Arabic witnesses

Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and his circle rendered Galen into Syriac and Arabic at Baghdad in the ninth century, sometimes from Greek exemplars older than surviving direct witnesses. These versions are valuable but mediated evidence whose weight depends on translation technique, manuscript history, and the passage. These files come from the Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Loading witness manifest…

Collating them

The commentaries are the tractable case. The Arabic of the commentary on the Aphorisms carries page anchors to the same Kühn pagination as the Greek, together with a numbered marker at each Hippocratic lemma, so the two traditions collate lemma by lemma without conjecture. Treatises are coarser: they paginate to their own printed editions — Sālim, Iskandar, Lyons — and mark Kühn only at chapter divisions. See a verse collated in this way, and the harness for the procedure.

Where the Arabic stands alone

Five of the translations have no Greek counterpart in the corpus, the Greek being lost: De nominibus medicis, De partium homoeomerium differentia, De optimo medico cognoscendo, De partibus artis medicativae, De causis contentivis. For these the Arabic is not a check upon the text but the text itself. The first of them has never been put into English — a German version of 1931 is all there is.