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496 Tihon Conclusion
Anne Tihon
When I agreed to write a conclusion to this Companion to Byzantine Science, I took on a perilous task. Each chapter of this book indeed contains an impres- sive amount of erudition, and each topic treated here would deserve in itself one or more separate volumes. However, reading the different chapters, a first remark comes to mind: it is time to stop apologizing for using the word “sci- ence” when studying Byzantine civilisation. The word “science”̕ may cover many different activities: study, teaching, creating manuals, commenting on scientific treatises, applying ancient or modern methods, conducting research, experiments and so on. There is no doubt that all the activities described in this volume fall into at least one of these categories. In spite of some received ideas, the Byzantine world was open to all kinds of intellectual activity, and especially to the scientific legacy from antiquity. This consists of a considerable number of writings which laid the foundation of science in the modern meaning of the word: Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, Diophantus, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, including many more elementary treatises such as Autolycus, Theodosius, Geminus, Cleomedes and others. Everybody agrees that the Byzantines preserved this legacy; but they did much more than simply preserve it: they kept it alive. Some Byzantine scholars undertook considerable work in understanding and practising, for example, the astronomical exercises and calculations of Ptolemy. It is almost a common top- ic amongst Byzantine texts to complain about the headache resulting from such study; and the funeral eulogy of Bessarion asserts that the study of as- tronomy in his youth seriously compromised his health! The study of Euclid’s geometry never ceased as Anna Komnena recalls through the story of a man who, after being blinded, studied Euclid with help of figures in relief. Other scholars suffered a great deal for Diophantus’ problems. Without the continu- ous efforts of Byzantine scholars to understand, explain, edit, apply, comment or paraphrase the ancient treatises, these works would have become incompre- hensible or would have simply disappeared. In spite of its importance, ancient heritage was not the only source of Byzan- tine scientific knowledge. The Byzantine empire, which during some periods covered an extensive geographical area, was not closed in on itself. Whether in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, botany, or in what we call today ̔pseudo- sciences ̕ such as astrology, alchemy, magic, in Constantinople as well as in
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Conclusion 497
other important towns, such as Thessalonica or Trebizond, or in neighbouring provinces, foreign influences clearly appear in Byzantine texts. The exchanges between Byzantium and the Arabic and Persian worlds, Western countries or Jewish communities, were intense and favoured by various circumstances: the Byzantine Court always welcomed many foreigners; merchants, medical practi- tioners, veterinarians, travellers also brought with them many kinds of practical procedures or various types of knowledge. At the end of antiquity, in the 5th and 6th centuries, the late Hellenic schools of the Eastern Roman Empire (Alexandria, Antioch, Apamea, Athens, Rho- dos…) played a major part in the transmission of Greek sciences into Syria, Armenia or Persia. Syrian texts of the 5th and 6th centuries testify the diffusion of Ptolemy’s astronomy to Mesopotamian monasteries: one needs only recall here the name of Severe Sebokht (7th c.). The transmission of Greek science into the Arabic world through the agency of Byzantine manuscripts cannot be explored here, but I would just like to men- tion an interesting document: the palimpsest Vaticanus syriacus 623. This man- uscript contains edifying stories written in Syria in 886 on palimpsest folios of parchment. The inferior writing shows some of Ptolemy’s astronomical tables (Πρόχειροι κανόνες) written in uncial script dating from the early 9th century; on other folios one can read an Arabic translation of Theon’s Small commentary. Some words in the Arabic translation are written in Greek by the same hand as the tables, and one of the Greek astronomical tables contains a Greco-Arabic lexicon with the names of the winds. The document was probably written in St Catherine̕s monastery of Sinai. Thus at the border of the Byzantine Empire, in a multi-cultural milieu, we can see an attempt to translate and pass on in Arabic Ptolemy’s astronomical tables. This is perhaps one of the most ancient wit nesses of this process. During the Palaiologan period, in the 13th century, Persian astronomical ta- bles were introduced into Byzantine culture through Trebizond. The Persian tables, of the Zīj-i Ilkhānī, adapted by George Chrysococces around 1347, were immediately widely diffused. One can find various adaptations of these tables in Constantinople, Cyprus, Rhodes, Mitylenos, Nicaea, and a Latin adaptation in Candia (Crete). In the 15th century, the Byzantine version of Persian tables were translated into Hebrew in the Jewish communities of Constantinople or Thessalonica. Moreover, several Jewish astronomical treatises composed in Provence, in Spain or in Italy were translated in Greek in Constantinople where they were widely diffused. At the end of the Byzantine Empire, many people travelled in European and Slavic countries, in Turkey, but also to the Near and Middle East: diplomats, scholars, members of the high clergy carried with them manuscripts, note-