Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic

Project Information

HUNAYNNET

Grant agreement ID: 679083

DOI

10.3030/679083

Project closed

EC signature date 29 March 2016

Start date 1 May 2016

End date 30 September 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 452,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 452,00

Coordinated by

OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - HUNAYNNET (Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic)

Reporting period: 2020-11-01 to 2021-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The general objective of the project HUNAYNNET is to study the late antique and medieval translations into Syriac and Arabic of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works. It is well known that medieval Europe received ancient Greek science and philosophy through Latin translations many of which were prepared on the basis of the Arabic and Hebrew versions of those works. It is perhaps less well-known that the Arabic translations, which appeared from the 8th to the 10th centuries, were made to a great extent either by means of or directly from Syriac versions of these Greek treatises. Greek scientific and philosophical literature as well as its Latin translations has been the object of scientific research for several centuries. The Arabic versions of these works have been published and actively studied over the last decades, and these efforts have yielded considerable results. The Syriac translations of Greek science and philosophy, on the contrary, remain practically unstudied and virtually neglected in modern research. Although it is generally accepted that the Syriac translations constitute a bridge between the Greek Hellenistic culture of Late Antiquity and their reception in medieval Islam, their actual contribution have not so far been systematically investigated. This is a problematic situation since without taking into account translations into Syriac one cannot study properly the transmission of Greek heritage through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Thus, the Syriac tradition remains the “missing link” in the transmission of Greek texts to the Latin West.

Named after Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (ca. 808–873), the central and most prominent figure in the history of scientific translations from Greek into Syriac and Arabic, the online corpus HUNAYNNET will serve as an open-access platform for research into the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical literature in Syriac and Arabic. HUNAYNNET will present an indispensable, but until now missing, instrument for filling a large gap in our knowledge of the transmission of Greek science. The web-portal will be designed not only for specialists in the field, but also for a broad spectrum of scholars who are interested in the history of culture and philosophy and in translation studies, more generally.

The principal aim is to create an online aligned corpus of Greek texts and their Syriac and Arabic translations which will serve as a platform for multi-purpose study in the history of science, medicine and philosophy, the transmission of scientific vocabulary, and translation techniques.

The ambition of HUNAYNNET is to contribute to the study of both western and eastern pre-modern texts and language through computational tools. Partnering with other projects, we aspire to improve the presence of the involved languages in the digital humanities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

HUNAYNNET is a doubly interdisciplinary undertaking, i.e. both within the humanities and in the crossing between the humanities and the digital world, an approach which we definitely see as the optimal way to shed light upon our subject matter.

The project website provides free access to the corpus of texts that are available in two formats, the Reading Interface and the linguistic Parallel Corpus. The corpus includes the works of Porphyry, Aristotle,Galen, Hippocrates and Euclid for which there are both Syriac and Arabic versions.
The same texts are also available at the Parallel Corpus: the texts are imported into an open-source corpus management system, NoSketchEngine (NoSkE), an open-source corpus management tool designed especially for the linguistic study of text corpora. The texts were enriched with the standard set of linguistic annotation: tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis. For Greek and Arabic, this is accomplished automatically, with some challenges to be overcome. For Syriac, the annotation is manual with challenges of its own, determined by the technical nature of the texts. The annotated data is currently being used for the development of an automated morphological analyzer/lemmatizer and part-of-speech tagger, as well as to for the lexical and authorship analysis.
A few more texts are now in the final stage of preparation and will be added to the corpus as soon as they are ready.

The scientific methodology used for preparation of the corpus was presented in the publications authored by the project members (Arnzen/Arzhanov/Bamballi/Čéplö/Kessel 2018, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2537032; Arnzen/Arzhanov/Bamballi/Čéplö/Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382407).

In a series of articles “Field Notes on Syriac Manuscripts” the team members presented several previously unknown Syriac scientific manuscripts containing both original Syriac medical and philosophical works as well as translations from the Greek (Kessel 2017, DOI: 10.1163/2212943X-00503015 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527016; Kessel 2017; Kessel/Bamballi 2018, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527030; Kessel/Arzhanov 2020, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382349). All these manuscripts are kept in the Middle Eastern collections and have recently become available thanks to the digitization campaign of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (Collegeville, MN).

The team members have prepared updated surveys of scientific Syriac works, including both translations of the Greek medical and philosophic writings and original Syriac compositions (Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2527034; Kessel 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4382450; Arzhanov 2019, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5708617).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

One of the greatest achievements of the project is a preparation of the first editions for a number of Syriac and Arabic versions that haven't been edited so far. Furthermore, already edited texts are going to be improved based on collation of the manuscripts and uniform editorial guidelines.

The project website provides an aligned corpus of Greek texts and their Syriac and Arabic versions – this is going to be the first of its kind corpus of historical texts. The aligned texts is available for simple reading and comparison in the Reading Interface and at the same time is available for more sophisticated linguistic analysis in the Parallel Corpus.

The achievements described above constitute a significant advancement beyond the state of the art in terms of fundamental resources and basic qualitative research. This has already produced fruit in the form of the insight into the translation of Galen’s Simple Drugs, book 6: it was possible to determine that the Arabic translation ascribed to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq was produced from the Syriac translation and not the Greek original.
The Syriac data produced by the project is particularly amenable to qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis going beyond the analysis of translation techniques. On the qualitative end, the data is being used to test the hypothesis concerning the distribution, nature and complexity of syntactic structures in original Syriac texts vis-à-vis translations from Greek. In terms of quantitative research, the availability of electronic texts makes it possible, for the first time ever, to employ the methods of quantitative stylometry to identify authors of anonymous translations of works included in the HUNAYNNET project. Further work of both qualitative and quantitative kind on the data produced by the project can further illuminate the issue of authorship of the Syriac and Arabic translations of Greek scientific works.

Example of text encoding in CTE

Parallel corpus search in NoSkE

HUNAYNNET reading interface