's account of the attribution problem" } ] }, { "id": "ethics-latin-grosseteste", "work": "nicomachean-ethics", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "robert-grosseteste", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "oxford", "date": { "from": 1246, "to": 1247, "ca": true }, "note": "The first complete Latin Ethics to survive and circulate, made from the Greek with a team of helpers and accompanying Greek commentaries: a bishop running a translation workshop between diocesan duties. A Toledo rival saluted him in a preface as 'Robert of the Big Head but the exquisite intellect'.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "dod-1982" } ] }, { "id": "ethics-english-rackham", "work": "nicomachean-ethics", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "harris-rackham", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1926 }, "note": "The Loeb English; the text carried in this library.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "rackham-1926" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "thucydides-latin-valla", "work": "peloponnesian-war", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "lorenzo-valla", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "nicholas-v", "role": "commissioner" } ], "place": "rome", "date": { "from": 1448, "to": 1452, "ca": true }, "note": "Commissioned for the papal library project. For a century Europe's Thucydides was Valla's Latin; the first English (1550) was made from a French version of it, at third hand from the Greek.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "thucydides-english-hobbes", "work": "peloponnesian-war", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "thomas-hobbes", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1629 }, "note": "The first English made directly from the Greek. Hobbes said he translated 'the most politic historiographer that ever writ' so his countrymen could see what democracies do in long wars; Leviathan was the sequel.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "hobbes-1629" } ] }, { "id": "thucydides-english-dale", "work": "peloponnesian-war", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "henry-dale", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1848, "to": 1849 }, "note": "The literal Bohn's Library version of the Rev. Henry Dale, 1848-49; the text carried in this library through the Perseus First1KGreek encoding of the 1851-52 printing.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "dale-1848" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "herodotus-latin-valla", "work": "histories-herodotus", "from": "original", "language": "latin", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "lorenzo-valla", "role": "translator" }, { "person": "nicholas-v", "role": "commissioner" } ], "place": "rome", "date": { "from": 1452, "to": 1457, "ca": true }, "note": "The second Greek historian Valla carried for the papal court; finished as his own life ran out.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "wilson-1992" } ] }, { "id": "herodotus-english-godley", "work": "histories-herodotus", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "arthur-godley", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1920, "to": 1925 }, "note": "The Loeb English; the text carried in this library.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "godley-1920" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "drn-english-creech", "work": "de-rerum-natura", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "thomas-creech", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "oxford", "date": { "from": 1682 }, "note": "The first complete English verse translation to be published, two and a half centuries after Poggio pulled the poem back into circulation. Lucy Hutchinson's complete version of the 1650s stayed in manuscript until 1996.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "creech-1682" } ] }, { "id": "drn-english-leonard", "work": "de-rerum-natura", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "william-ellery-leonard", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1916 }, "note": "Leonard's verse translation; the text carried in this library.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "leonard-1916" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "aeneid-english-dryden", "work": "aeneid", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "john-dryden", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "london", "date": { "from": 1697 }, "note": "The subscription Virgil that set the commercial template Pope would reuse for Homer. Douglas's complete Scots Eneados of 1513 deserves its asterisk as the first in any Anglic tongue.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "dryden-1697" } ] }, { "id": "aeneid-english-williams", "work": "aeneid", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "theodore-williams", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "boston", "date": { "from": 1910 }, "note": "The Boston verse translation; the text carried in this library.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "williams-1910" }, { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] }, { "id": "manusmriti-english-jones", "work": "manusmriti", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "william-jones", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "calcutta", "date": { "from": 1794 }, "note": "Jones proposed the codification project to Cornwallis himself in 1788, having written three years earlier that he could no longer bear to be 'at the mercy of our pandits, who deal out Hindu law as they please'. The Institutes were printed by order of the Government at Calcutta early in 1794; Jones died there that April.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "jones-1794" }, { "source": "cannon-1990" } ] }, { "id": "manusmriti-english-buhler", "work": "manusmriti", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "georg-buhler", "role": "translator" } ], "place": "oxford", "date": { "from": 1886 }, "note": "Volume 25 of the Sacred Books of the East: the scholarly replacement for Jones, with the apparatus his century lacked.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "buhler-1886" } ] }, { "id": "legislation-english-thothica", "work": "traite-de-legislation", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adnan-abbasi", "role": "editor" }, { "person": "david-hart", "role": "scholar" } ], "place": "new-delhi", "date": { "from": 2026 }, "note": "An AI-assisted translation curated at Thothica in New Delhi, made from the French editions kept findable by Hart's Digital Library of Liberty and Power. No earlier complete English translation is known to this atlas; the verification page records the search.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" }, { "source": "hart-dlp", "detail": "source editions and the scholarship that kept the book in citation" } ] }, { "id": "dunoyer-english-thothica", "work": "nouveau-traite-deconomie", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adnan-abbasi", "role": "editor" }, { "person": "david-hart", "role": "scholar" } ], "place": "new-delhi", "date": { "from": 2026 }, "note": "The companion crossing to Comte's treatises, from the same workshop, the same shelves, the same year.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" }, { "source": "hart-dlp" } ] }, { "id": "denkfreiheit-english-thothica", "work": "zuruckforderung-der-denkfreiheit", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adnan-abbasi", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "new-delhi", "date": { "from": 2026 }, "note": "A complete crossing of the 1793 pamphlet. An English version of the speech appeared in Schmidt's 1996 Enlightenment anthology; this one was made independently and entire, preface and all.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" }, { "source": "schmidt-1996" } ] }, { "id": "ghalib-english-thothica", "work": "diwan-e-ghalib", "from": "original", "language": "english", "kind": "translation", "people": [ { "person": "adnan-abbasi", "role": "editor" } ], "place": "new-delhi", "date": { "from": 2026 }, "note": "A complete AI-assisted crossing of the published divan that keeps the radif: every couplet of the first ghazal still lands on 'it is not there'. Made for no patron and no market, which chapter eleven of the book calls the fascination clause.", "confidence": "attested", "evidence": [ { "source": "falsafa-2026" } ] } ], "sources": [ { "id": "gutas-1998", "kind": "book", "author": "Gutas, Dimitri", "title": "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society", "year": 1998, "publisher": "Routledge", "note": "The standard account of why and how the Abbasid translation movement happened. Also the corrective on the House of Wisdom legend." }, { "id": "burnett-2001", "kind": "article", "author": "Burnett, Charles", "title": "The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century", "year": 2001, "publisher": "Science in Context 14" }, { "id": "burnett-1994", "kind": "article", "author": "Burnett, Charles", "title": "Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen", "year": 1994, "publisher": "Micrologus 2" }, { "id": "burnett-2004", "kind": "reference", "author": "Burnett, Charles", "title": "Ketton, Robert of (fl. 1141-1157)", "year": 2004, "publisher": "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" }, { "id": "hasse-2010", "kind": "book", "author": "Hasse, Dag Nikolaus", "title": "Latin Averroes Translations of the First Half of the Thirteenth Century", "year": 2010, "publisher": "Olms" }, { "id": "hasse-sep", "kind": "reference", "author": "Hasse, Dag Nikolaus", "title": "Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West", "year": 2020, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/" }, { "id": "sep-ibn-rushd", "kind": "reference", "author": "Ben Ahmed, Fouad and Pasnau, Robert", "title": "Ibn Rushd [Averroes]", "year": 2021, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-rushd/" }, { "id": "adamson-sep", "kind": "reference", "author": "Adamson, Peter", "title": "The Theology of Aristotle", "year": 2025, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/theology-aristotle/" }, { "id": "zimmermann-1986", "kind": "article", "author": "Zimmermann, F. W.", "title": "The Origins of the So-Called Theology of Aristotle", "year": 1986, "publisher": "In Kraye, Ryan and Schmitt (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages" }, { "id": "griffel-sep", "kind": "reference", "author": "Griffel, Frank", "title": "al-Ghazali", "year": 2025, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/al-ghazali/" }, { "id": "minnema-2014", "kind": "article", "author": "Minnema, Anthony H.", "title": "Algazel Latinus: The Audience of the Summa theoricae philosophiae, 1150-1600", "year": 2014, "publisher": "Traditio 69" }, { "id": "murdoch-1971", "kind": "reference", "author": "Murdoch, John E.", "title": "Euclid: Transmission of the Elements", "year": 1971, "publisher": "Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 4" }, { "id": "busard-folkerts-1992", "kind": "book", "author": "Busard, H. L. and Folkerts, M.", "title": "Robert of Chester's (?) Redaction of Euclid's Elements, the so-called Adelard II Version", "year": 1992, "publisher": "Birkhäuser" }, { "id": "pal-project", "kind": "reference", "author": "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus project", "title": "Work entries for the Arabic and Latin Almagest translations", "year": 2023, "publisher": "Bavarian Academy of Sciences", "url": "https://ptolemaeus.badw.de/" }, { "id": "kunitzsch-1974", "kind": "book", "author": "Kunitzsch, Paul", "title": "Der Almagest: Die Syntaxis Mathematica des Claudius Ptolemäus in arabisch-lateinischer Überlieferung", "year": 1974, "publisher": "Harrassowitz" }, { "id": "strohmaier-ei2", "kind": "reference", "author": "Strohmaier, Gotthard", "title": "Hunayn b. Ishak al-Ibadi", "year": 1971, "publisher": "Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Brill" }, { "id": "lamoreaux-2016", "kind": "book", "author": "Lamoreaux, John C. (ed. and tr.)", "title": "Hunayn ibn Ishaq on His Galen Translations", "year": 2016, "publisher": "Brigham Young University Press" }, { "id": "hunayn-risala", "kind": "primary", "author": "Hunayn ibn Ishaq", "title": "Risala on the Galen translations made by him and his school", "year": 856, "note": "Hunayn's own catalogue of 129 Galenic titles, who translated each into Syriac or Arabic, for whom, and how reliably. The most detailed self-report any medieval translator left." }, { "id": "fihrist", "kind": "primary", "author": "Ibn al-Nadim", "title": "Kitab al-Fihrist", "year": 987, "note": "The Baghdad bookseller's catalogue of every book known to him, with translator attributions that anchor much of the Arabic side of this atlas." }, { "id": "ibn-juljul", "kind": "primary", "author": "Ibn Juljul", "title": "Tabaqat al-atibba wa-l-hukama", "year": 987, "note": "Generations of the physicians, written in Cordoba. The primary source for both the Baghdad Dioscorides translation and the Byzantine gift manuscript episode, by a participant in the Cordoba revision circle." }, { "id": "pormann-savage-smith-2007", "kind": "book", "author": "Pormann, Peter E. and Savage-Smith, Emilie", "title": "Medieval Islamic Medicine", "year": 2007, "publisher": "Edinburgh University Press" }, { "id": "de-blois-1990", "kind": "book", "author": "de Blois, François", "title": "Burzoy's Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalilah wa Dimnah", "year": 1990, "publisher": "Royal Asiatic Society" }, { "id": "riedel-2010", "kind": "reference", "author": "Riedel, Dagmar", "title": "Kalila wa Demna i. Redactions and Circulation", "year": 2010, "publisher": "Encyclopaedia Iranica", "url": "https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kalila-demna-i" }, { "id": "olivelle-1997", "kind": "book", "author": "Olivelle, Patrick", "title": "Pancatantra: The Book of India's Folk Wisdom", "year": 1997, "publisher": "Oxford University Press" }, { "id": "pingree-1970", "kind": "article", "author": "Pingree, David", "title": "The Fragments of the Works of al-Fazari", "year": 1970, "publisher": "Journal of Near Eastern Studies 29" }, { "id": "bea-2007", "kind": "reference", "author": "Hockey, Thomas et al. (eds.)", "title": "Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (entries: Fazari, Khwarizmi, Majriti, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar)", "year": 2007, "publisher": "Springer" }, { "id": "mercier-1987", "kind": "article", "author": "Mercier, Raymond", "title": "Astronomical Tables in the Twelfth Century", "year": 1987, "publisher": "In Burnett (ed.), Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century" }, { "id": "hughes-1989", "kind": "book", "author": "Hughes, Barnabas B.", "title": "Robert of Chester's Latin Translation of al-Khwarizmi's al-Jabr: A New Critical Edition", "year": 1989, "publisher": "Steiner Verlag" }, { "id": "toomer-1973", "kind": "reference", "author": "Toomer, G. J.", "title": "al-Khwarizmi", "year": 1973, "publisher": "Dictionary of Scientific Biography" }, { "id": "siraisi-1987", "kind": "book", "author": "Siraisi, Nancy G.", "title": "Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500", "year": 1987, "publisher": "Princeton University Press" }, { "id": "lemay-1978", "kind": "reference", "author": "Lemay, Richard", "title": "Gerard of Cremona", "year": 1978, "publisher": "Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 15 supplement", "note": "Includes the Commemoratio librorum, the list of Gerard's translations drawn up by his students after his death in 1187." }, { "id": "gutas-sep-ibn-sina", "kind": "reference", "author": "Gutas, Dimitri", "title": "Ibn Sina [Avicenna]", "year": 2016, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-sina/" }, { "id": "treiger-2017", "kind": "article", "author": "Treiger, Alexander", "title": "Reconstructing Ishaq ibn Hunayn's Arabic Translation of Aristotle's De Anima", "year": 2017, "publisher": "Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 27" }, { "id": "taylor-2009", "kind": "book", "author": "Taylor, Richard C. (tr.)", "title": "Averroes: Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle", "year": 2009, "publisher": "Yale University Press" }, { "id": "russell-1994", "kind": "book", "author": "Russell, G. A. (ed.)", "title": "The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England", "year": 1994, "publisher": "Brill" }, { "id": "ben-zaken-2011", "kind": "book", "author": "Ben-Zaken, Avner", "title": "Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism", "year": 2011, "publisher": "Johns Hopkins University Press" }, { "id": "overwien-2015", "kind": "article", "author": "Overwien, Oliver", "title": "The Paradigmatic Translator and His Method: Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Translation of the Hippocratic Aphorisms from Greek via Syriac into Arabic", "year": 2015, "publisher": "Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3" }, { "id": "burnett-jacquart-1994", "kind": "book", "author": "Burnett, Charles and Jacquart, Danielle (eds.)", "title": "Constantine the African and Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Magusi: The Pantegni and Related Texts", "year": 1994, "publisher": "Brill" }, { "id": "tannous-2018", "kind": "book", "author": "Tannous, Jack", "title": "The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers", "year": 2018, "publisher": "Princeton University Press" }, { "id": "dancona-sep", "kind": "reference", "author": "D'Ancona, Cristina", "title": "Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy", "year": 2022, "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/" }, { "id": "bhayro-2017", "kind": "article", "author": "Bhayro, Siam et al.", "title": "The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: A Tale of Two Texts", "year": 2017, "publisher": "Journal of Semitic Studies / Project MUSE" }, { "id": "wilson-1992", "kind": "book", "author": "N. G. Wilson", "title": "From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance", "year": 1992, "publisher": "Duckworth", "note": "Standard account of the recovery of Greek in the West, including Pilatus's Homer and Valla's Thucydides and Herodotus." }, { "id": "reynolds-wilson-2013", "kind": "reference", "author": "L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson", "title": "Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature", "year": 2013, "publisher": "Oxford University Press, 4th ed.", "note": "The standard survey of how classical texts survived and were recovered, including Poggio's manuscript hunts." }, { "id": "hankins-1990", "kind": "book", "author": "James Hankins", "title": "Plato in the Italian Renaissance", "year": 1990, "publisher": "Brill", "note": "The standard study of Ficino's Latin Plato and its readers." }, { "id": "akasoy-fidora-2005", "kind": "book", "author": "Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora (eds.), with D. M. Dunlop", "title": "The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics", "year": 2005, "publisher": "Brill", "note": "Edition of the surviving Arabic Ethics with Dunlop's account of its disputed translator attributions." }, { "id": "dod-1982", "kind": "article", "author": "Bernard G. Dod", "title": "Aristoteles latinus, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy", "year": 1982, "publisher": "Cambridge University Press", "note": "Reference list of the medieval Latin Aristotle, including Grosseteste's Ethics of 1246-47." }, { "id": "hobbes-1629", "kind": "primary", "author": "Thomas Hobbes", "title": "Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre", "year": 1629, "publisher": "London", "note": "The first English Thucydides made directly from the Greek; Hobbes's preface calls him 'the most politic historiographer that ever writ'." }, { "id": "dale-1848", "kind": "primary", "author": "Henry Dale", "title": "The History of Thucydides, literally translated", "year": 1848, "publisher": "Bohn's Classical Library, London", "note": "The Victorian crib-style translation carried in the Perseus First1KGreek encoding." }, { "id": "chapman-1611", "kind": "primary", "author": "George Chapman", "title": "The Iliads of Homer", "year": 1611, "publisher": "London", "note": "Completion of the first full English Iliad, issued in parts from 1598." }, { "id": "chapman-1616", "kind": "primary", "author": "George Chapman", "title": "The Whole Works of Homer", "year": 1616, "publisher": "London", "note": "Collects his Odyssey of 1614-15 with the Iliad: the first complete English Homer." }, { "id": "pope-1715", "kind": "primary", "author": "Alexander Pope", "title": "The Iliad of Homer", "year": 1715, "publisher": "London, 1715-1720", "note": "Published by subscription; the financial model is part of the story." }, { "id": "pope-1725", "kind": "primary", "author": "Alexander Pope", "title": "The Odyssey of Homer", "year": 1725, "publisher": "London, 1725-1726", "note": "With William Broome and Elijah Fenton as collaborators." }, { "id": "butler-1898", "kind": "primary", "author": "Samuel Butler", "title": "The Iliad of Homer, rendered into English prose", "year": 1898, "publisher": "London", "note": "The novelist's plain-prose Homer; the Perseus English Iliad derives from it." }, { "id": "butler-1900", "kind": "primary", "author": "Samuel Butler", "title": "The Odyssey, rendered into English prose", "year": 1900, "publisher": "London", "note": "Companion to his Iliad; the Perseus English Odyssey derives from it." }, { "id": "ficino-1484", "kind": "primary", "author": "Marsilio Ficino", "title": "Platonis Opera Omnia, Latin translation", "year": 1484, "publisher": "Florence", "note": "The first complete Plato in any Western language since antiquity." }, { "id": "jowett-1871", "kind": "primary", "author": "Benjamin Jowett", "title": "The Dialogues of Plato", "year": 1871, "publisher": "Oxford", "note": "The translation through which anglophone readers met Plato for a century." }, { "id": "shorey-1930", "kind": "primary", "author": "Paul Shorey", "title": "Plato: The Republic (Loeb Classical Library)", "year": 1930, "publisher": "Harvard University Press, 1930-1935", "note": "The Loeb English carried in the Perseus encoding and in this library." }, { "id": "rackham-1926", "kind": "primary", "author": "Harris Rackham", "title": "Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Loeb Classical Library)", "year": 1926, "publisher": "Harvard University Press", "note": "The Loeb English carried in the Perseus encoding and in this library." }, { "id": "godley-1920", "kind": "primary", "author": "A. D. Godley", "title": "Herodotus (Loeb Classical Library)", "year": 1920, "publisher": "Harvard University Press, 1920-1925", "note": "The Loeb English carried in the Perseus encoding and in this library." }, { "id": "creech-1682", "kind": "primary", "author": "Thomas Creech", "title": "T. Lucretius Carus, his six books De natura rerum, done into English verse", "year": 1682, "publisher": "Oxford", "note": "The first complete English De Rerum Natura." }, { "id": "leonard-1916", "kind": "primary", "author": "William Ellery Leonard", "title": "Of the Nature of Things", "year": 1916, "publisher": "London and New York", "note": "The verse translation carried in the Perseus encoding and in this library." }, { "id": "dryden-1697", "kind": "primary", "author": "John Dryden", "title": "The Works of Virgil", "year": 1697, "publisher": "London", "note": "The Aeneid that ruled English for a century, sold by subscription." }, { "id": "williams-1910", "kind": "primary", "author": "Theodore C. Williams", "title": "The Aeneid of Virgil", "year": 1910, "publisher": "Boston", "note": "The verse translation carried in the Perseus encoding and in this library." }, { "id": "jones-1794", "kind": "primary", "author": "William Jones", "title": "Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu", "year": 1794, "publisher": "Calcutta", "note": "The first complete English Manusmriti, made for the courts of British Bengal." }, { "id": "cannon-1990", "kind": "book", "author": "Garland Cannon", "title": "The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones", "year": 1990, "publisher": "Cambridge University Press", "note": "Standard biography of William Jones." }, { "id": "buhler-1886", "kind": "primary", "author": "Georg Buhler", "title": "The Laws of Manu (Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25)", "year": 1886, "publisher": "Oxford University Press", "note": "The scholarly English Manusmriti of the nineteenth century." }, { "id": "schmidt-1996", "kind": "book", "author": "James Schmidt (ed.)", "title": "What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions", "year": 1996, "publisher": "University of California Press", "note": "Contains an English translation of Fichte's Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought." }, { "id": "hart-dlp", "kind": "reference", "author": "David M. Hart", "title": "The Digital Library of Liberty and Power (davidmhart.com)", "year": 2026, "publisher": "davidmhart.com", "note": "Hart's open digital library of classical-liberal texts; the source of the French and German editions behind Thothica's translations of Comte, Dunoyer and Fichte." }, { "id": "falsafa-2026", "kind": "reference", "author": "Thothica", "title": "Falsafa: the library and librarian (falsafa.ai)", "year": 2026, "publisher": "falsafa.ai", "note": "The library carrying the AI-assisted English translations whose crossings the newest chains record." } ] }