Pierre-Maurice BOGAERT. — In the reviving Université catholique de Louvain (1835), the bishops of Belgium appointed to the chair of Biblical exegesis at the Faculty of Theology a Dutch priest, trained in philology according to the German scholarship, Jean-Théodore Beelen (1807-1884). He had to teach Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, Biblical and talmudic Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic…
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Virginie ALAVOINE, Johannes DEN HEIJER. — This paper concerns the contribution of Professor Jacques Ryckmans to the domain of studies and research on Ancient Arabia…
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Alessio AGOSTINI, Davide D’IMPERIO. — Les abécédaires, soit des documents épigraphiques qui présentent une succession ordonnée de lettres, constituent dans le monde sémitique une catégorie textuelle plutôt composite susceptible de donner lieu à plusieurs interprétations…
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In the 52nd and last epistle of the Brethren of Purity, one finds a passage which is a very faithful translation of Plato’s famous narrative about the ring of Gyges. Taking into account the literality of the translation, the size of the passage (about 30 lines) and the precision of the reference made to the original text, it may fairly be assumed that it is a unicum in the history of the transmission of Plato to the Arab world. The purpose of this paper is to take up again this issue and try to bring up some new elements to the discussion.
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In the absence of integral and litteral Arabic translations of Plato’s dialogues, the transmission of Platonism in the Muslim world was an indirect one, passing through different channels such as medical works, doxographies and gnomologies. The complexity and relative obscurity of this ‘voie diffuse’, in which according to Pierre Thillet oral transmission played an important role, led to all kinds of hazardous speculations about the existence of a Platonic Academy among the ‘Sabaens’ in Ḥarrān, which was supposed to be still in activity in the Xth century. This article proposes a critical analysis of one of the most quoted ‘evidences’ for this theory: al-Mas‘Å«dÄ«’s report about a Platonic inscription he claims to have seen on the door-knocker of the maǧma‘ of the Sabaeans in Ḥarrān. Rather than proving the existence of a ‘Platonic Academy’ there, al-Mas‘Å«dÄ« offers us an eloquent illustration of the way Platonism was transmitted in the Muslim world.
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J. DEN HEIJER et P. LA SPISA. — This paper addresses the important phenomenon of contacts and influences between the various religious communities of the pre-modern Near East in the field of the written heritage, and more particularly in that of Christian Arabic literature…
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In this paper, I want to show the influence of the hippocratic treatise On airs, waters, places ((Περὶ á¼€Îρων, ὑδάτων, τÏŒπων) and Galen’s commentary in particular, on the arabic scientific literature. Of course, we find it in medicine but also in geography. In this field, the Galen’s commentary of hippocratic text determined the base of the theory of geographical determinism, giving a conceptual structure (physic and even physiological) to the influence of the man’s environment. The mediaeval thinkers applied this theory to the humanity and in this context, the hippocratic opposition between Schythians and Egyptians is replaced by the one between Turks and Egyptians or Slaves and Blacks. They used it also to explain the physical constitution and the ethics of a specific population.
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The Arabic Grammatical Tradition aims at studying the Kalâm-ʾl-Ê¿Arab or “Language of the Arabs”, relying on texts written before 130/750. ʾAbû Ê¿Alî al-Qâlî (Manâzgird 280/893 – Cordoba 355/966), after having learnt Arabic grammar in Baghdad, has left the city in 328/939 for teaching in Cordoba from 330/941, applying the principles of Basra Grammatical School Tradition. He wrote several books, but one of them may be considered as typical for this Tradition : “The Book of Shortened and Extended Noun”, a critical edition of which has recently been published by Dr. al-Haridi. Al-Qâlî does no more regard “shortened noun” (ʾism maqá¹£ûr) and “reduced noun” (ʾism manqûá¹£) as synonymous as Ancient Grammarians did. In his view, a shortened noun is a noun where a /y/ or a /w/ is included as a radical. He looks for a main structural principle organizing grammatical rules, putting aside the nawâdir or unusual words. So that we may think about him as occupying an intermediary position between Ibn Sarrâǧ and Ibn Ǧinnî in the history of Arabic Grammatical Tradition.
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