- THE MUSLIMS 55
only their Arabic translations survive.^7 Second, the translators, inspired by the
work they were translating, wrote original works of their own. The mechanism of
this two-part process has been well described by Berggren (1990, p. 35):
Muslim scientists and patrons were the main actors in the acqui-
sition of Hellenistic science inasmuch as it was they who initiated
the process, who bore the costs, whose scholarly interests dictated
the choice of material to be translated and on whom fell the bur-
den of finding an intellectual home for the newly acquired material
within the Islamic dar al-'ilm ("abode of learning").
We shall describe the two parts of the process as "acquisition" and "devel-
opment." The acquisitions were too many to be listed here. Some of the major
ones were listed by Berggren (2002). They include Euclid's Elements, Data, and
Phenomena, Ptolemy's Syntaxis (which became the Almagest as a result) and his
Geography, many of Archimedes' works and commentaries on them, and Apollonius'
Conies.
The development process as it affected the Conies of Apollonius was described
by Berggren (1990, pp. 27-28). This work was used to analyze the astrolabe in
the ninth century and to trisect the angle and construct a regular heptagon in the
tenth century. It continued to be used down through the thirteenth century in the
theory of optics, for solving cubic equations, and to study the rainbow. To the two
categories that we have called acquisition and development Berggren adds the pro-
cess of editing the texts to systematize them, and he emphasizes the very important
role of mathematical philosophy or criticism engaged in by Muslim mathematicians.
They speculated and debated Euclid's parallel postulate, for example, thereby con-
tinuing a discussion that began among the ancient Greeks and continued for 2000
years until it was finally settled in the nineteenth century.
The scale of the Muslim scientific schools is amazing when looked at in com-
parison with the populations and the general level of economic development of the
time. Here is an excerpt from a letter of the Persian mathematician al-Kashi (d.
1429) to his father, describing the life of Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, where the great
astronomer Ulugh Beg (1374-1449), grandson of the conqueror Timur the Lame,
had established his observatory (Bagheri, 1997, p. 243):
His Royal Majesty had donated a charitable gift... amounting to
thirty thousand... dinars, of which ten thousand had been ordered
to be given to students. [The names of the recipients] were writ-
ten down; [thus] ten thousand-odd students steadily engaged in
learning and teaching, and qualifying for a financial aid, were
listed... Among them there are five hundred persons who have
begun [to study] mathematics. His Royal Majesty the World-
Conqueror, may God perpetuate his reign, has been engaged in
this art... for the last twelve years.
(^7) Toomer (1984) points out that in the case of Ptolemy's Optics the Arabic translation has also
been lost, and only a Latin translation from the Arabic survives. As Toomer notes, some of the
most interesting works were not available in Spain and Sicily, where medieval scholars went to
translate Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts into Latin.