Gerard of Cremona | Hacker News Reader

Gerard of Cremona

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41 pointsteleforce18 comments

For people wondering why the Islamic world would have had more texts, many of which are of western (Greek/Latin) origin, than the western world. The problem is that, as the Roman empire collapsed, papyrus supply disappeared in the west (while north Africa still had papyrus, and later early paper) forcing copyist to use-significantly more expensive and lower supply-parchment. As the texts on papyrus started to crumble to dust, monks had to decide which ones to save given the limited writing material available (so they saved a lot of Saint Augustin...).

Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.

But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?

Not just ancients' knowledge, algebra comes from a corruption of al-jabr in Musa al Khwarizmi's "al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah". al-Khwarzimi himself got corrupted to algorismus, from which the word algorithm came from. Also, 2/3 of named stars have Arabic-origin names. Arabic influence on medecine and chemistry was significant, the word alcohol is also of Arabic origin, as is Chemistry via al-kimiya, alchemy. And finally, admirals are amir-al-bahr, emirs of the sea.

Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin

His pupil, the English scholastic Daniel of Morley, recorded one of Gerhard's methods[6] in translation: His Mozarabic assistant Ghalib (Latinized Galippus)[7] translated the text orally into medieval Castilian, Gerhard listened and wrote the text down in Latin. In the case of the Almagest, which had been translated from its original language of Ancient Greek first into Syriac, then into Arabic, and which Gerhard translated into Latin via the oral route of Castilian, this long chain of transmission introduced numerous sources of error.

This is not even close to true. The Byzantine Empire was the keeper of all of this western knowledge. The arabs got their texts from them and the Spanish from them and the Byzantines. The arabs did trade texts from India to Europe as well.

Nevertheless, many of the texts from the Greeks were first translated into Latin from Arabic copies in Spain from the 11th century, because the Greek versions were inaccessible in Western Europe until Constantinople was conquered in 1453 and the scholars escaped to the west with their scrolls

They transmitted the text yeah but they were not the “preserver” of the roman legacy. The byzantines viewed themselves as romans.

I was talking about Greek texts rather than Roman legacy, whatever that means. Arabs certainly preserved some of the Greek texts, because many haven't survived in origianl Greek manuscripts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Arabic_translation_move...

The Muslims also made original contributions to science, e.g. Ibn Sahl discovering what later became known as Snell's law of refraction.

> Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.

I was taught this many times in US schools.

And its a fabrication of history

> Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.

Did not Muslim Scholars originally get the texts from Nestorian and Syriac Christians in the Middle East? Wouldn't there be a good chance of the text surviving in their monasteries?

Arab-writing, not necessarily always Muslim. For example, the first person to describe Prague was Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, an Arabic-writing Jewish merchant from Cordoba.

Arabic was a lingua franca of a territory that was significantly more religiously diverse than today. Both contemporary Iraq and Egypt were only about 50 per cent Muslim by the age of the Crusades. This applied in many other regions that are now 90+% Muslim and where we can hardly imagine any non-Islamic community today.

The fall of Rome is 5th century, so it predates Islam, doesn't it?

That's the western half, but ehen the Ottomans annexed bisantium in 1400 they still considered themselves Romans, even tho they spoke Greek. The date of the fall of Rome is pretty arbitrary.

The sultan took the title of kaiser-i-rum (Caesar of Rome).

Rather, thanks to the scholars of the Byzantine Empire, aka the Eastern Roman Empire.

I think it's pretty sure some of it was.

Just consider that the X in math is not a latin X but a Greek Χ (chi) :)

Most mathematical notation wasn't invented until centuries later. At the time, they would just write calculations out in words. In particular, the use of x representing an unknown quantity was introduced by Descartes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra#The_symbol_...

For folks who are curious of this, one potential example/discussion of this is Thomas Harriot's _Artis Analyticae Praxis_ (ob. discl., I did some of the typesetting of the Muriel Seltman/Robert Goulding translation)

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