Quote:
Originally Posted by prometheus
Yes, they preserved something, I say something, not much. But that was the merit of Nestorian Christians in the first place. Greek writings were first translated into Aramaic, then Nestorian translators from Baghdad (in 9th century) translated it into Arabic. So the Arab world got to know them. Then there was the School of Toledo which translated these writings from Arabic into Latin. So Aristoteles came to Europe in a distorted form, through the cribble of three translations! This Arabicized Arsitoteles had a certain influence on the European medieval culture, along with Arab philosophers and Aristoteles' commentators like Averroes, Avicenna and Avempace.
It wasn't until the humanism and renaissance that Europe came in touch with the Greek originals of Aristoteles and other Greek authors. It was mainly due to the influx of Greek intellectuals who fled Byzantium, which was conquered by Turks.
It is a very odd thing to me. Why did medieval Europeans translate Aristoteles and other Greeks from Arabic? Why didn't they just learn Greek and translate it from the original? The Greek-speaking world was not geographically much more distant from the medieval Catholic Europe than the Muslim-occupied southern Spain. In spite of that, Greek was largely unknown in Europe at that time. There was even a proverb: Graecum est, non legitur. (It is in Greek, so no-one reads it.)
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Hmmmm...interesting. So you are saying that while Byzantium did retain this knowledge of Greek science, it had become largely lost to the West (for whatever reason), and that what information the West did receive regarding this was from the Islamic contact in Spain....and ultimately transmitted to the Arabs themselves by the Nestorian Christians. Could the schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic have something to do with the West not receiving this information directly from Byzantium? Or perhaps the language barrier between the Greeks and the West was even greater than the barriers which existed between Islamics in Spain and the West?
I suppose I just question a bit the amount of hype the multi-culturalists' claim has been given, they lie on so much else about Europe.
Let's not forget the Irish who were said to have the retained the ancient Greek knowledge as well and preserved it for Europeans.