Modern science traces its origins back to ancient Greece, beginning with the first philosophers of nature in the sixth century B.C. Greek science flourished for more than a millennium, ending with the collapse of classical civilization in the early Christian era, when virtually all the cities of the Greco-Roman world were utterly destroyed, beginning the Dark Ages of western Europe. And yet a thousand years later Greek classics inspired the Renaissance and brought about the rebirth of science. When Copernicus published his sun-centered planetary theory in 1543, he was reviving the work of a Greek astronomer who had proposed the same idea some eighteen centuries earlier.
How did ancient Greek science survive and by what means was it transmitted to western Europe? The answer to those questions is the main theme of this book, a story that begins on the Aegean shore of Asia Minor at Miletus, where the first Greek physicists emerged, influenced by ancient Mesopotamian lore in astronomy and mathematics. The story then moves in turn to classical Athens, Hellenistic Alexandria, imperial Rome, Byzantine Constantinople, Nestorian Jundishapur, Abbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Cairo and Damascus, Muslim Cordoba, Toledo of the Reconquista, Norman Palermo, and Latin Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century, setting the stage for the European scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finally to Mongol Samarkand and Ottoman Istanbul, tracking the last peak of Islamic science and its long decline.
The story has never been fully told in a book for the general reader, and there is not even a specialist work on the subject as a whole, as I learned when I began my career as a physicist and started reading about the history of science. My first studies in this field began in 1966-67, when I had a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford under the tutelage of Alistair Crombie, who pioneered the study of how Greek science came to western Europe in translation from Arabic into Latin after having been preserved and developed in the Islamic world. This led me to study the Islamic renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries, when the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical works into Arabic under the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad began the first stage in the journey that would eventually lead to the emergence of science in Europe. According to Dimitri Gutas of Yale, one of the leading authorities on the transmission of Greek culture to the Islamic world, “the Graeco-Arabic translation movement of Baghdad constitutes a truly epoch-making stage … equal in significance… to that of Pericles’ Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it deserves so to be recognized and embedded in our historical consciousness.”
This is not an academic work, but a book designed for the general reader with an interest in cultural history off the beaten track. The emphasis throughout is on the people, places, and cultures involved in the story, an intellectual travelogue that makes its way back and forth between East and West with the tides of history and the rise and fall of civilizations.
The multifaceted cultural interaction that has produced modern science should be of particular interest now, in light of the apocalyptic talk of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The original conflict that accompanied the rise of Islam brought Greco-Islamic science to the West, beginning the modern scientific tradition. The time seems to be right for this story to be told, in all of its cultural complexity. As Edward Said remarked of the interconnected world in which this story is set: “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic.”
So here is the story of how Greek science came to Europe through the Islamic world, beginning with the ancient Ionian city of Miletus in the archaic period of Greek history (750-480 B.C.).