Contesting the Greek Past in Ninth-Century Baghdad The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Connelly, Coleman. 2016. Contesting the Greek Past in Ninth- Century Baghdad. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493255 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Contesting the Greek Past in Ninth-Century Baghdad A dissertation presented by Coleman Connelly to The Department of the Classics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Classical Philology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2016! © 2016 Coleman Connelly All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Mark Schiefsky Coleman Connelly Contesting the Greek Past in Ninth-Century Baghdad Abstract From the eighth century through the tenth, the ‘Abb!sid capital of Baghdad witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac intermediary. Muslim and sometimes Christian patrons from all sectors of ‘Abb!sid high society paid princely sums to small groups of Graeco-Arabic translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians. In this diverse ‘Abb!sid milieu, who could claim to own the Greek past? Who could claim to access it legitimately? Who were the Greeks for ‘Abb!sid intellectuals and how did the monumental effort to translate them make or fail to make the Greek past a part of the ‘Abb!sid present? This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each investigating a distinct ninth-century approach to accessing the Greek past. Chapter 1 investigates ninth-century narratives attempting to explain how the Greek sciences came to flourish in ‘Abb!sid Mesopotamia. Against this backdrop, I shed new light on the polymath and patron of translation al-Kind" and his attempts to claim direct access to the Greeks via both an abstract teleology inspired by Aristotle and a concrete genealogy that connected his ancestral tribe of Kinda to the Greeks. In Chapter 2, I analyze other Muslim intellectuals, such as the litterateur al-J!#i$, who radically doubt the ability of Graeco-Arabic translators—the majority of whom, once again, were Christians—to provide such access to the Greek past. I argue that previous commentators on these critiques have missed their subtext, namely the Islamic concept of ta!r"f whereby Christians are held to have corrupted iii the Bible in order to transmit a distorted version of the prophetic past that contradicts God’s ultimate revelation, the Qur’!n. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigate the attitudes toward translation and the Greek past of the %unayn circle of Graeco-Arabic translators, who do in fact alter Greek cultural elements in the texts they translate, presenting an idealized version of the Greek past which both Christians and Muslims can claim. iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…………….1 Chapter 1. Accessing the Greek Past: anti-Byzantinism and al-Kind"……………………………6 Section 1.1. The Byzantines as Illegitimate Heirs as to the Greeks……………………..10 Section 1.2. Al-Kind"’s Claims to the Greek Past……………………………………….28 Section 1.3. Other ‘Abb!sid Claims to the Greek Past…………………………………..47 Chapter 2. Tampering with the Greek Past: al-J!#i$ and other critics of translation…...……….60 Section 2.1. Accessing the Greek Past Via Translations……...…………………………62 Section 2.2. Ta!r"f and Translation………………………………………………………80 Section 2.3. Accusations of Tampering against the Graeco-Arabic Translators...……..114 Chapter 3. Adapting the Greek Past: the %unayn Circle……………………………………….139 Section 3.1. Audience and Agency in the %unayn Circle………………………………139 Section 3.2. %unayn Circle Alterations: the Case of the Arabic Artemidorus……...….154 Section 3.3. %unayn Circle Alterations: Greek Poetry in Galen…………...…………..176 Section 3.4. %unayn Circle Alterations: Religion in Galen…………………………….190 Section 3.5. Explaining %unayn Circle Alterations…………………………………….208 Conclusion…………………………………………………………….………………………..224 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………228 ! v Acknowledgments It is my great pleasure to thank the friends, colleagues, and mentors who have helped me and made this work possible. First, I thank my committee members Khaled El-Rouayheb and Greg Nagy, and especially my advisor Mark Schiefsky for their diligent oversight and encouragement at every step along the way. They read my work with an open mind and an eagle’s eye, contributing their insight both to its present form and to the form it will, I hope, take in future as I carry my research forward. This dissertation would not have been the same without the time I spent as a Tyler Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. I am grateful both to Dumbarton Oaks for its institutional support, and to all the friends I made there. In particular, I thank Joe Glynias, Scott Johnson, and James Redfield for the afternoons we spent reading Syriac together. Under Scott’s guidance we all learned Syriac, and I matured as a thinker. For his intellectual and moral support, I am deeply grateful to my friend Julian Yolles— omnibus e meis amicis antistans mihi milibus trecentis. Finally, let me conclude by thanking my parents, James and Kathleen, for encouraging and sustaining in me a love of learning throughout my life. I dedicate this dissertation to them both. vi Introduction From the eighth century through the tenth, Baghdad was an extraordinary place to be. The capital of the ‘Abb!sid caliphate witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac intermediary. Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen and many other Greek authors—some of them already dead for more than a thousand years—became readily available to intellectuals across the Muslim world. Muslim and sometimes Christian patrons from all sectors of ‘Abb!sid high society paid princely sums to small groups of Graeco-Arabic translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians.1 For obvious reasons, this Graeco-Arabic translation movement has attracted scholars interested in philosophy and the history of science. This dissertation, however, approaches Graeco-Arabic translation from a different angle and attempts to answer the following questions. Who in ‘Abb!sid society, particularly in ninth-century ‘Abb!sid society, owned the Greek past? Who could claim to access it legitimately? Who were the Greeks for ‘Abb!sid intellectuals and how did the monumental effort to translate them make or not make the Greek past a part of the ‘Abb!sid present? This project began simply as an investigation of how Syriac-speaking Christian translators handle elements of classical Greek culture embedded in these scientific texts—that is, references to the ancient gods, lines quoted from Greek poetry, or descriptions of Graeco-Roman political institutions. I noticed that elements were often changed in passing from Greek through 1 The now classic social and intellectual history of the translation movement is D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (New York, 1998). A corrective to Gutas’s lack of emphasis on the agency of Christian Graeco-Arabic translators can be found in J. Tannous, “Syria Between Byzantium and Islam: Making Incommensurables Speak” (Princeton University, unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, 2010). I am grateful to the author for providing me with a copy. "1 Syriac to Arabic. How, I wondered, might the translators be adapting or altering these Christian translators be adapting glimpses of the Greek past when transmitting them to their Muslim patrons and readers? This fascinating question has received some, but not enough attention in the scholarship. In fact, even among students of Graeco-Arabic translation, its most famous treatment is probably to be found not in scholarship, but in fiction. Many readers will be familiar the short story “Averroes’ Search” by the twentieth-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In this piece, Borges depicts the twelfth-century Arabic philosopher Averroes’ doomed attempt to understand the terms “tragedy” and “comedy” which he reads in the Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. After a day and night spend in frustration, the philosopher finally decides that “tragedy” must refer to poetry of praise, while “comedy” must refer to poetry of blame, both recognized genres of traditional Arabic poetry. In Borges’ vision, a man “closed with the orb of Islam” and therefore lacking a tradition of theater and drama could never understand the Classical Greek concepts of tragedy and comedy.2 As a work of fiction Borges’ story is effective, but it makes some fundamental—and troubling—historical mistakes. To begin with, Averroes himself was not the first to gloss comedy and tragedy as praise- poetry and blame-poetry. Rather, this was the innovation of the East Syrian Christian translator and logician ’Ab# Bi$r who translated the Poetics from Syriac into Arabic in the tenth-century. Averroes simply found these glosses in ’Ab# Bi$r’s Arabic translation, which he consulted along with the philosopher Avicenna’s earlier commentary. The intellectual and cultural interpretive 2 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. (London/NewYork, 2000: 147-155 at 155). Borges’s story has been subjected to scholarly scrutiny as well by U. Vagelpohl, “The Rhetoric and the Poetics in the Islamic world” in A. Alwishah and J. Hayes (eds.), Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition (Cambridge, 2015: 76-91 at 76-77). "2 work of the Christian translator is thus entirely elided in Borges’ story. More troubling, though, is Borges’ assertion that the Islamic world, whatever its achievements in the realm of the Greek sciences, is utterly closed to Greek culture and the classical Greek past which must remain forever alien.