All this evidence illustrates that the Syriac route of transmission, at least during pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, could not have been much more reliable than the contact or the pocket theory of transmission. And yet the rise of the more sophisticated Islamic scientific tradition in early Islamic times owes a great deal to the acquisition of the Greek scientific legacy and the direct translations of major classical Greek scientific and philosophical texts. How did this happen? The following chapter will, I hope, shed some light on this.
Having resorted to the three methods of transmission that are often mentioned by the proponents of the classical narrative, we find ourselves at a loss to explain how this transmission took place. This, to say nothing of the motivation of the early Abbāsid caliphs for the acquisition of these ancient sciences, which had been already abandoned for about 700 years before those early Abbāsids began to translate them. Why the sudden awakening? And why were the Abbāsids so motivated toward the beginning of the ninth century to finance, patronize, and undertake such a major operation, or even make it "a regular state activity",[20] as is often stressed by the classical narrative but rarely explained? It is hoped that the following chapter will shed some light on this subject too.
The early Abbāsids' involvement in the activity of transmission remains to be explained, even if all those problems regarding the manner in which the "ancient sciences" were transmitted to the Islamic civilization were all resolved once and for all, and even if the classical narrative that generated them was abandoned. For there would still remain a second and more important problem: that of the timing of this transmission, which the classical narrative locates toward the beginning of the Abbāsid times. Why at that time in particular and not during the earlier 100-year rule of the the Umayyads? What was so special about the Abbāsids? Here the classical narrative offers three plausible explanations for that starting point, two of them corollaries of one another:
(1) It is very well known, as is repeatedly emphasized by the classical narrative, that the general character of the Abbāsid dynasty allowed the ascendancy of the "Persian elements" of the Islamic empire. For, after all, the argument goes, the Abbāsids rose in rebellion first in Transoxania, and they did so against the Umayyads, who were in turn characterized by the classical narrative that bases itself on many other classical Arabic sources as champions of the "Arab elements" of the empire. In fact one finds some echoes of such contentions in the classical Arabic sources themselves.
It is true that the Abbāsids, who came to power with the swords of the central Asian troops, brought along with them clients who ruled on their behalf in the Transoxanian provinces, and thus depended greatly on the loyalty of those central Asian troops, many of whom were of Turkic and Persian origins. It is also true that the men who occupied the high positions of government, at least in the early Abbāsid times, and at the ranks of viziers and the like, such as the members of the Barmakīd family, were themselves of Persian descent. And despite the devastating demise of the Barmakīds toward the beginning of the ninth century (when the whole family was simply wiped out from positions of power[21]) other Persian families such as the Nawbakhts simply replaced them in the high positions of government.
That the sources speak of Persians, Turks, and Arabs (among others) during the early Abbāsid period indicates that these sources, from which the classical narrative derived its inspiration, began to reflect, at that particular time, the racial makeup of the people in power. That phenomenon itself must be explained rather than be stipulated in such essentialist terms, as the classical narrative seems to do with that particular historical setting.
In other words, and even if we privilege the classical narrative with some analytical power, then we still have to explain why the "Persian elements" of the Islamic empire would resort to translating Greek scientific and philosophical sources and not restrict themselves to translating Persian sources, for example. Dimitri Gutas, in his recent book Greek Thought, Arabic Culture,[22] offers a plausible explanation. Gutas refers to what he claims was the prevailing ideology of the time, reflected in a source that was quoted in the Fihrist of al-Nadīm (c. 987), and which asserted that all sciences began in Persia and that those sciences were translated into Greek at the time of Alexander's invasion of Persia, thus leaving the Persians deprived of their legacy after the cataclysmic devastation that befell them at the hands of Alexander. So when those Persians came to power, inexplicably only during Abbāsid times and not before during Sasanian times when they were the full masters of the lands east of the Euphrates and sometimes even west of it, they awakened to that ancient legacy and decided to reclaim it. Thus, starting with al-Manṣūr, the second Abbāsid caliph who enjoyed a relatively long reign, to al-Mahdī, and Hārūn al-Rashīd, and then of course to al-Ma'mūn, who epitomized this trend, one caliph after the other doggedly persisted in reclaiming this Greek scientific heritage. They also patronized the more literary Persian translations, simply because there were no more sciences left in Persian after their abandonment from the time of Alexander's plunder.
This explanation fits well with the then-prevailing trend in the classical sources just mentioned, in which the "Persian elements" were made responsible for this large-scale Abbāsid enterprise. It does not explain, however, the lack of real interest in such reclamation of original Persian sciences from the Greeks during the times of the Sasanians, when they were the masters of the domain, and in constant warfare with the Greeks. In fact, the same reports that speak of the reclamation of the Persian sciences from Greek during Abbāsid times also speak of earlier Sasanian attempts to reclaim Persian sciences, but mainly from India and China, and from the Greeks only as an afterthought. These reclamation efforts remain unsubstantiated.[23]
Searching for evidence of the actual scientific texts that were produced or translated during Sasanian times, one could certainly find at least one astronomical work, the so-called Zīj-i Shahriyār, which was later translated from Persian into Arabic. And since the Zīj itself was composed during Sasanian times, this does indeed indicate an interest in scientific works in the Sasanian Empire. Unfortunately the Zīj is no longer extant. But from the few citations of it in later Arabic sources, it seems to have been more indebted to Indian astronomical sources than to Greek ones,[24] and thus this particular, almost unique, source does not attest to the interest in Sasanian Iran in reclaiming "their" Greek heritage. Rather it points in the other direction.
Other astrological texts, such as the Anthologia of Vettius Valens[25] and the Carmen Astrologicum of Dorotheus Sidonius,[26] were indeed reclaimed from Greek into ancient Persian, and were later translated into Arabic during Abbāsid times. But even those astrological texts can hardly be called a reclamation of the Greek sciences on the scale or sophistication in which they were reclaimed during Abbāsid times. A look at the second of those texts and the fragments that have been quoted of the first reveals that they were mainly books of descriptive astrology and not the more sophisticated and demanding horoscopic astrology, which could be attained only after the translation of the more sophisticated texts such as Ptolemy's Handy Tables. Such tables would indeed enable one to cast a horoscope.
21
See the account of Muḥammad Diyāb al-İtlīdī,
23
See al-Nadīm,
24
For a short analysis of this
25
See C. Nallino,
26
Now available in the Arabic version with English translation and Greek fragments (D. Pingree,