3M181 S94 6 Tu 10 May 94

[Looking at Class Locker, review of chronographs, not transcribed]

I have another histomap. I'll show you a really ornate historical histomap. Here is a recent one, it's called The Rand McNally Histomap of World History, and here again the width is proportional either to the population or the geographic area controlled by a people. The Egyptians started in 2000 B.C., we see the (implement?) shrinking. The entire sphere of our earth is reduced to a one-dimensional interval, 10 inches of which is the Ageans, the Egyptians, Hypites, Amorites, Arabians, Indians, Huns and Chinese. This is roughly an East to West, West to East map in the northern hemisphere. Now we are in 800, let's see if we can recognize Alexander here... Okay, here it says "Alexander established the Macedonian Empire, including the Persian Empire", so see how wide it is. The Persians are still here, but they're reduced. Then look at this huge bulge. The Roman Empire absorbs almost everything...Here's the Byzantine Empire at the time of Justinian, and here it says Mohammed, so here we see the growth of the Arabs from absolute nowhere to a certain sizeable slice which gets wider and wider. The Byzantine groups are correspondingly shrunk, but they're still there. The Byzantine Empire functioned as a plug between Islam and Europe, right on down to 1453, right here. Anyway, this is another example of a histomap, proving once again that I'm not the only one who is interested in the subject.

We could summarize these histomaps something like this: there are a lot of empires, then they're all unified, and this is a bifurcation, or more -- it's a meltdown, a metamorphosis as when the caterpillar becomes the butterfly. So that's Alex. And then down here there is some kind of India and China, which -- let's see, put them like this [writing], where he doesn't succeed because the troups mutinied at (?) and he had to turn around and go back. So much was unified. but upon his death it was again divided into just three empires, especially the Ptolemaic in Egypt and the Selucid in Persia. Then we have the Roman Empire and Christianity, again it has it's limit, and then out of here somewhere comes Islam and absorbs this Byzantine. Mohammed and Islam lasts for a while. 

These bifurcation moments in history are the particular focus of these lectures, and now I'm devoting a lot of time to one event that happened within early Islam, and that is a bifurcation something like that in which these two strains, the Greek Byzantine on the one hand and Hindu, Chinese and Persian on the other hand from East and West Islam come together in a certain moment. Last time I showed you a diagram from the book by Adolpha in which he shows the West and the East Islamic influences coming together and creating a magical event which is the (Bait Al Hitsma?), the house of wisdom. It was  created by Al Mamun around 820. In 820 Al Carisme was 40 years old and probably did not read Greek, Syriac or Palave, but he had access to the great classics of mathematics which had been translated into Arabic for him and others. 

This period of translations is the important part of our story, because it has to do with the merging of these two strains and the creation of the miracle of Bagdad, which I'm calling here The Crux. I got fascinated by this word in rock climbing. You're going up a face which is rated 5.14 or something. It's a very easy climb all the way until you get to a piece of rock about 3 feet across which is absolutely smooth and you have to cross it using a higher degree of skill. Once you're past it, it becomes easy again, though it might involve leaping and other miracles of the human spider. That point on the cliff is called The Crux. So the crux is somehow the problem, it's the bottleneck. I looked up the word crux in Eric Partridge's Origins, that great classic of English literature, it's the most interesting etymological dictionary. Under crux, it says  "See cross." Crux must mean cross, I guess. We live in Santa Cruz, so cruz, crux, cross, different European languages. So under cross it says: "Cross, noun (hence?) adjective, not parallel, a swart, literally and figuratively contrary. Synonyms or related words: crossbow, crosspatch, crossdaf, crosstrue, crossroad, crux, crucial, cruciate, crucible, crucifix, crucifixion, crucify, crusade, crusader, cruise, cruiser, cruciform, excru- ciate, and excruciation." (?) In the crux you are, as it were, in the position of a cross. Going on, the key word is the Latin crux, "a perpendicular supporting a horizontal beam", hence in Latin the cross upon which Christ was suspended. So this figure is actually a crux. (2) From the derivative sense, torture, comes crux, a problem, the decisive point. The Latin adjective crucius becomes early French crucial, adopted by English. The likewise derivative cruciala, to crucify; cruciatus, with the English (?) cruciate, cross-shaped; the subsidiarly Latin cruciatio yields cruciation. The middle Latin crucibulum, a light burning before the cross, hence a hanging lamp, hence an earthenware pot for the melting of metals becomes a crucible in English. (3) The Latin Crucifer, he who or that which bears a cross has English adjective cruciferus. Latin cru- cifidere, to torture on a cross, to crucify. Crucifixus, hence the crucified Christ, hence a representation thereof, hence (mootly?) the cross, adopted by English. (5) Latin crux becomes Spanish cruz, once cruzada, once English crusade, from the cross marked on the soldiers' breastplates or shields. (6) Latin crux becomes middle German crusa, croisa, cris, hence crusin, to move, to sail crosswise, hence to cruise, cruiser and a cruise. And it goes on. 

So I'm presenting this moment around 820 as the crux, the crucial point in the history of Euclid's voyage, the crucial point in the transmission of the Greek corpus, somewhat enlarged, especially in India, to Europe, and the stimulus, the trigger, for the Renaissance. Somehow the European tradition gave no credit whatsoever to anything that had ever happened in Bagdad, so these materials are not usually included in European history books. 

When we turn to the map to consider these two incoming strains further, we may ask, where are they coming from, what are they carrying, what is going on here, and why would it matter that they come together?  What has happened is that somehow part of the puzzle is contained in this transmission, another part in that transmission, and without having the two parts together actually nothing is very clear. We covered the Western transmission pretty well, and if I make a crude copy here of a piece of a map, we have Alexandria, Byzantium, and Antioch. There the land route from Alexandria to Byzantium has gone through Antioch. There are Heretical Christians expelled from Alexandria and Byzantium who come back to Antioch, and a university is started there. Not too far away, Odessa. Near Bagdad  -- Bagdad hardly exists so far -- there are two little towns that we've mentioned briefly, Kusa and Bazra, which are near where Bagdad is going to be. Here is another one, Jindi Shapur, and way off in this corner I have mentioned Merv, also spelled Mau and Mary and other ways. The western line of transmission here is Alexandria and Byzantium to Antioch and Odessa. There is some back and forth there that we talked about, to Kufa, Bazra and, to a lesser extent, Jindi Shapur. 

I didn't say too much about the eastern one yet. There is a back road from Alexandria to Merv that goes that way carrying a different piece of the puzzle. There is also a direct land route to Merv, built during the Salucid Empire. So Merv is the easternmost extent of the Alexandrian Empire and is also the western limit of the influence of the Hindu world. Alexander's original path went somehow like this, and just by the addition of a couple of short roads it developed into a super highway for caravans, for freight trucks as it were of the time that went back and forth here carrying spices from India. There was also a sea route that went, not all the way to Merv but across a difficult desert to the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers and down to the Persian Gulf and by sea to the Indian coast and near the Delta of the Indus River, then up the Normald River a distance of about 100 miles where there was a large port called Eugene. A large observatory was built there and many of the Greek texts were received, and this became the source of the Indian mathematical tradi- tion, which I haven't gone into in detail. Then Indian mathematics diffused here and eventually was carried by another diffusion of a heretical religious sect, this time Buddhists. Merv became a Buddhist outpost and scientific center. The main baggage going this way was Tolome's (Syn- tracus?), later called The Armagest or Amagest, and that book had 13 chapters, 12 on Eudocus' (epicycle?) model for the solar system, and 1 on trigonometry. This created an Indian mathematical tradition. Those of you who didn't skip chapter 6 have read about Bashkar and highly important people, and their output is called the Sinhind. It turns out to be impossible to understand the Sindhind without Euclid's Elements. So this Sinhind eventually is a route from Merv to Jindi Shapur and that is actually this eastern influence. And what's going to happen is Bagdad, there, the miracle. After this event becomes clear, the transmission of the resulting work, which is (dated?) in the Greek Corpus, is a simple straight line to Europe across North Africa and through the twin gateways to Europe of Cordova and Paloma. 

That's the simple picture. I have a couple of details, a story I have written about these two treks. I'll read just one page for you, about the Western Buddhism trek, from 250 B.C. to 250 A.D. 
[didn't transcribe -- assuming you have this on computer already]

So, about this coming together here, I wanted to read a little piece by Peter. I don't usually like to read Christian historians of Islam, but this one is particularly good. Usually I prefer Nasir, that's the one I put on reserve in the science library. This book is called Olive Commonwealth: The History of Islam from 600-1100 A.D. by Effy Peters. He also wrote  on Greek history, he was a specialist of (sulanism?). Chapter 4, The Reception of Helenism, has to do with the actual arrival of Helenistic science in the heart of Islam. 
"The Muslim created his homegrown sciences of Kuran, Habit and Sikh within the Arab enclaves of Medina, Mazra and Kufa. His intelectual experiences during the first Islamic century in Alexandria, Antioch and Tefethan was (out of center?) with a non- Arab and non- Muslim culture are impenetrably varied from sight. It is only at the course of the Habasids at Bagdad that one can finally perceive the intelectual confrontation of Islam, Hellus and Iran. The changes that came about from that meeting were immense despite the fact of their concealment beneath a vigorously maintained Arabism. The pre-Islamic Arab had a paretical tradition of considerable vitality, but little else that might serve to give him an enduring cultural (edification). The revelation of Islam supplied something of that latter, and during the first century after the Hishra, the interpolar tribal and literary (?)ism, with the book revelation of the Kuran, created a Semitic cultural complex, not unlike that of Judaism during its post-exilic phase. The Hashmanian Pharasies and their descendents, the Rabbis, may have learned something from Helenism in their treatment of the law, just as the Jurists and Gramarians of Basra may have experience the ill-defined influences of Roman law and Greek grammar. But a closer Jewish contract with Helenism eventually produced something more--the Alexandrian Philo. And it would not have been difficult to predict that once Islam came under the direct influence of that same Helenism, the effects of synchronism would be (equally?) remarkably in Islam. The only wonder is that it took more of a century for a Philo to come forth from Islam. And another wonder is why it occurred in the new city of Bagdad and not in Helenism's venerable center of Alexandria. The early Califs understood that if Islam were to survive it needed their protection and reinforcement. Instead of pouring the Arab troopers into the old urban centers in the near East, where they would have been swallowed by the Helenic or Iranian majority, they (cantoned?) them in new Arab towns where they were in effect the majority. Firstak, Kufa and Bazra -- [Firstak is now Cairo] -- Firstak, Kufa and Bazra were totally Arab and totally Islamic, and as others came there, they came as petitioners at the seats of power and patronage. In such a deliberately protected environment, the Arab scientists thrived under the care of Muslim savants. Bagdad was a different kind of settlement. Associated with neither the Arab (tents?) or the old Iranian capitols, it was a new city of the Islamic (ukenina?) where Muslims, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Greeks and Iranians all came together on what was close to neutral ground. Bagdad was Islam's Alexandria, a commercial emporium in the seat of political power. There was an expectation and unencumbered by either nostalgia or jealousy. And once the ground had been prepared, Islam's philos came forward by the score into the discernable light of history. In 987 the Bagdad bookseller Ibn Al Badim completed his (fishrist) or catalog. (?) bookseller's handlist, but the author's own writing and curiosity, and the bracing intellectual climate of (?) Bagdad eventually produced something far different. The catalog is nothing less than a 10th century encyclopedia of the literary arts and sciences of Islam. From calligraphy to alchemy, Ibn Al Badim noted down the biographical and historical comments, the sum of the books of Islam. His (?) were happily catholic, though a Shiite by conviction, and likely a mestozarite as well, he interested himself in the entire reign of the Islamic and foreign sciences. What we know of the early history of the Muslim theological sects and of such non-Muslim groups as the Fabians, the Meniculans, and the Basanites come immediately and (dispensibly) from the catalog and it is to the same source that we owe most of our knowledge of the progress of Helenism in Islam. Across the dense pages of the catalog it is possible to trace with a convincing amount of detail the enormous translation activity from Greek, Syriac and Palovi into Arabic. The translations described by Ibn Al Badim could not have begun much before 750 and are all but complete by the time of the author's death, sometime toward the end of the 10th century."

It goes on about the translations not only of the scientific and mathematical works, but also philosophical versus neoplatonism and magical and alchemical texts of the Caldonian Oracles and the Corpus Hermeticum.
 
I now want to make a chronology of the translations, and I'm going to try to discipline myself not to tell the whole story, because I think it would be clearer if I just gave an outline. So as we just read, the period 750 to 1000 was the translation period. These translations were represented, actually, in the merging of these two strains. Now the translators had to know either Greek or Syrica or Palavi (old Persian), and they had to know Arabic. Generally they were not Arabs. They were Greeks, Syrians and Persians. In fact they weren't Muslims either. Not a single one of these translators was a Muslim. These were just mercenaries, savants, people dedicated to their work, seeking support and employed to get the job done. There is the early period, the middle period, and the late translation period. In the early period we have Calif number two, Al Monsur, who moved the Califat to Bagdad in 765. He invited the intellectuals from Bazra, Kufa and Drindi and created an academy for them, so the first step really occurred in 765. 

I'm going to stay with this chart, but you have to understand that each Calif had a cabinet consisting of three main counselors called the (Reviewer?), the Court Physician and the Royal Astronomer. Each Calif, for example number two Al Monsur, had this cabinet of three people. Sometimes when the Calif died, the cabinet or part of the cabinet was preserved, and sometimes one of the cabinet members died and was replaced by another one. The crux that appeared in Bagdad was largely the work of the cabinet, in particular the royal astronomer. Under Al Monsur, for example, the (Reviewer) was Calib and the Physician was Jabral and the Astronomer was Al Phasari. So Calif, Reviewer, Physician, Astronomer. All of these people were involved with Merv. In fact at one point the Califat was actually in Merv. At one time, the Islamic world was (?) together from a single capitol, so it split into an east and west chapter just like the Roman Empire, and the eastern chapter was in Merv. Strong connections were made between the Persian elements in the Califat and the Buddhists and scholars from India living in Merv, and those connections were maintained in the form of these cabinet members who actually came from Merv or from Jindi Shapur, which was kind of an outpost of Merv. 

So Al-Monsur moved the Califat to Bagdad. His physician, Jabral, was head of the academy in Jindi, and he was succeeded as physician by his son, Bookdishu. Calid was the founder of the Bamakin Clan in Merv and eventually they were all assassinated, but before that, the successive generations of this clan of Persian Savantes essentially controlled the intellectual atmosphere in Bagdad. Calid became the governor in Merv. It was Calid who suggested the translation of the Sadantes, that's an important event here. In 764, Sadantes's translation was suggested by the Grand Reviewer, Calid. Al- Monsur's astronomer Al Phisari brought an Indian mission to Bagdad in 771 to help with the translation. Mission from India. That's important. That's like an injection of brilliant mathematical thought from way over here straight into the heart of Islam. And so began the translation of the Sadantes, and Ptolome's (tetrabiblous?) on astrology. That's the early period. In those days, people were just trying to learn how to do it. They couldn't manage the translation from a language of which they didn't have knowledge, so they got experts from outside to help. A famous Indian astrologer named Kanaka came at this time to assist them.
 
Habasid Calif number five, Harun Al Rashid, was tutored by Yaya. Yaya was the son of Calid from Merv, and Yaya was the tutor of Harun Al Rashid when he was a child, so after he became Calif number five, Yaya was brought to be his Reviewer. When Yaya died, he was succeeded as Reviewer by his son Jafar. Under the influence of the Reviewer Jafar and the physician Jabral II, Harun collected books. They told him that he had to get this knowledge. They influenced him. Like Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle, Harun was tutored by the Savantes and was sympathetic. Upon his orders, books were collected and translations were begun. Aristotle was being translated from Syriac and the Sadante from Old Persian. These translations were undertaken by a mercenary, Hasan Ibinsol, who was a Jew from Merv. Now they finally saw sufficiently far into the Sinhind, which has these epicycles, so they drew circles on the circles on the circles describing the motions of the planets in the solar system as seen from the perspective of earth in the center. You couldn't understand it without enough mathematics to read the text.  Jafar understood that the Sinhind required the background of Euclid and Tolome, and so he tried to obtain Euclid and Tolome in Greek or Syriac and sent a mission to Byzantium in 786 to get the books. These were translated by the first of the expert translators of Euclid, namely Al Hadaj.

Al Hadaj is the first important mathematician of Islam, but he is one of the few that is not mentioned in our text by Katz. Al Hadaj did two separate translations. This was the first one that he did upon the order of  the fifth Calif Harun, and therefore it is called the Haruni. The manuscript he worked from was the Greek manuscript from Alexandria of which we spoke before. Hupacha worked on it. She was the greatest mathematician and the only woman recorded for the University of Alexandria. She worked with her father Theon, it's called The Theonic Rescension. It's one of just eight Greek versions that survive to this day, and it's that particular one, the Theonic Rescension, that is translated by Al Hadaj before the year 800.

Okay, so that's all A, the early period. This is B, the middle period. Harun's dates are 786 to 809. In the late period, Calif number seven Al Mamun takes over in 813, he moves the Califat from Merv to Bagdad in 819. The court physician from earlier days is still the physician, still influencing the Calif in academic matters, and thanks to the urging of this physician, Jabral II, they suggested the bait.[?] Bait Al Hickman, house of wisdom. They suggested it in 801, and after the move to Bagdad in 819, it opened in 820. There the Armajest and Euclid's Elements were translated a second time by Hal Hadaj. The first one, translation number one, is called the Haruni, because it was done under Calif number five, Harun Al Rashid,  in the middle period. The second one, in the late period under Al Mamun, is called the Mamuni. These two translations of Euclid's Elements really mark the beginning of mathematics in Islam. Following immediately,  you have Al Karismi from whom the word Algebra is derived, and that story is told in very competent detail in our text by Katz. So leaving out a few details, that's the story of this crux. Or I could call it cruz. The Santa Cruz of the history of mathematics.

If we weren't close to the end we'd keep on going in a straight line pretty much from here to the Renaissance with Leonardo of Pisa, and then to Sir Isaac Newton without realizing themagnitude of this bifurcation..