Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 202

took it upon themselves to collect these
texts as well as other non-religious writ-
ings on science and philosophy which
were conformable to Zoroastrian teach-
ings. In this fashion, philosophical and
scientific writings of all cultures were seen
as ultimately either derived from or con-
formable with the Avesta, and translation
as the means to “repatriate” them into
Persian. This culture of translation in late
Sāsānid times, officially sponsored by the
state, continued even after the fall of the
Persian empire, and during the Umayyad
and early Abbāsid periods gave rise to
numerous translations from the Pahlavi
into Arabic.
With the advent of Islam and a new
political order, yet another language
with universalist claims, the last in a long
series, made its appearance in the Near
East. The move of Arab rulers and tribes-
men into areas whose populations did not
speak Arabic made translation into Ara-
bic inevitable both in government circles
and in everyday life during the Umayyad
period. Necessity dictated that, for rea-
sons of continuity, the early Umayyads
keep both the Greek-speaking functionar-
ies and the Greek language in their impe-
rial administration in Damascus. Sar ¡ ūn
b. Manūr al-Rūmī (the Byzantine), who
served as secretary to the first Umayyad
caliphs from Muāwiya to Abd al-Malik,
was asked by the latter to translate the
administrative apparatus ( dīwān ) into Ara-
bic. Also related to the needs of the ruling
élite in Umayyad times was the transla-
tion, sponsored by Hi ª ām's secretary
Sālim Abu 'l-Alā, of the Greek mirror
for princes literature in the form of cor-
respondence between Aristotle and Alex-
ander the Great. Similar needs must have
occasioned the translation of the Syriac
medical compendium ( kunnā ª ) of Ahrun
by Māsar ¡ awayh, allegedly for Marwān
I or Umar II, if indeed the sources in this

regard are to be relied upon. In private
life, social and commercial intercourse in
Syro-Palestine and Egypt, heavily Greek-
speaking until well after the end of the
Umayyads, made translation a quotidian
reality. Bilingual Greek and Arabic papyri
of deeds and contracts attest to this fact
for 7th-8th century Egypt; the practice
was doubtless ubiquitous. Due also to the
existence of numerous Greek speakers in
these areas, translation from the Greek
must have been easily available on an
individual basis to everybody, scholar or
otherwise. Even as late as the 4th/10th
century, amza al-Ifahānī relates how
he asked a Greek prisoner of war and his
son to translate orally for him a text on
Graeco-Roman history. All these activi-
ties of translation during the Umayyad
period are instances of random and ad hoc
accommodation to the needs of the times,
generated by Arab rule over non-Arab
peoples. Deliberate and planned scholarly
interest in the translation of Greek works
(and Syriac works inspired by Greek) into
Arabic appears not to have been present
in Umayyad times. The report that the
prince ‡ ālid b. Yazīd had had Greek
topics on alchemy, astrology, and other
sciences translated into Arabic has been
demonstrated to be a later fabrication.
It was with the accession of the Abbāsids
to power and the transfer of the seat of
the caliphate to Ba ∞ dād under Manūr
that translation into Arabic from Greek
(on occasion through Pahlavi or Syriac
intermediaries) became a movement, a
historically significant social phenome-
non. What sets the translation movement
in Ba ∞ dād apart from the incidental
translation activities of Umayyad times
and other periods of Islamic history is
that it lasted uninterruptedly for well over
two centuries, that it was commissioned
by both the Abbāsid aristocracy and the
majority of all literate classes of Ba ∞ dādī