A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



follow the stream of history from its Roman course 

 eastward to the new seat of the Roman empire in 

 Byzantium. Here civilization centred from about 

 the fifth century A.D., and here the European came in 

 contact with the civilization of the Syrians, the 

 Persians, the Armenians, and finally of the Arabs. The 

 Byzantines themselves, unlike the inhabitants of 

 western Europe, did not ignore the literature of old 

 Greece ; the Greek language became the regular speech 

 of the Byzantine people, and their writers made a 

 strenuous effort to perpetuate the idiom and style of 

 the classical period. Naturally they also made tran- 

 scriptions of the classical authors, and thus a great 

 mass of literature was preserved, while the corre- 

 sponding works were quite forgotten in western 

 Europe. 



Meantime many of these works were translated into 

 Syriac, Armenian, and Persian, and when later on 

 the Byzantine civilization degenerated, many works 

 that were no longer to be had in the Greek originals 

 continued to be widely circulated in Syriac, Persian, 

 Armenian, and, ultimately, in Arabic translations. 

 When the Arabs started out in their conquests, 

 which carried them through Egypt and along the 

 southern coast of the Mediterranean, until they 

 finally invaded Europe from the west by way of 

 Gibraltar, they carried with them their translations 

 of many a Greek classical author, who was introduced 

 anew to the western world through this strange 

 channel. 



We are told, for example, that Averrhoes, the 

 famous commentator of Aristotle, who lived in Spain 



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