Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 203

society, that it was financially supported
with an enormous outlay of funds, both
public and private, and that it eventu-
ally proceeded on the basis of a scholarly
methodology and philological exactitude
that spanned generations and reflected, in
the final analysis, a social attitude; more
than any other characteristic it defines the
public culture of early Ba ∞ dādī society.
At the end of the Graeco-Arabic trans-
lation movement, the majority of pagan
Greek topics on science and philosophy
(high literature and pagan history were
excluded) that were available in Late
Antiquity throughout the eastern Byzan-
tine empire and the Near East had been
translated into Arabic. To these should
be added a few other marginal genres
of writings, such as Byzantine military
manuals, popular collections of wisdom
sayings (gnomologia), and even topics on
falconry. In sheer quantity of volumes
translated, let alone in quality of transla-
tion, the achievement was stupendous.
Historical sources credit Manūr with
having initiated the translation move-
ment. The Abbāsids came into power
as the result of a civil war, and Manūr
addressed the task of reconciling the dif-
ferent interest groups that participated
in the Abbāsid cause and legitimising
the rule of the Abbāsid dynasty in their
eyes by expanding his imperial ideol-
ogy to include the concerns of factions
that were carriers of Sāsānid culture.
These included, among others, Persian-
ised Arabs and Aramaeans, Persian con-
verts to Islam, and especially Zoroastrian
Persians—at the time of Manūr still the
majority of Persians—who, as a number
of Persian revivalist insurrections of the
time indicates, had to be convinced that
the Islamic conquests were irreversible.
This was done by promulgating the view
that the Abbāsid dynasty, in addition to
being direct descended from the Prophet,

was at the same time the successor of the
ancient imperial dynasties in Mesopo-
tamia, culminating in the Sāsānids. As
the most effective means for the diffusion
of this ideology, Manūr incorporated
the translation culture of the Sāsānids
as part of his overall imperial ideology,
and employed the same technique as the
Zoroastrians did for spreading their mil-
lennarianism: astrological history (political
astrology), i.e. accounts and predictions
of dynastic reigns in terms of cyclical
periods governed by the stars. His court
astrologer, Abū Sahl b. Nawba ¶ t, com-
posed a topic in which he incorporated
the account of the transmission and pres-
ervation of the sciences from Dēnkard IV
(mentioned above) and placed heavy
emphasis on the role of translation in the
renewal of knowledge as ordained by the
stars for each people. Astrological history
performed for Manūr and his immedi-
ate successors both a political function in
that it presented the political dominion of
the Abbāsid state, whose cycle was just
beginning, as ordained by the stars and
ultimately by God, and hence inevitable,
and an ideological function in that it
inculcated the view of the Abbāsids as the
legitimate successors, in the grand astro-
logical scheme of things, of the ancient
Mesopotamian empires, something which
entailed translation of ancient texts as part
of the renewal of sciences incumbent upon
each imperial dynasty. Al-Manūr's adop-
tion of this aspect of Sāsānid ideology and
its culture of translation indirectly initiated
the Graeco-Arabic translation movement
and gave it official sanction.
The initial translations of Greek works
were made from Pahlavi intermediaries or
compilations, and they were preponder-
antly of astrological character, as Abbāsid
interest in political astrology required.
However, the translation movement was
further invigorated and its role enhanced