Hunayn ibn Ishaq on His Galen Translations.

• Author: Cooper, Glen M.
• Position: Book review

Hunayn ibn Ishaq on His Galen Translations. Edited and translated by JOHN C. LAMOREAUX. Eastern Christian Texts. Provo, UT: BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xxxiii + 207. $49.95.

The Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries CE, in which Hunayn ibn Ishaq played a major role, and the Greco-Syriac translation movement that preceded it by three centuries were pivotal for the intellectual history of mankind, since they were the conduits through which the Greek intellectual heritage reached the medieval world. The volume under review is thus a muchneeded work of scholarship, making this extremely important historical source accessible to modern scholars and general readers.

Of the early translators working in the intellectual milieu of ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad who translated from Greek into Syriac and Arabic, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873) was the most significant. Syriac was at the time the language of the dominant class of physicians, and Arabic was the imperial language of the Islamic empire, and was becoming a powerful intellectual tool for science and philosophy. Hunayn contributed to the foundations of scientific Arabic by creating much of the Arabic medical vocabulary from the Greek medical tradition, as well as by setting philological standards for the recovery and translations of Greek works into these two Semitic languages.

The book under review presents an edition and translation of Hunayn's own writings, written toward the end of his career, about many of the medical translations that he and others produced. In it, he placed his own efforts within the historical context of all of the Syriac and Arabic translators and their works that were known to him, from the early sixth century on. This took the form of a letter (risala) to his colleague and patron. 'Ali ibn Yahya. Each of the translations of works by Galen, Hippocrates, and several other Greek authors is listed and briefly described. Its translation history is sketched and the patron for whom the translation was prepared is described. Occasionally, additional details are provided, such as a patron's specific requests for a specific style of translation, or a recounting of the difficulties that Hunayn encountered when trying to locate a specific Greek manuscript. Details such as these make Hunayn's source immensely valuable to our historical understanding of the translation movement. John Lamoreaux provides an excellent review of the history of...