Carried Across · Chapter 2
A book is a body
In the 1630s, a chaplain of the English Levant Company stationed in Aleppo went shopping for manuscripts. His name was Edward Pococke. He was already the finest Arabist England had produced, and would shortly become the first holder of Oxford's new chair of Arabic. Among the volumes he carried home was a copy, made in 1303, of a philosophical novel written in twelfth-century al-Andalus: Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the story of a child who grows up alone on an island and reasons his way, unaided, to physics, metaphysics and God.
The manuscript went onto a shelf in the Bodleian Library, where it sat for roughly forty years. Then Pococke's son, also Edward, translated it into Latin at the age of twenty-three. The bilingual edition, Arabic and Latin on facing pages, came off the Oxford press in 1671 under the title Philosophus Autodidactus, the self-taught philosopher. It detonated. Within three years there was an English version by the Quaker George Keith, who read the solitary islander as a parable of the inner light. Within one year there was an anonymous Dutch translation out of Amsterdam, which scholars place in Spinoza's circle. In 1708 Simon Ockley translated it again, directly from the Arabic. And the year the Latin edition appeared, 1671, in the same university, John Locke wrote the first drafts of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the book that taught Europe to ask what a mind could build from experience alone. Whether the self-taught islander stands behind Locke's tabula rasa is argued; that the two shared a small city in the same year is fact.
Here is the point of the story. The entire European career of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the Latin, the Dutch, the English versions, the Quaker enthusiasm, the Enlightenment readers, runs through one physical object: a stack of leaves copied by hand in 1303 and bought in a Syrian market three centuries later. No purchase, no book. Ideas may be immaterial. Their travel never is.
We talk about texts as if they were software, installed once in the culture and available forever after. A manuscript civilization had no such illusion. A book was a body. It was skin or rag paper, gall ink and thread, and it lived the life of a body: it aged, sickened, drowned, burned, and was eaten. Its survival was never a default. Every copy that exists is the fossil of a decision, because copying a long book by hand cost a skilled professional months, and nobody spent months by accident.
Consider what water could do. In the late eleventh century a scholar from Ifriqiya, in modern Tunisia, sailed for Italy carrying the best of Arabic medicine, including his copy of al-Majusi's Complete Book of the Medical Art, a systematic encyclopedia of the entire field. Off Cape Palinuro, south of Salerno, a storm broke over the ship. The man survived; the second half of the encyclopedia did not. The scholar, who became the monk Constantine the African at the abbey of Monte Cassino, spent his remaining decades translating Arabic medicine into Latin, and his version of al-Majusi, which he issued as the Pantegni, transformed European medical teaching. But every early copy of it transmits a complete ten-book theory and a stump of a practice, about three books where ten should stand. Twelfth-century readers could feel the storm in the table of contents. The missing surgery was finally supplied decades later by two translators working from a fresh Arabic copy found during a military expedition to the Balearics. One squall off the Italian coast left a dent in the European curriculum that took two generations to hammer out.
Or consider what thrift could do. In the sixth century, Sergius of Reshaina, a Mesopotamian physician trained in Alexandria, translated Galen's great treatise On Simple Drugs into Syriac, part of the first sustained effort anywhere to move Greek medicine into another language. Three centuries later the Baghdad translators graded and reworked his versions. Some centuries after that, a monastery needed writing material more than it needed an old pharmacology text, and Sergius's Galen was unbound, scraped, and overwritten with liturgical hymns. That should have been the end of it: one more link dissolved quietly into the parchment supply. Except that scraping is never perfect. In the 2010s, multispectral imaging recovered the ghost of the undertext from beneath the hymns, letter by letter, and the Syriac Galen Palimpsest gave scholars back a translation no living person had read. The body had been killed for parts and still testified.
Now turn the mortality around, because it has a strange consequence. If books are bodies, then translation is reproduction, and a translation can outlive its parent. Some of the most important texts in this atlas survive only as their own descendants.
The deepest case is Aristotle's On the Soul as the Arabic world knew it. In later ninth-century Baghdad, Ishaq ibn Hunayn, the philosophical specialist of the city's great translation workshop, rendered the treatise into Arabic; the bookseller's catalogue of 987 records that he translated it twice, the first version left slightly unfinished. On that Arabic, three centuries later in al-Andalus, Averroes built his Long Commentary, quoting Ishaq's text in full, paragraph by paragraph, as the scaffolding for the most influential reading of Aristotle's psychology ever written. Around 1220, probably by Michael Scot, the commentary was translated into Latin, and through it Paris caught fire: within a generation Averroes was simply "the Commentator," and the quarrel over his account of the intellect ran all the way to the formal condemnations of 1270 and 1277.
Count the bodies. Ishaq's Arabic translation is lost. Averroes' Arabic commentary survives only in fragments. The Latin, the copy of a copy, is the one body that lived, and it preserved both of its ancestors inside itself: modern scholars reconstruct Baghdad's lost Arabic Aristotle from the Latin lemmata of Michael Scot, helped by a Hebrew translation made in Rome in 1284. There is even a scar where the seam should be. The textual tradition records a note at the exact point, deep in the third book, where Ishaq's first version stopped: Ishaq ibn Hunayn translated the copy to this point. The catalogue of 987 said his first attempt was left incomplete, and a thousand years later you can still put your finger on the place.
The pattern repeats with the strangest itinerary in the atlas. Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta, the treatise of 628 in which a scholar in western India worked out, among much else, rules for calculating with zero, reached Baghdad with an Indian embassy in the early 770s and was adapted into Arabic as the Zij al-Sindhind, the astronomical tables of the Sindhind. Al-Khwarizmi recomputed the tables around 820. About two centuries later, the astronomers of Cordoba, Maslama al-Majriti and his pupil, refit al-Khwarizmi's Baghdad tables for the meridian of their own city. In 1126 an Englishman, presumably Adelard of Bath, translated the Cordoba version into Latin. Now: the Baghdad original is lost. The only form in which al-Khwarizmi's tables survive at all is the Latin translation of an Andalusi revision of a vanished Arabic adaptation of Sanskrit astronomy. Four bodies, three of them gone, and the youngest keeping the family's memory. Even the name had worn down in transit: Sindhind is what Arabic mouths made of the Sanskrit siddhanta, and later bibliographers, no longer recognizing the loanword, solemnly glossed it as meaning "the perpetual eternity."
The economics of all this are worth a moment, because they explain a silence in the record that will matter later in the book.
Copying was a market. Monasteries, madrasas and commercial scriptoria allocated scarce skilled labor to the texts somebody wanted: wanted to teach from, pray with, bill for, or display. A work that fell out of use did not have to be banned or burned. It just stopped being copied, and entropy handled the rest, at the speed of damp and insects. The historian Dimitri Gutas has made the deep version of this point about the end of the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement: it wound down not in failure but in success, when the commissioning class had absorbed what it wanted; the rest of Greek literature, the poetry, the histories, the tragedy, was never translated because nobody in Baghdad was buying. The sieve was demand. What passed through it survived in multiplying copies. What did not, with a handful of lucky exceptions like a palimpsest under hymns, ceased to exist.
So when a chain in this atlas looks miraculous, a text threading five languages and nine centuries, read it instead as a sustained run of purchases. Someone paid for every body in the sequence. The next two chapters are about those people: first the ones who did the carrying, then the ones who signed for it.