Sergius of Reshaina | |
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| Died | 536 |
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Sergius of Reshaina (died 536) was a physician and priest during the 6th century. He is best known for translating medical works from Greek to Syriac, which were eventually, during the Abbasid Caliphate of the late 8th- & 9th century, translated into Arabic. [1] Reshaina, where he lived, is located about midway between the then intellectual centres of Edessa and Nisibis, in northern Mesopotamia.
The ninth-century translator Hunain ibn Ishaq gives the names of twenty-six medical texts by Galen which Sergius translated into Syriac; they were the first significant translations of medical works from Greek into a Semitic language, and presumably were the textbooks Sergius himself had used when he studied at Alexandria. Hunain is not always complimentary about Sergius's translations, though some he thinks are better, as Sergius became more experienced. Sergius also translated various other works, including the Categories of Aristotle, Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories and theological works by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. He also composed two works of his own, On the Influence of the Moon and The Movement on the Sun, probably drawing heavily on Greek sources.
Recently, a palimpsest with an undertext of Galen, translated by Sergius from Greek to Syriac, gathered the attention of scientists. It contains chapters of Galen's On Simple Drugs that had been lost. The manuscripts upper text dates from the 11th century and the undertext, which contains the translation from Sergius of Reshaina, has been dated to the 9th century. [2] The imaging and reading of the text is considered crucial, as it will elucidate the role that Sergius played in the transmission of medical knowledge from Greek into Arabic. [3] Sergius' translations of Galen were copied and recopied for centuries, and eventually became a bridge for moving the medical expertise of the ancient Greeks to Islamic societies. Syriac texts were much easier than Greek ones to translate into Arabic. [4]
Although Sergius kept in close contact with the mostly Nestorian scholars nearby, he was himself a Miaphysite Christian priest. In 535, he was sent to Rome by Ephrem, Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, and escorted Pope Agapetus I to Constantinople. There he died, the following year.
Syriac scholars played a significant role in the 'translation movement' of the late 8th and 9th centuries under Abbasid patronage, which provided the Arabic-speaking world with the Greek intellectual heritage of Late Antiquity; their contribution was especially important during the earlier years of this movement, seeing that there was a long tradition of translation from Greek into Syriac, but none yet from Greek into Arabic; for this reason many translators (including the most famous of them all, Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq) first translated from Greek into Syriac, and then from Syriac into Arabic.
[...] Syriac translation of Galen's main pharmacological treatise, 'On Simple Drugs', as a lower erased layer (an undertext) of approximately the ninth century. It is overwritten by another Syriac text of a different nature, Melkite liturgical hymns called canons, presumably of the 11th century.
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Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus, often anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Roman Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.
In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse, in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in the interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another; for example, a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved.
Materia medica is a Latin term from the history of pharmacy for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, 'On medical material'.
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arrived at a knowledge of each part of [philosophy] according to the study of the Latins, nevertheless, because of his love for the Almagest, which he did not find at all amongst the Latins, he made his way to Toledo, where seeing an abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and pitying the poverty he had experienced among the Latins concerning these subjects, out of his desire to translate he thoroughly learnt the Arabic language....
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The transmission of the Greek Classics to Latin Western Europe during the Middle Ages was a key factor in the development of intellectual life in Western Europe. Interest in Greek texts and their availability was scarce in the Latin West during the Early Middle Ages, but as traffic to the East increased, so did Western scholarship.
The Graeco-Arabic translation movement was a large, well-funded, and sustained effort responsible for translating a significant volume of secular Greek texts into Arabic. The translation movement took place in Baghdad from the mid-eighth century to the late tenth century.
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Yaḥyā ibn al-Biṭrīq was an Assyrian scholar who pioneered the translation of ancient Greek texts into Arabic, a major early figure in the Graeco-Arabic translation movement under the Abbasid empire. He translated for Al-Ma'mun the major medical works of Galen and Hippocrates, and also translated Ptolemy Tetrabiblos.
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