Dating Medical Translations

The third/ninth-century translator Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq and his associates produced more than a hundred mostly medical translations from Greek into Syriac and then into Arabic. We know little about the chronology of these translations, except for a few scattered remarks in Ḥunayn's Risāla (Epistle). This article attempts to reconstruct the chronology based on Hippocratic quotations in the Arabic translation of Galen's works. Hippocratic writings were usually not translated independently but embedded in Galen's commentaries, so a comparison between this "embedded" Hippocrates and quotations from the same Hippocratic text elsewhere in the Arabic Galen might reveal chronological relationships. The findings of this collation are thought- provoking, but they need to be weighed against the uncertainties surrounding translation methods and potential interference by well-meaning later scholars and scribes.