Classics and Ancient History

I provide the first study of an extended Arabic quotation from Plato's Phaedo preserved in a work of medical ethics by the ninth-century physician al-Ruhāwī. This quotation, I argue, is valuable both for its antiquity (its Vorlage likely predated all extant non-papyri witnesses to the Phaedo) and for the text that it transmits. Through an analysis of seven readings transmitted in the quotation, I conclude that the Arabic version is of significant textual value. A valuable new witness to the late antique, Neoplatonic tradition of Plato, it presents a plausible and unique set of variants and confirms that the tradition had been extensively contaminated even before the production of the earliest extant codices.

At Leg. 666b7, Burnet’s emendation of the transmitted λήθην to λήθῃ has been widely accepted.  Newly discovered support for this emendation comes from an Arabic version or adaptation of Plato’s Laws, most likely Galen’s Synopsis,  quoted by the polymath Abū-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (A.D. 973–1048) as Kitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭun in his ethnographic work on India.

In November 2014 we announced the first forty Arabic scientific manuscripts to go live in the Qatar Digital Library. We are now pleased to let you know that a further forty Arabic manuscripts have been uploaded. The thinking behind our selection can be found in our previous blog. Of particular note is the fact that all our copies of the Almagest of Ptolemy have now been digitised (Add MS 7474, Add MS 7475, Add MS 7476 and Royal MS 16 A VIII), as well as other representative manuscripts containing Arabic translations of Greek scientific texts, for example, Galen's Ars medica (Arundel Or 52) and Hippocrates' Aphorisms (Or 9452).