When I first started studying Astrology one thing that fascinated me was the plethora of Arabic names all around it.
This is due to my unhappiness towards the refusal of arabic language on European academics for the last centuries. For a long time we learned that the arabs "only translated the greek" among Andaluzian gardens; in the fabulous and a thousand pages long Middle Age's philosophy by Ettiene Gilson, there's about 30 pages about arabic authors... Even though they were, we know, much more influential than any latin medieval author has ever been.
These prejudices of ideological academicisms are tough, even ancient times suffered with it - Émile Brehier had to "rebirth" Plotinus on XX century, this mostly by the common belief that "Hellenism" were decadent times compared to Classical Greece...
Of course Astrology, Alchemy and so many interesting subjects suffer a lot with it, but what I'm supposed to talk here is specifically about the arabic language - it's useful however to mix here the prejudices towards astrology, I mean, forgotten manuscripts simply because they deal with this "polemical" subject - Belles Lettres seems to not have even edited Tetrabiblos, I've found it (too expensive) on Oxford, but I guess the English interest is more in Ptolomeus as science-root than anything.
I've been long convinced that arabic is the most important language (paired only by Greek) to comprehend the Western world - by western I understand the civilizations brought by Cyrus - Alexander - Rome and so on.
If Greek has the sources, Arabic has the "modern" version of it, and it certainlly encompasses tons of Greek lost material, like the only original of Euclydes.
Perhaps the aprehension of the clay languages of Mesopotamia will change this scenario, but this arabic Euclydes is what I focus now.
I have an edition of Zosimus, one of the first Alchemists, on Belles Lettres bilingual French/Greek, edition of around 1984...
The French scholar is just amazing, the book has 500 pages of notes/introductions for 70 pages of Greek text.
Almost any original phrase has explanations of their meanings with quotations and digressions of their use by hundreds of early christian age authors that I've never heard of.
And this marvellous work of erudition is the second edition, the first which I don't have is of around 1940, done by another scholar and is considered more classical and more authoritative.
(the 1940's scholar which I can only imagine by the comments the second makes, seems much more mystical and I usually get astonished with the quotations that she does in the intent to criticize him. It seems the 80's edition focused more on Alchemy as Chemistry precessor, focusing on techniques, etc; while the 40's focused on it's alegorical mystical meanings, that she considers very often absurd; this is congruent with my feeling that western culture shifted to an abandon of open-minded occultism after the second world war by the proheminence of english language - proud of it's skeptical tradition, Newton, and having to claim some kind of cultural superiority to justify for a century the dominance over the millenar culturally marvellous India - and the absolute-skepticism was the natural solution, but this is another point)
The interesting thing is that on the introduction she mentions the sources... A few greek, and a few latin manuscripts. Yes, the full works of the Great Zosimos encompasses about 70 pages, of incomplete texts; difficult to comprehend, difficult to understand the context, etc.
However, she has sent a friend to some arabic libraries to look for something... And in Istambul, Teehran, Tunis and a few other cities I've forgotten he found a lot of manuscripts of names that could perfectly be Zosimos. Big books, plenty of pages. It could easily multiply the amount of work we know from the author.
But, they couldn't make a standard text for publishing, cause they didn't have someone qualified disponible to study it. Period.
So, in 1984 they had this enormous erudition of every Ancient Greek comma on their 40 pages that were left from Zosimos, another tons of erudition for the 30 pages of latin - but no one to at least do a single edition of the lots of "hidden Zosimos" on arabic libraries.
This is the condition of "Western" culture - hidden in arabic libraries that ideology doesn't allow to explore.
This is due to my unhappiness towards the refusal of arabic language on European academics for the last centuries. For a long time we learned that the arabs "only translated the greek" among Andaluzian gardens; in the fabulous and a thousand pages long Middle Age's philosophy by Ettiene Gilson, there's about 30 pages about arabic authors... Even though they were, we know, much more influential than any latin medieval author has ever been.
These prejudices of ideological academicisms are tough, even ancient times suffered with it - Émile Brehier had to "rebirth" Plotinus on XX century, this mostly by the common belief that "Hellenism" were decadent times compared to Classical Greece...
Of course Astrology, Alchemy and so many interesting subjects suffer a lot with it, but what I'm supposed to talk here is specifically about the arabic language - it's useful however to mix here the prejudices towards astrology, I mean, forgotten manuscripts simply because they deal with this "polemical" subject - Belles Lettres seems to not have even edited Tetrabiblos, I've found it (too expensive) on Oxford, but I guess the English interest is more in Ptolomeus as science-root than anything.
I've been long convinced that arabic is the most important language (paired only by Greek) to comprehend the Western world - by western I understand the civilizations brought by Cyrus - Alexander - Rome and so on.
If Greek has the sources, Arabic has the "modern" version of it, and it certainlly encompasses tons of Greek lost material, like the only original of Euclydes.
Perhaps the aprehension of the clay languages of Mesopotamia will change this scenario, but this arabic Euclydes is what I focus now.
I have an edition of Zosimus, one of the first Alchemists, on Belles Lettres bilingual French/Greek, edition of around 1984...
The French scholar is just amazing, the book has 500 pages of notes/introductions for 70 pages of Greek text.
Almost any original phrase has explanations of their meanings with quotations and digressions of their use by hundreds of early christian age authors that I've never heard of.
And this marvellous work of erudition is the second edition, the first which I don't have is of around 1940, done by another scholar and is considered more classical and more authoritative.
(the 1940's scholar which I can only imagine by the comments the second makes, seems much more mystical and I usually get astonished with the quotations that she does in the intent to criticize him. It seems the 80's edition focused more on Alchemy as Chemistry precessor, focusing on techniques, etc; while the 40's focused on it's alegorical mystical meanings, that she considers very often absurd; this is congruent with my feeling that western culture shifted to an abandon of open-minded occultism after the second world war by the proheminence of english language - proud of it's skeptical tradition, Newton, and having to claim some kind of cultural superiority to justify for a century the dominance over the millenar culturally marvellous India - and the absolute-skepticism was the natural solution, but this is another point)
The interesting thing is that on the introduction she mentions the sources... A few greek, and a few latin manuscripts. Yes, the full works of the Great Zosimos encompasses about 70 pages, of incomplete texts; difficult to comprehend, difficult to understand the context, etc.
However, she has sent a friend to some arabic libraries to look for something... And in Istambul, Teehran, Tunis and a few other cities I've forgotten he found a lot of manuscripts of names that could perfectly be Zosimos. Big books, plenty of pages. It could easily multiply the amount of work we know from the author.
But, they couldn't make a standard text for publishing, cause they didn't have someone qualified disponible to study it. Period.
So, in 1984 they had this enormous erudition of every Ancient Greek comma on their 40 pages that were left from Zosimos, another tons of erudition for the 30 pages of latin - but no one to at least do a single edition of the lots of "hidden Zosimos" on arabic libraries.
This is the condition of "Western" culture - hidden in arabic libraries that ideology doesn't allow to explore.
