Peter E. Pormann

Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition

The Hippocratic Epidemics and Galens Commentary on them constitute milestones in the development of clinical medicine. However, they also illustrate the rich exegetical traditions that existed in the post-classical Greek world. The present volume investigates these texts from various and diverse vantage points: textual criticism; Greek philology; knowledge transfer through translations; and medical history. Especially the Syriac and Arabic traditions of the Epidemics come under scrutiny.

The Arab ‘Cultural Awakening (Nahda)’, 1870–1950, and the classical traditiona)’, 1870–1950, and the classical tradition

The Classical Tradition is often studied from a Eurocentric point of view. The present article argues that the Arab world is as much heir to the legacy of Greece as the ‘West’. It does so by focusing on the reception of Classical Antiquity during the so-called Arabic ‘Cultural Awakening’ (Nahda), 1870–1950. It investigates more specifically 1) how Greek epic and dramatic poetry, which had not been part of the versions produced during the great translation movement in eighth- to tenth-century Baghdad, was rendered into Arabic; 2) how Greek drama inspired Arabic playwrights, with Taufīq al-Hakīm urging his fellow countrymen to engage with the Classical heritage; and 3) how the greatest Arab intellectual of the twentieth century Tāhā Husain, fought for Greek and Latin teaching in schools and university.

Imaging the Syriac Galen Palimpsest: preliminary analysis and future prospects

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is a remarkable, privately owned manuscript that contains the Syriac version of Galen’s Simple drugs by Sergius of Rēs ‘Aynā (d. 536). The anonymous owner commissioned a full set of multi-spectral images and made them freely available. The available combined and enhanced images of the undertext, however, leave many areas of poor readability. The present article reports on attempts to improve readability by using sophisticated algorithms (Canonical Variate Analysis). The initial results are encouraging, and additional image capture in the infrared area with wavelengths longer than 940 nm may also be useful.

Classical Scholarship and Arab Modernity

Any treatment of Islamic ‘classics’ and their modernization must start by rejecting the stereotyped dichotomy of ‘traditionalists’ (or ‘fundamentalists’) and ‘modernizers’. Twentieth-century conceptions of the Qur’a¯n and its authority were influenced by globalized modern ideas of ‘scripture’; and Egyptian scholars who had studied (Western) ‘classics’ in Western universities did not see them as alien, but wanted to re-root the study of Greco-Roman Egypt in their own country and globalize ‘classical philology’ by applying it to Arabic texts.

The Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms: Introduction

This special issue focuses on the ‘Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’. During a 5-year ERC-funded project, a team of researchers led by Peter E. Pormann has produced a 1.5m-word corpus of preliminary editions, and analysed it in multi-faceted ways. The team shared their digital editions with scholars from outside Manchester, and invited them to engage with the new material; these editions are now freely available to all under a Creative Commons license. In April 2015, they organised an international conference at which team members and other scholars discussed this rich commentary tradition from various vantage points. This special issue contains a selection of papers read at the conference. In this contribution, we introduce our project and its collaborators; list the texts in our corpus of preliminary editions and reflect on the scholarly analysis to which it has hitherto been subjected, ranging from Graeco-Arabic studies, textual criticism, medieval exegetical methods, medical theory and practice, and questions about the social history of medicine. We conclude with an outlook on the most pressing needs for future research, and close with acknowledgments for the manifold support that we have received.

The Enigma of Arabic and Hebrew Palladius

This article reassesses the attribution of the Aphorisms commentary preserved in the Haddad Memorial Library (MS Ḥaddād) to Palladius. Where the evidence for the commentary in Greek sources is virtually non-existent, Arabic testimonia are more numerous. We discuss Arabic fragments in Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā al-Rāzī’s Comprehensive Book (al-Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) and Arabic commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. These fragments demonstrate that Palladius wrote a commentary on the Aphorisms. Analysis of MS Ḥaddād, however, reveals that the commentary it preserves cannot be a translation of Palladius’ Greek text. Philological evidence occasions the conclusion that MS Ḥaddād contains an anonymous Arabic Aphorisms commentary written in the early ʿAbbāsid period. We discuss two Hebrew manuscripts that purport to be translations of Palladius’ commentary. Although more work on the Hebrew Palladius is needed, it is clear that the Hebrew commentaries are different translations of the anonymous Aphorisms commentary in MS Ḥaddād.

Greek Thought, Modern Arabic Culture: Classical Receptions since the Nahḍa

This article surveys the growing, yet largely understudied field of classical receptions in the modern Arab world, with a specific focus on Egypt and the Levant. After giving a short account of the state of the field and reviewing a small number of previous studies, the article discusses how classical studies as a discipline fared in Egypt; and how this discipline informed modern debates about religous identity, and notably views on the textual history of the Qurʾān. It then turns to three literary genres, epic poetry, drama, and lyrical poetry, and explores the reception of classical literature and myth in each of them. It concludes with an appeal to study this reception phenomenon on a much broader scale.

Qualifying and quantifying medical uncertainty in 10th-century Baghdad: Abu Bakr al-Razi

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya’ al-Razi (d. 925) was one of the most interesting and innovative clinicians of the medieval world.1 He distinguished smallpox from measles, experimented on an ape to establish the toxicity of quicksilver (mercury) and used a control group to assess whether bloodletting was an effective treatment for ‘brain fever’.2–5 Al-Razi stated in one of his treatises: My aim and objective is [to provide] things useful to people who practise and work, not for those engaged in research and theory5 (pp. 112–13). Hospitals in 10th-century Baghdad Al-Razi rose to become a hospital director both in Rayy (his home town, and now a suburb of Tehran) and Baghdad. This hospital environment proved important for his medical research. By the 10th century, hospitals in Baghdad had developed into quite sophisticated institutions. For instance, in the 920s and 930s, a powerful vizier by the name ‘Ali ibn ‘Isa endeavoured to improve public health, both by maintaining hospitals and sending doctors to areas where there was inadequate medical provision. The hospitals were Islamic charitable foundations with sometimes substantial endowments, so they benefitted from both legal and financial security; but ‘Ali ibn ‘Isa specified that they should serve non-Muslims as well as Muslims.6 Moreover, the medicine practised in these hospitals was not based on religious beliefs, but on the humoral pathology inherited from the Greeks, as the writings of the hospital physician al-Kaskari demonstrate.7 In this sense, the Islamic hospitals offered – somewhat paradoxically – a non-religious and non-sectarian service: physicians and other practitioners from various backgrounds catered for equally diverse patients in a non-confessional medical system. The development of the hospitals meant that elite medicine moved to them, and some of the most highly regarded doctors looking after patients in the upper echelons of society worked and taught in them. In addition, given their large numbers of patients, hospitals provided an infrastructure for research.

Collaborative research on the digital Syriac Galen Palimpsest

The purpose of this note is to generate a broader awareness in the scholarly community of the existence of an important privately owned palimpsest of which the undertext contains the Syriac translation (by Sergius of Rēs ʿAynā, 6th century) of Galens treatise On the mixtures and powers of simple drugs.