THE GRECO-ROMAN
TRADITION AFTER THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The period historiansrefer to as late antiquity
ended with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire between the early 400s and 476 ce. The medievalperiod, or the Middle Ages, spanned the thousandyears between 500 and 1500 ce .
THE GRECO-ROMAN TRADITION IN THE EAST AND THE RISE OF THE ISLAMIC GOLDEN AGE
The eastern half of theRoman Empire centered on the city of Constantinople (later renamed Istanbul in modern Turkey). Much conflictaccompanied the fall of the Roman Empire, but with the rise and spread
of Islam during the seventh century, the use of a common language—Arabic—helped to unify andstabilize a vast region stretching from the easternMediterranean and north Africa to Arabia (generally the area in the Middle East located on the Arabian Penisula).A new age of intellectual life began to emerge with the blossoming of Arab-Islamicscholarship; historians sometimes refer to this periodas the Islamic Golden Age. Likethe Greco-Roman tradition, theIslamic Golden Age continued from the late 700s ce until the decline of the Islamic Caliphate (an empiretied to the religion of Islam) beginning when Genghis Khan and Mongolinvasions began todestabilize the region in the 1200s ce .
During the Islamic GoldenAge, new Persian wealthcreated funds to support scholarship. Persiawas a broad geographic region during this age and included, among other places, presentday Iran and much ofIraq. From the early 800s ceon, the city of Baghdad became aglobal center for the collection and translation (into Arabic) ofvast numbers of works, including medical treatises.Medical texts were brought to thecity from places as far away as India, Egypt (and other places in north Africa), and Spain (and therest of the Iberian Peninsula), and itwas via this route through Spain that many Greco-Roman works were transmitted to the Arab-Islamicworld. Baghdad itself was a highly cosmopolitan city in which Christians,Jews, and Muslims freely mingled.This intermingling of faiths was critical for the great translation project since a widerange of language skills were needed in Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit. Baghdad was also known for its hospital or bimaristan(derived from a Persian wordmeaning “house for the sick”),an institution that would becomewidespread across the Arab-Islamic world.
Arab scholars organized Greco-Roman writingsand knowledge during the Islamic Golden Age.By combining Greco-Roman interpretations withthose from other traditions—the Arab-Islamic,
Persian,and Jewish traditions in particular—Arabscholars also produced new, morecomplete works of knowledge.Later, when medieval humanists
translated these manuscripts into Latin, many of theoriginal contributions by Arab-Islamic scholars were adopted and incorporated into the Western tradition without due credit. In this way, not only were novel descriptions of diseases like smallpox—as-yet unknown to Western audiences—introduced into Western medical scholarship, but so too were new
surgical procedures (cataract surgery, for example), new pharmacological recipes, andnew ideas concerning the anatomicalmakeup of human and animal bodies.
Portraitof al-Razi, a physician, philosopher, and alchemist who wrotetwo hundred or so treatises covering every aspect of the theory and practice of medicine.
Two famous Muslim physicians and philosophers, Abu BakrMohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi (c.854–c.925), known to the West by the Latinized form ofhis name, Rhazes, and Ibn Sina (c.980– 1037), or Avicenna, were important to the Islamic Golden Age.Following his hero Galen, al-Razistrived to be the epitome of the scholarlyphysician, producing many works of philosophyas well as more practical texts on anatomy,diagnosis, pharmacology, andsurgery. And it was Ibn Sina’s workon Galen and Hippocrates thathelped to bolster the status of humoral theory in the West when Arab translations of Greco-Romantexts began to be translated intoLatin at European universities during the latemedieval and early modern period.
A drawing of the physician and philosopher Ibn Sina,whose work on Galen and Hippocrates helped to bolster the status of humoraltheory in the West.
Despite turmoil at theend of the Roman Empire,some pockets of the Greco-Roman world continued to flourish intellectuallyin the 400 and 500s ce, and nowheremore so than in the northAfrican regions. It was here that early Christian theologians (scholarsof religion) and medicalscholars produced some of themost important works oflate antiquity.31 At the same time, many ancient Greek texts of philosophy and medicinewere translated into Latin.This was an important development for posterity, becauseLatin would endureas the official languageof the Church and of scholarship for the nextfourteen hundred years,while knowledge of classical Greek faded almostentirely in Europe.
Nonetheless, the scale of translationwork into Arabicdwarfed that of Latin translation. For this reason, mostwritings on Greek medicine that survive today were preserved from translation intoArabic rather than Latin. It is important to note that medieval European scholars did not simply “reclaim” Western scholarshipfrom the Arab-Islamic tradition. Instead, Westernmedicine was infused, in this era, by other traditions,and benefited from the work of Islamicscholars who synthesizedknowledge in this era.
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