Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 219

for unayn had Greek manuscripts at
his disposal which were several centuries
older than ours. They also represent a
valuable substitute for some writings that
are otherwise lost.
Thanks to the important edition of
unayn's Risāla . . . ilā Alī b. Yayā fī £ ikr
mā tur ¡ ima min kutub ⁄ ālīnūs bi-ilmih
wa-ba mā lam yutar ¡ am by G. Berg-
strässer, we possess a detailed report on
the various translations of Galen that
were available at his time. There exists
a different recension of this Risāla , which
was found some time later. unayn enu-
merates 129 titles, of which he himself
translated about 100 into Syriac or Arabic
or into both. The list is not exhaustive,
however, for al-Rāzī wrote a special trea-
tise Fi 'stidrāk mā baiya min kutub ⁄ ālīnūs
mimmā lam ya £ kurhu unayn wa-lā ⁄ ālīnūs
fī Fihristih . One must bear in mind that
unayn wrote the Risāla after the com-
plete loss of his library, a fact to which
he repeatedly refers in it. In the Risāla as
well as in another tract Fī £ ikr al-kutub
allatī lam ya £ kurhā ⁄ ālīnūs fī Fihrist kutubih
he makes some statements about the spu-
riousness of several writings ascribed to
Galen, and it is remarkable to see how
his judgement coincides with the results of
modern scholarship. Only the question of
the commentary on the Hippocratic oath
remains doubtful: unayn regarded it as
genuine, but we have nowadays to rely on
a few Arabic fragments, whereas unayn
had the full text before him.
In the Risāla he also gives some occa-
sional remarks on his philological meth-
ods. They are not different from ours: he
used to collect as many Greek manuscripts
as possible and to collate them in order to
get a sound textual basis for the translation.
In search of manuscripts he travelled to
Syria, Palestine and even to Egypt. But in
one respect his philological principles devi-
ate from the modern. Like other Christian

translators he felt the obligation to elimi-
nate all traces of paganism from the works
of the ancients, e.g. , to replace the pagan
gods by the one God and His angels, etc.
Usually this did not impair the scientific
value of his translations, but it did some
harm to the rich mythological material
found in the dream-book of Artemidorus.
The Risāla also contains valuable data
on the translations of Galen made by
unayn's predecessors and contempo-
raries. He does not spare them harsh
criticism, if necessary, and he often had
to revise their Syriac or Arabic versions.
He himself translated either into Syriac
for his Christian colleagues or into Arabic
for the Muslim sponsors of his work. It is
remarkable that there is no word about
the famous bayt al-ikma ; the whole activ-
ity seems to have been based on a kind
of private enterprise. He engaged two
members of his family, his son Isā, his
nephew ubay ª b. al-asan al-Asam,
and another pupil, Īsā b. Yayā, who
also took part in translating Galen. Since
ubay ª and Īsā did not understand
Greek well enough, they made Syriac
translations after unayn's Arabic or,
much more often, Arabic translations
after unayn's Syriac. This could lead to
some deterioration, if unayn or Isā
did not have the opportunity to compare
these new versions with the Greek origi-
nal. Usually the colophons in the manu-
scripts of these second-hand versions
mention unayn as the only translator, a
fact which is already stated in the Fihrist .
The reason for this is not clear. Perhaps it
is due to the modesty of the pupils them-
selves, or else they wanted to conceal the
circumstance of the double translation, as
Muslim intellectuals had been well aware
of its shortcomings.
Unfortunately, there exists no corre-
sponding risāla for the non-Galenic writings,
and it remains to be proved by an analysis