stephan huller

Thank you David. Yes I am aware of Vella. I devoted a post at my blog about this. But the stories about the existence of the Arabic Livy are quite numerous and precede Vella's falsification. For instance - as noted above - Nicolas Lefevre (c. late sixteenth century) made reference to the existence of an Arabic Livy at St Macarius monastery (or specifically 'the desert of St Macarius = Wadi Natrun = St Macarius monastery).

I have just stumbled upon another version of the story which predates Vella by almost two centuries, Thomas van Erpe - http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/20...abic-livy.html, http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/20...ss-claims.html

stephan huller

This is the second NASCAS response, this time from a scholar in Moscow:

DCHindley

Stephen,

In the course of assisting my fair wife the other day with the landscaping of our beautiful country estate, as a sort of celebration on account of her birthday, I took a few moments to flesh out the bare bones of your two quotations.

Drawing upon my encyclopedic knowledge of the languages involved, I present the following translation, with essential annotations:

Erpenius assures that the Arabs have a translation in the language of the entire history of Livy (Erpen. Orat. 1 Lingua Arab), and [A.] Hinkelman[n] in the Preface to his edition of the Koran [Al Coranus, seu lex Islamitica, &c, "The Arabic Text of the Qur'an", Hamburg, 1649], claims that this translation was to be found at Fez:

"From dark, incomparable Fez, Livy lay, to be rescued from oblivion."

But there is every reason to believe that this alleged version, which the Vessiün Arab Historian Joseph says was preserved in the monasteries of Mount Lebanon, does not exist (anymore).

Paul Jove [Paulus Jovius, quoted by Usher, Br. Eccl. 597] believed all of Livy had been transported to a small island of Ireland (sic), where it was carefully saved from of the sack of Rome by Alaric.*

*According to John Jamieson, Ancient Culdees of Iona (1890, p. 303): Boethius [lib. vii. p. 114] [says that] Fergus the II, assisting Alaric the Goth, in the sacking of Rome, brought away, as share of the plunder, a chest of books, which he presented to the monastery of Iona. Aeneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II.) intended, when he was in Scotland, to have visited the library, in search of the lost books of Livy, but was prevented by the death of the king, James I. A small parcel of them were, in 1525, brought to Aberdeen, and great pains were taken to unfold them, but, through age and the tenderness of the parchment, little could be read ; but, from what the learned were able to make out, the work appeared by the style to have rather been a fragment of Sallust than of Livy.

Which I render, again with essential annotations, thusly:

Note on an essay in Tite-Live Arabe by M. Vella with Nicolas Clénard, Thomas Erpenius etc.. N"58, p. 210-216. Add a note on the work of Erpenius. Add a note here on page 8 for the library room which I cited the testimony of Th. Erpenius, in soft excerpt, of his two discourses De Lingua arabica ["On The Arabic Language," Leyden, 1613] on my 8vo paper entitled Eastern Literature, Arabic, etc.. (See: above, p. 459, No. 1.) [The Belgian bibliophile, Volume 9 (1788) p. 459-460]

This truckload of bull sh*t, however true the annotations may be, was brought to you by DCH.

stephan huller

An email this weekend from the expert on ancient works translated into Arabic, Dimitri Gutas of Yale:

Very interesting.

Roger Pearse

Sounds as if Dimitri Gutas has got fed up with being asked that one repeatedly; although I had not heard it.

We have to bear in mind the process whereby literature ended up in Arabic.

The Arabs occupied a large part of the Eastern Roman empire. Most of this spoke Syriac, and had translated Greek stuff into their own language already. Most of this was theological, because politics in that realm took that form, and included lots of philosophical stuff (because it was useful for arguing theology). It also included practical handbooks. In the 9-10th century the Arabs were no longer in charge of the Islamic empire, and the new Persian dynasts wanted their medical books in Arabic. So the process took place of converting these handbooks into Arabic. Syriac and Arabic are very close, so the translators tended to translate from Greek first into Syriac (following the established process) and then into Arabic.

What this means is that Arabic contains the writings in Arabic of the Christians who were unfortunate enough to be ruled by the Islamic empire, plus the translations from Greek made by the same people, mainly theological, plus whatever the Moslems wrote themselves.

There isn't really a feed from the classical Latin world into this. The exception is in Spain, which was part of the Ummayad empire, right at the start, but was no longer part of the Abbasid empire, which is when the translation movement got started. But this exception is why Orosius was translated; he was a popular "history" in that period.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Returning to the original post: it is not particularly pleasant to get any idea of what exists in Arabic.

The standard reference for Arabic literature is Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. This is a stupid volume. Brockelmann published it in two volumes. Like a muppet he abbreviated every other word, which means understanding it is very hard. This bit is online, tho. Then in the 30's he published three volumes of supplements. Then -- incredibly -- the idiot published a "second edition" of the two original volumes, but not including material from the supplements, which themselves refer back to the original volumes. So to find anything you have to look at at least three volumes; the 2nd, the first, and then the supplement. I did a translation of the materials on the biographers of Mohammed and was exhausted at the end of it.

Brockelman's GAL does not include Christian literature. Fortunately during WW2 a German priest named Graf was holed up in the Vatican with nothing else to do, and he produced the Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur as, you guessed it, a supplement to Brockelmann. So it isn't complete either! But it's a far easier piece of work to use than Brockelmann, because Graf wasn't an idiot. GCAL is in five volumes. Volume 1 is devoted solely to translations from other languages, mainly Syriac.

What is desperately needed is an English handbook on Arabic literature. I did toy with getting the first two volumes of GCAL translated commercially into English (that takes us up to 1500 AD), which would at least be something. But I was refused permission to do so. Since it would have cost around $25,000, I wasn't altogether sorry!

So ... where finding stuff is concerned, try the two online volumes of Brockelmann and see what's in the indexes.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

stephan huller

Just received this from Professor Martino Diez in Venice