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27-06-2015, 08:37

Third Period

Between the seventh and the eighth century, after the Muslim conquest, the West Syrian monastic cenacle of Qenneshre, on the western bank of the Euphrates, produced a great amount of philosophical and scientific work, both in the form of translations and commentaries. It is in these works that we can clearly detect the main change of the Syriac translation technique analyzed by Brock (19791983,2004): from a periphrastic style to a more literal one, with a much more abundant presence of Greek borrowings in the new translations (for Greek loanwords in Syriac, see Brock 1975, 1996; SchaLl 1960).

The initiator of Qenneshre’s flourishinG period was Severus Sebokht (d. 666/7). He is well-known for a wide scientific production, but not for translations. His main disciples and successors were Athanasius of Baladh (d. 687), James of Edessa (d. 708), and George of the Arabs (d. 724). Athanasius revised in 645 the first anonYmous translation of the Isagoge, edited by Freimann (1897); other translations by him of Aristotelian texts are lost, but we know that he translated the Prior and the Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistici elenchi: that is to say that he is the only Syriac scholar of the first millennium who, as far as we know, translated the entire

Organon which, as an heritage of the Alexandrian commentary tradition, was neither usually translated nor commented upon beyond the Prior Analytics. James of Edessa, for example, did not go beyond the An. pr.; he revised the sixth-century anonymous translation of the Categories (Schiiler 1897), translated the De interpretatione (even if this translation is attributed to the sixth century Syriac philosopher Probus in the manuscript which transmits it), and the Prior Analytics. George of the Arabs translated the same three works in a more literal way (Furlani 1925). In the same monastery a certain Phokas substantially revised Sergius’ version of the Dionysian Corpus, which he translated together with John of Scythopolis’ scholia (Van Esbroeck 1997). After George, almost nothing has survived of the Syriac translations. The most important translator, both into Syriac and Arabic, under the ‘Abbasids is Hunayn b. Islraq (ninth century), but it is difficult to single out any fragments of his Syriac translations. We know about them from a letter that he wrote in 856, where he displays the list of his Syriac translations of Galen’s works. He retranslated many of Galen’s works into Syriac, because of his severe judgment on many of Sergius’ translations (Brock 2004). We know that he also produced new versions of the Categories and the De interpretatione, but they are no longer extant.

To the third era of the Syriac translations probably belongs also the version of Nemesius of Emesa’s De natura hominis, which is known only from fragments quoted by eighth and ninth century authors, and for linguistic reasons should not be dated before the seventh century.

See also: > Sergius of Resh'ayna > Translations from Greek into Arabic



 

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