In the ancient world, the lan­guage of philosophy—and there­fore of sci­ence and medicine—was pri­mar­i­ly Greek. “Even after the Roman con­quest of the Mediter­ranean and the demise of pagan­ism, phi­los­o­phy was strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Hel­lenic cul­ture,” writes phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor and His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy with­out any Gaps host Peter Adam­son. “The lead­ing thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek lit­er­a­ture.” And in the east­ern empire, “the Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tines could con­tin­ue to read Pla­to and Aris­to­tle in the orig­i­nal.”

Greek thinkers also had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in Egypt. Dur­ing the build­ing of the Library of Alexan­dria, “schol­ars copied and stored books that were bor­rowed, bought, and even stolen from oth­er places in the Mediter­ranean,” writes Aileen Das, Pro­fes­sor of Mediter­ranean Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan. “The librar­i­ans gath­ered texts cir­cu­lat­ing under the names of Pla­to (d. 348/347 BCE), Aris­to­tle and Hip­pocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), and pub­lished them as col­lec­tions.” The scroll above, part of an Aris­totelian tran­scrip­tion of the Athen­ian con­sti­tu­tion, was believed lost for hun­dreds of years until it was dis­cov­ered in the 19th cen­tu­ry in Egypt, in the orig­i­nal Greek. The text, writes the British Library, “has had a major impact in our knowl­edge of the devel­op­ment of Athen­ian democ­ra­cy and the work­ings of the Athen­ian city-state in antiq­ui­ty.”

Alexan­dria “rivalled Athens and Rome as the place to study phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine in the Mediter­ranean,” and young men of means like the 6th cen­tu­ry priest Sergius of Reshaina, doc­tor-in-chief in North­ern Syr­ia, trav­eled there to learn the tra­di­tion. Sergius “trans­lat­ed around 30 works of Galen [the Greek physi­cian]” and oth­er known and unknown philoso­phers and ancient sci­en­tists into Syr­i­ac. Lat­er, as Syr­i­ac and Ara­bic came to dom­i­nate for­mer Greek-speak­ing regions, the Greek texts became intense objects of focus for Islam­ic thinkers, and the caliphs spared no expense to have them trans­lat­ed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed, often con­tract­ing with Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish schol­ars to accom­plish the task.

The trans­mis­sion of Greek phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine was an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non, which involved bilin­gual speak­ers from pagan, Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, and Jew­ish back­grounds. This move­ment spanned not only reli­gious and lin­guis­tic but also geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, for it occurred in cities as far apart as Bagh­dad in the East and Tole­do in the West.

In Bagh­dad, espe­cial­ly, by the 10th cen­tu­ry, “read­ers of Ara­bic,” writes Adam­son, “had about the same degree of access to Aris­to­tle that read­ers of Eng­lish do today” thanks to a “well-fund­ed trans­la­tion move­ment that unfold­ed dur­ing the Abbasid caliphate, begin­ning in the sec­ond half of the eighth cen­tu­ry.” The work done dur­ing the Abbasid period—from about 750 to 950—“generated a high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage and a mas­sive amount of source mate­r­i­al,” we learn in Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s The Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion. Such mate­r­i­al “would feed sci­en­tif­ic research for the fol­low­ing cen­turies, not only in the Islam­ic world but beyond it, in Greek and Latin Chris­ten­dom and, with­in it, among the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tions as well.”

Indeed this “Byzan­tine human­ism,” as it’s called, “helped the clas­si­cal tra­di­tion sur­vive, at least to the large extent that it has.” As ancient texts and tra­di­tions dis­ap­peared in Europe dur­ing the so-called “Dark Ages,” Ara­bic and Syr­i­ac-speak­ing schol­ars and trans­la­tors incor­po­rat­ed them into an Islam­ic philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion called fal­safa. The moti­va­tions for fos­ter­ing the study of Greek thought were com­plex. On the one hand, writes Adam­son, the move was polit­i­cal; “the caliphs want­ed to estab­lish their own cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny,” in com­pe­ti­tion with Per­sians and Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tine Chris­tians, “benight­ed as they were by the irra­tional­i­ties of Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy.” On the oth­er hand, “Mus­lim intel­lec­tu­als also saw resources in the Greek texts for defend­ing, and bet­ter under­stand­ing their own reli­gion.”

One well-known fig­ure from the peri­od, al-Kin­di, is thought to be the first philoso­pher to write in Ara­bic. He over­saw the trans­la­tions of hun­dreds of texts by Chris­t­ian schol­ars who read both Greek and Ara­bic, and he may also have added his own ideas to the works of Plot­i­nus, for exam­ple, and oth­er Greek thinkers. Like Thomas Aquinas a few hun­dred years lat­er, al-Kin­di attempt­ed to “estab­lish the iden­ti­ty of the first prin­ci­ple in Aris­to­tle and Plot­i­nus” as the the­is­tic God. In this way, Islam­ic trans­la­tions of Greek texts pre­pared the way for inter­pre­ta­tions that “treat that prin­ci­ple as a Cre­ator,” a cen­tral idea in Medieval scholas­tic phi­los­o­phy and Catholic thought gen­er­al­ly.

The trans­la­tions by al-Kin­di and his asso­ciates are grouped into what schol­ars call the “cir­cle of al-Kin­di,” which pre­served and elab­o­rat­ed on Aris­to­tle and the Neo­pla­ton­ists. Thanks to al-Kindi’s “first set of trans­la­tions,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “learned Mus­lims became acquaint­ed with Pla­to’s Demi­urge and immor­tal soul; with Aris­totle’s search for sci­ence and knowl­edge of the caus­es of all the phe­nom­e­na on earth and in the heav­ens,” and many more ancient Greek meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. Lat­er trans­la­tors work­ing under physi­cian and sci­en­tist Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son “made avail­able in Syr­i­ac and/or Ara­bic oth­er works by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Theophras­tus, some philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings by Galen,” and oth­er Greek thinkers and sci­en­tists.

This tra­di­tion of trans­la­tion, philo­soph­i­cal debate, and sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery in Islam­ic soci­eties con­tin­ued into the 10th and 11th cen­turies, when Aver­roes, the “Islam­ic schol­ar who gave us mod­ern phi­los­o­phy,” wrote his com­men­tary on the works of Aris­to­tle. “For sev­er­al cen­turies,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado’s Robert Pas­nau, “a series of bril­liant philoso­phers and sci­en­tists made Bagh­dad the intel­lec­tu­al cen­ter of the medieval world,” pre­serv­ing ancient Greek knowl­edge and wis­dom that may oth­er­wise have dis­ap­peared. When it seems in our study of his­to­ry that the light of the ancient phi­los­o­phy was extin­guished in West­ern Europe, we need only look to North Africa and the Near East to see that tra­di­tion, with its human­is­tic exchange of ideas, flour­ish­ing for cen­turies in a world close­ly con­nect­ed by trade and empire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness