Galen in Arabic - more than a translation

In the Arabic-Islamic world of the ninth and tenth centuries the Greek physician Galen (d. around 216 CE) was probably the most translated antique author, even before Aristotle. While the Arabic translations of the Aristotelian corpus and their reception have been studied for decades, Galen has not fared so well. Many of the Arabic translations of Galens original treatises as well as later abridgements remain unedited. The project GAIA will provide a number of dearly needed editions centring on Galens Method of Treatment in which the epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge of the Greek physician is explained. Based on these editions, the reception and transformation of Galens epistemology in the intellectual thought of the Arabic-Islamic world, in particular in medicine, philosophy and Islamic theology will be studied. A further area of research will be semiology, i.e. the theory of signs, for which Galens influence is essential. The project GAIA stands at the cross-roads of the history of Graeco-Arabic medicine, Arabic philosophy and Islamic theology. Galen was not only an excellent physician, but also an ingenious philosopher and thus influenced not only medicine in the Arabic-Islamic world, but also the developing fields of philosophy and theology. Analysing his influence in these three domains shall show their mutual connections and interdependences. It shall further emerge that and how the transmission of the Galenic tradition was impacted by the intellectual debates taking place within the Islamicate world at that time. The applied methods are the ones of philology, of the history of medicine, of ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as of Islamic theology. In the past the Arabic transmission of Galen has often been approached from the point of view of the Greek Galen, i.e. either to reconstruct Galenic treatises lost in Greek, but preserved in Arabic, or to study Greek-Arabic translation techniques. The GAIA-approach, in contrast, focuses on the audience for whom Galens works were translated, their understanding of these translations, their impact on the transmission and their development of the transmitted thoughts. The research undertaken in the framework of proposed project will further acknowledge and stress the fact that the Arabic translations of Galen the physician were not exclusively read for medical purposes, but also out of interest for their philosophical contents. In this way Galen the philosopher and his influence on the philosophy and theology in the Islamicate world shall emerge.

The Greek scholar Galen (d. around 216 CE) was not only a physician, but also a philosopher as can been seen in his extensive literary output. In the ninth century CE almost the entire Galenic corpus was translated into Arabic. The most famous Arabic Galen-translator, the Christian unayn ibn Isq was himself a physician and scholar and his aim was to make his Muslim as well as Christian contemporaries understand and appreciate Galen. Therefore his translations are more than translations, namely interpretations of the Galenic texts. They provide an insight into how Galen was understood in the Arabic speaking world and which impact he had on the emerging fields of Arabic medicine, philosophy and rational theology (kalm). Beside the Galenic originals, a number of later reworkings, adaptations and revisions of Galen by Greek and probably Aramaic-Syriac speaking scholars influenced the Arabic tradition as well. In many cases, this influence is the only surviving evidence of these later exegetical works as they are lost to a great extent. The majority of the Arabic translations of Galen's oeuvre and its later reworkings are still only accessible in manuscripts that are often difficult to decipher. In the framework of the project GAIA, the first modern editions of the "Alexandrians' Summaries of Galen's Therapeutic Method" and the pseudo-Galenic "Introduction" (Isagoge) to medicine were done. With regard to the latter text, that was also translated into German, the interesting question arises whether it is really a translation or rather an Arabic composition presenting Galenic material, for the text is very similar to unayn ibn Isq's "Medical Questions". The "Medical Questions" are an introductory treatise to medicine, that has been extremely influential in the Arabic speaking world and has, in its Latin translation, also shaped the understanding of medicine in the entire medieval Latin West. As apparent from its title, the "Medical Questions" are structured in question-and-answer form. However, there also exists a version in tables, probably made for pedagogical and didactic purposes. This tabular version was also edited and translated into German. In addition to the Arabic text editions and German translations, we showed how unayn adapted the Galenic term 'nature' when translating for his target audience. Furthermore, we documented the development of the division of medicine into its sub-disciplines, starting from Galen to his Late Antique commentators onto unayn. In doing so, we focused on an anonymously transmitted division of medicine that is preserved, although badly, on the title page of a Parisian manuscript containing two Galen translations. Our partial reconstruction of the damaged text was eventually confirmed by identifying its source in another manuscript.