INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS ON EUROPEAN CIVILISATION
“The nations of Europe,” says Bailly in one of his letters to Voltaire, “after having grown old in barbarism, were only enlightened by the invasion of the Moors and the arrival of the Greeks.” We venture to add—and far more by the invasion of the Moors, or of those to whom Bailly gives the name, than by the arrival of the Greeks of the Lower Empire. And, indeed, one of the distinctive and prominent characteristics of the influence which the Arabs exercised on all branches of modern civilisation, is precisely that of having restored to Europe a knowledge of the ancient Greek authors, whose language, works, and even names, were completely forgotten.
It may be boldly asserted that the numerous translations and still more numerous commentaries which the Arabs wrote on all the works of Ancient Greece, and which makes their literature the second daughter of Greek literature, served to give the modern peoples their first notions of the sciences and letters of antiquity. It was only after having known them through the versions of the Arabs that the desire to possess and understand the original writers took shape, and that the language of Homer and Plato found several diligent interpreters. Indeed, “The greater part of Greek erudition,” according to Hyde,
h “which we have to-day from those sources, we received first from the hands of the Arabs.”
In order to justify this assertion, which may seem a little paradoxical, it will be sufficient to call attention to the fact that the Arabs had transmitted to Europe, without disguising its origin, the knowledge they borrowed from the Greeks, long before Boccaccio’s guest, Leontius Pilatus, had started a course on the Greek language at Florence (about 1360), and the dispersal of the inhabitants of Constantinople, after the taking of that town by Muhammed II (1453), had rendered their idiom a common study in Europe. Indeed many Greek books, and notably those which treated of the sciences, were originally translated from Arab into Latin. Among others may be cited the earliest versions of Euclid and Ptolemy.
A not less certain proof that Greek letters first received an asylum from the Arabs, is that several works of Ancient Greece have been preserved by them, and discovered in their own works. Mathematicians, for instance, would never have possessed the Sphericals of the geometrician Menelaus of Alexandria, who was antecedent to Ptolemy, but for the Arab translation (Kitab al-Okar), which was afterwards translated into Latin, nor the eight books of Apollonius of Perga’s Conic Sections, if the Maronite, Abraham Ecchellensis, had not copied and translated (1661) the missing fifth and sixth and seventh books from an Arab manuscript in the Medici library in Florence; neither would the doctors have been able to complete Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ Epidemics without the Arab translation discovered in the Escurial, and the naturalists would not even possess an abridgement of Aristotle’s Treatise on Stones but for the Arab manuscript in our (the French) National library.
If we trace the whole history of human knowledge, and recall the fact that Greece survived Rome in Alexandria, we may well assign the Arabs the position of guardians to that sacred depôt between Greece and the Renaissance. “They merit,” says M. Libri,
i “eternal gratitude for having been the preservers of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus, when those people were no longer producing anything and Europe was still too ignorant to undertake the charge of the precious deposit. Efface the Arabs from history and the Renaissance of letters will be retarded in Europe by several centuries.”
