Читать книгу A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate онлайн

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We may rightly refer to this period as a renascence, for it meant quickening into new and other life the embers of the later Hellenistic culture, and especially of the Aristotelian philosophy and medical and natural science, which had never quite died away in Western Asia, but had been checked by its passage into Syriac-speaking and Persian-speaking communities, amongst whom the language in which the original authorities were written was only imperfectly known. Thus Hellenism suffered a phase of provincialism, which came to an end when Arabic appeared as a more or less cosmopolitan language, and thought began to be exchanged by different races and social groups. Under the early ʿAbbasids, and especially under the Khalif al-Maʾmun (A.H. 198-218), there was a vast amount of translation from Greek into Arabic until the greater part of Aristotle, of the neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle, of Galen, some parts of Plato, and other material, were freely accessible to the Muslim world: whilst at the same time translations were made from Indian writers on mathematics, medicine, and astronomy, some directly from the Sanskrit, and others from old Persian versions.