Aladdin's lamp How Greek science came to Europe through the Islamic world

Review by Choice Review

Aladdin's Lamp provides the story of science from sixth-century-BCE Greece up to Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, spanning more than 1,000 years. While Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages, Asia Minor scholars translated many great works into Arabic and added their own scientific contributions. The Renaissance was in part triggered by their retranslation into Latin in the 12th century, climaxing in the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s. Freely (physics and history of science, Bosphorus Univ., Istanbul, Turkey) traces a fascinating road through historical times, adding intimate knowledge of the Mediterranean world to bring new dimensions to the transmission of scientific knowledge during this traditionally overlooked chapter in the history of science. The road passes from Ionia and Athens through Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, Jundishapur, Baghdad, and Moorish Spain to the emergence of European science again. When Newton said that he was "standing on the sholders (sic) of Giants," he was recalling scholars in ancient Greece as well as in the Arabic and Latin worlds, such as Ibn Bajja, who rejected Ptolemy's epicycles. A wonderful index of names, places, and ideas, and a thorough bibliography plus numerous page notes, quotations, and figures for readers of scientific history, round out the text. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates and general readers. F. Potter formerly, University of California, Irvine

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

A historian of science, Freely chronicles the transmission of scientific ideas from ancient Greece and Rome to an early modern Europe on the cusp of the scientific revolution. Many ancients' notions about nature were, Freely recounts, preserved from oblivion by scholars based in centers of Islamic learning such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Before reaching those destinations, Freely profiles the Greek sages, enumerating their surviving works and what information they held about mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, among other subjects. Leaving behind a roster of names that is likely familiar to the core audience, Freely's account then addresses Islamic rulers, such as the first caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty around 800, who sponsored translations into Arabic of Greek texts. Freely ranges over the names of Islamic scholars so occupied, who served as arks for Greek science, and of original thinkers who formulated such topics as algebra, all of which reached the West in the cultural diffusion Freely describes. A sinuous odyssey through scientific ideas, Freely's work will most appeal to tastes for intellectual history.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Europe's debt to Islamic scholarship is counted up in this sketchy intellectual history. Freely (Strolling Through Athens), a historian of science, surveys the work of ancient Greek thinkers from Pythagoras through Aristotle and Ptolemy in astronomy, mathematics, physics and medicine. He then recounts how this learning, mostly forgotten in Western Europe during the Dark Ages, was preserved in medieval Islamic capitals, where Arabic translations of Greek scientific texts sparked an intellectual renaissance. Freely contends that Muslim scientists made important advances, but his case falls short with his shallow treatment of their work-little more than a compendium of names, dates and translations. The book deepens when it analyzes the impact on European scientists, from the 11th century onward, of Latin translations of Greco-Arabic scientific texts. Ranging from 13th-century Oxford and the University of Paris to the Newtonian revolution, Freely shows how Western science developed in relation to-and in controversy with-ancient Greek ideas about matter, light, motion and the structure of the heavens. His map of the route from ancient to modern science is informative and intriguing, but it's more of a chronology than a narrative of intellectual history. 33 illus, maps. (Feb. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Isaac Newton characterized his scientific discoveries as dependent upon his "standing on the shoulder of Giants." In this history of Newton's "Giants," Freely (history of science, Bosphorus Univ.; Istanbul: The Imperial City) writes, often with encyclopedic detail, about the Greek and Roman natural philosophers and how their observations and philosophical musings influenced Islamic science during the Middle Ages. In return, Islamic scientists built upon this ancient foundation, while concurrently preserving it by translation into Arabic works. By the late Middle Ages, Greek and Islamic science had infiltrated Western thought, fueling change during the Renaissance and blossoming into the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Freely is at his best in the later chapters when he moves from a textbook-like description of historical facts to a summary synthesis of the transmission of science from its ancient origins to the beginnings of the modern world. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.-Scott Vieira, Johnson Cty. Lib., KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Freely (Storm on Horseback: The Seljuk Warriors of Turkey, 2008, etc.) profiles the various caliphates that fostered scholarship and scientific inquiry during Europe's Dark Ages. As the eighth century drew to a close, the author writes, Baghdad became a beacon illuminating classical antiquity. The Abbasid caliphate, which had held sway there for several centuries, reached its peaking during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786809), when Baghdad's scholars plumbed the known world for long lost books and documents, including many from the ancient library at Alexandria. In Baghdad's library, known as the House of Wisdom, Greek texts were painstakingly translated into Arabic. But Islamic scholars did more than just translate, the author notes; they critiqued Greek thinkers from Archimedes and Aristotle to Zeno. They questioned ideas on the nature of reality, corrected astronomical observations and probed medical tracts and mathematical theorems. In once instance, three wards of a Baghdad caliph marched a measured distance from north to south in the desert until the elevation of Polaris had changed by exactly a single degree; multiplying by 360, they arrived at a circumference of the earth only 92 miles short of what today's science confirms. In time, Cairo and Damascus succeeded Baghdad as centers of Islamic study, flourishing from the tenth into the 14th centuries under the Fatimids and other dynasties. Umayyad caliphs ruled the region of southern Spain known to Arabs as Al-Andalus, which offered another tolerant, enlightened bastion for scholars. As Christians came there to study, Greek texts that had once flowed into Arabic were poured into Latin, and the early flame of the European Renaissance flickered. Freely extensively documents Islamic works that gave us words like algebra and algorithm and dusted off the even more ancient Hindu numerals now universally employed. A chewy study of the preservation and transportation of classical Greek thought. See Jonathan Lyons' The House of Wisdom (2009) for a more accessible account of the Arab influence on Western civilization. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 IONIA: THE FIRST PHYSICISTS The site of ancient Miletus is on the Aegean coast of Turkey south of Izmir, the Greek Smyrna. When I first visited Miletus, in April 1961, it was completely deserted except for a goatherd and his flock, whose resonant bells broke the silence enveloping the ruins through which I wandered, the great Hellenistic theater, the cavernous Roman baths, the colonnaded way that led down to the Lion Port and its surrounding shops and warehouses, once filled with goods from Milesian colonies as far afield as Egypt and the Pontus. Its buildings were now utterly devastated and partly covered with earth, from which the first flowers of spring were emerging, blood-red poppies contrasting with the pale white marble remnants of the dead city. The site has been under excavation since the late nineteenth century, so that all of its surviving monuments have been unearthed and to some extent restored, though its ancient harbor, the Lion Port, has long been silted up, leaving Miletus marooned miles from the sea. The entrance to the port is still guarded by the marble statues of the two couchant lions from which it took its name, though they are now half-buried in alluvial earth, symbols of the illustrious city that Herodotus called "the glory of Ionia." The Greek geographer Strabo writes that "many are the achievements of this city, but the greatest are the number of its colonizations, for the Euxine Pontus [Black Sea] has been colonized everywhere by these people, as has the Propontis [Sea of Marmara] and several other regions." Excavations have revealed that the earliest remains in Miletus date from the second half of the sixteenth century B.C., when colonists from Minoan Crete are believed to have established a settlement here. A second colony was founded on the same site during the mass migration of Greeks early in the first millennium b.c., when they left their homeland in mainland Greece and migrated eastward across the Aegean, settling on the coast of Asia Minor and its offshore islands. Three Greek tribes were involved in this migration--the Aeolians to the north, the Ionians in the center, and the Dorians in the south--and together they produced the first flowering of Greek culture. The Aeolians gave birth to the lyric poet Sappho; the Ionians to Homer and the natural philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes; and the Dorians to Herodotus, the "Father of History." Herodotus, describing this migration in Book I of his Histories, writes that the Ionians ended up with the best location in Asia Minor, for they "had the good fortune to establish their settlements in a region which enjoys a better climate than any we know of." Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, written in the second century a.d. remarks, "The Ionian countryside has excellently tempered seasons, and its sanctuaries are unrivalled." He goes on to say that "the wonders of Ionia are numerous, and not much short of the wonders of Greece." The Ionian colonies soon organized themselves into a confederation called the Panionic League. This comprised one city each on the islands of Chios and Samos and ten on the mainland of Asia Minor opposite, namely, Phocaea, Clazomenae, Erythrae, Teos, Lebedus, Colophon, Ephesus, Priene, Myus, and Miletus. The confederation, also known as the Dodecapolis, had its common meeting place at the Panionium, on the mainland opposite Samos. The Ionians also met annually on the island of Delos, the legendary birthplace of Apollo, their patron deity. There they honored the god in a festival described in the Homeric Hymn addressed to Delian Apollo: Yet in Delos do you most delight your heart; for the long-robed Ionians gather in your honor with their children and shy wives. Mindful, they delight you with boxing and dancing and song, so often as they hold their gathering. A man would Excerpted from Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World by John Freely All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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