Greek-Arabic translations
Between the 8th and 10th centuries CE, hundreds of Greek philosophical, medical and scientific works were translated into Arabic. These translations helped shape the development of philosophy and science in the Islamic world. Through later Latin translations, they also exerted some influence in the Latin West.
These Arabic translations were crucial for preserving, transmitting and extending ancient Greek thought: many Greek texts were lost in the intervening centuries and are now only extant in Arabic. The Arabic translators also had access to manuscripts that were often several centuries older and potentially closer to the Greek originals than those available to editors of ancient Greek texts today.
The Arabic translators’ understanding of their Greek sources was informed by their historical, cultural, religious and linguistic background. Their reading of these texts offers a new perspective on the ancient world that has the potential to enhance our own understanding.
The Digital Corpus
The Digital Corpus assembles a wide range of Greek texts and their Arabic counterparts. It also includes a number of Arabic summaries, commentaries and secondary sources. The texts in the corpus can be consulted individually or, where applicable, side by side with their translation. The majority of texts can also be downloaded for further analysis.
The Corpus currently has ca. 1.8M Arabic and 3.8M Greek words. It consists of more than 360 texts, two thirds of which are Greek and the rest Arabic. The texts range in length from a single to several hundred pages, and they represent about 280 works by 34 authors. They cover a wide range of subjects, but philosophical and medical works, especially by Aristotle, Galen and Hippocrates, are particularly prominent. The corpus also contains a sizable sample of mathematical texts. Other fields represented by one or more texts are astronomy, biology, zoology and psychology as well as doxography.
The Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies was initiated as a collaborative project at Harvard and Tufts University and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It was started and supervised by Mark J. Schiefsky at the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, and Gregory R. Crane, then at the Department of Classics, Tufts University; Uwe Vagelpohl, Department of Classics, University of Warwick, was responsible for assembling the Arabic corpus, vetting and tagging the raw texts and importing the corpus into the Digital Corpus database.
More recently the corpus was supported by the University of Warwick and the Wellcome Trust under the umbrella of a project on Arabic summaries of Galen. The database and web page infrastructure, including the front end to view and download texts from the corpus and the back end to add or modify texts and add metadata, was created by net4media.
Contribute to the corpus
The Digital Corpus is a work in progress. We welcome submissions of Greek and Arabic digital texts in any format. Copyrighted texts can also be included in the database and can be viewed or searched, but they will not be made available for download. Please comntact us if you want to find out more.
Project members
Mark Schiefsky
Harvard University
Gregory R. Crane
Universität Leipzig
Uwe Vagelpohl
University of Warwick