A literary history of Persia

3o6all scientific endeavours, who gave the greatest impulse to this activity.^Hff gfll^"' 1-fiihjHn. (^prmftft ofWkHnm'),with its attached libraryand astronomical observatory, founded by him in Baghdad, was theculminating point of an active endeavour to promote learning. Thetranslations produced under him and his immediate successors haveentirely overshadowed those of the older school, and are alonepreserved to us."Amongst the most eminent translators whose names herefollow are the Christians, Qusta b. Luqa of Ba'labaklc(Baalbek) ; Hunayn b. Ishaq of Hira, his son Ishaq, and hisnephew Hubaysh.Thus did the civilisation of 'Abbasid Baghdad become theinheritorof the ancient wisdom of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia,India, and Greece ;and for this it was chiefly indebted toheathens like Thabit b. Qurra, Christians like Hunayn andQusta, Magians, converted or unconverted, like Ibnu '1-Muqaffa 4 1or Mu'tazilite " heretics " like 'Amr b. Bahr al-,Jahidh, besides sundry Jews and Nabathaeans. To thissplendid synthesis the Arabs, though, as it has been " said,oneof the acutest peoples that have ever existed," lent little savetheir wonderful and admirable language ;but the functions ofassimilation, elucidation, and transmission they performed in amanner which has made mankind, and especially Europe, theirdebtors. That they were sensible of their own indebtedness tothese non-Muslims, who bestowed upon them the wisdom ofthe ancients, appears, amongst other things, from the elegycomposed in praise of Thabit b. Ourra, the Sabnean physicianand mathematician, by the poet San ar-Raffa, 2 wherein he1Amongst translators from Pahlawi into Arabic are mentioned in theFihrist (ed. Fliigel, pp. 244-245), besides Ibnu'l-Muqaffa', the family ofNaw-Bakht (see also op. cit., pp. 177 and 274), who were ardent Shi'ites, BaNnirn, the son of Mardan-shah, nnibad of Nishapur, and a dozen others.Mention is also made of two learned Indians who made translations fromthe Sanskrit, and of the celebrated Ibnu' 1-Wahshiyya who translated theBook of Nabathcean Agriculture.2 Ibn Khallikan, Wiistenfeld's text, vol. i,No. 127 ;de Slane's transl.,vol. i, pp. 288-289.