Hunayn ibn Ishaq
The translator of Baghdad
Hunayn ibn Ishaq was a Christian physician and scholar of Baghdad, and the greatest of the translators who carried Greek learning into Syriac and Arabic.
He was born in 809 at al-Hira in Iraq, the son of a pharmacist, into the Church of the East. He studied medicine in Baghdad, travelled to learn Greek, and returned to become the leading translator of the Abbasid capital, working for scholars, physicians and caliphs, and serving in time as physician to the caliph al-Mutawakkil.
Hunayn and his circle, among them his son Ishaq and his nephew Hubaysh, translated much of Galen, the Hippocratic writings and works of Plato and Aristotle. In a letter describing his work he lists well over a hundred works of Galen alone. He searched for manuscripts across Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, compared several copies before he began, and rendered the sense of a passage where a word-for-word version would have obscured it.
He was an author as well as a translator. His Ten Treatises on the Eye is one of the earliest systematic works on the eye, and its diagram of the eye’s structure, shown here in a later copy, is among the best known images of medieval medicine.
Through such labours much of the Greek inheritance survived, and later passed from Arabic into Latin. Hunayn is remembered here among the great keepers of that inheritance: he carried the thought of one civilisation into the language of another with fidelity and care; see Those Who Preserve.