12/4/2023 0 Comments Early middle ages time periodThis model of physiology dominated medicine until the eighteenth century, let’s say. And Galen is the person who is responsible for the transmission, if not invention, of the notion of the four bodily humors. The main authority for the Arabs, the person that they translated with the most assiduity and interest, was Galen, G-A-L-E-N, a physician who wrote in Greek at the time of the Roman Empire. We’re not exhausting the subject studied by the Arabs, but I wanted to give you math, geography, and medicine as three examples. And it is an aspect both of the respect accorded to the Arab geographers in the Christian world, and the fact that despite our tendency to see these two worlds as opposed– after all 1138 is the era of the Crusades– there’s quite a fair amount of collaboration, interchange of knowledge between the Christian kingdoms of Europe, and the Islamic world– the Islamic kingdoms– of the Southern Mediterranean and the Middle East.įinally, medicine. And he started from his native Tunis and traveled as far as China and Indonesia.Īnd then, finally, a scholar named al-Idrisi, another one of these travelers, geographers, was hired by the Christian king of Sicily, Roger the Second, in 1138 to put together a map of the world with accompanying descriptive texts. Completed in 985 after twenty years of traveling.īut the greatest traveler of the Islamic premodern world was Ibn Khaldun, who is much later but worth at least mentioning here, 1332 to 1406. So there’s this book by Al-Muqaddasi, M-U-Q-A-D-D, usually known in English as the Best Division for Knowledge of the Regions. Many of these guys are indefatigable travelers. Crucial, crucial discovery.īut this question of how much water is there versus how much land is there– a sense of the entire world– is a problem investigated by these geographers. And it was only the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century– specifically in 1498, well really, 1489– who demonstrated that you could go around Africa, and thus from the Atlantic Ocean into the Indian Ocean. Ptolemy has a kind of Antarctic land mass that connects with Africa. And that you could get around much of the world by water.Īlthough crucially, Ptolemy does not think that you can go around Africa. And Ptolemy is the first geographer received in the medieval period to suggest that there’s an awful lot of water. Ptolemy, whom we spoke about last time, the Greek geographer, author of this book known as the Almagest or Geography, translated into Arabic as one of the first projects of this House of Wisdom in Baghdad. This is partly, it’s thought, an interpretation of something in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible that seems to suggest that seven-eighths of the world is land. If you look at Christian maps of the world up to 1300 or so, they show almost no oceans, all huge amounts of land mass. This is an interesting form of speculation. So these geographers were employed by the caliphs, for example, to figure out the circumference of the world, to figure out the relationship between land and water in the world. Geography both of a quantitative kind– measuring, navigation, figuring out to get from place to place– and of a kind of curiosities of the world kind, of different customs, different peoples, different products. And the point of that is not Palermo or anything like that, but just the fascination that the Muslim world had for travel, for geography. Remember the chapter in Wickham opens with the contemptuous description of Palermo by the tenth century geographer, Ibn Hawqal, H-A-W-Q-A-L. So that the enumeration, the use of zero are from India, but the development of algebra is a unique contribution of this period and of these people. Professor Paul Freedman: So we had talked about the mathematical researches of the Arabs combining Persian, Greek, and Indian mathematics and, of course, with contributions of their own. The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 HIST 210 - Lecture 17 - The Crucial Seventh CenturyĬhapter 1: Geography and Medicine under the Abbasids
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