THE MEDIEVAL MIND 77 



Eastern and African blood to rally quickly from the 

 poison. The land had been laid waste again and again 

 by invasion, and almost all continuity of knowledge 

 was destroyed, not so much by the overthrow of social 

 conditions, as by the destruction of the minds capable 

 of transmitting it. Thus the natural course by which 

 culture and learning, following the old routes, could 

 reach the new Western nations had silted up, and the 

 stream, when it broke in at last, came by other channels. 



It was by indirect paths that most of the re- 

 Arabian covered learning of the Greeks reached 

 Science, mediaeval Europe. Of these indirect 

 paths perhaps the earliest was the Arabian. 



A certain amount of Graeco-Jewish culture sur- 

 vived for many centuries in Syria and in the neighbour- 

 hood of the Persian Gulf, with its chief centres at the 

 Eastern Imperial Court at Constantinople and at 

 Baghdad. It was probably along the Eastern trade 

 routes that the Indian numerals travelled to Europe, 

 where, under Arabian influence, they gradually dis- 

 placed the clumsy Roman figuring. In Damascus and 

 Baghdad, Greek medicine was still cultivated under 

 Jewish and Christian teachers, and received some ac- 

 cessions of knowledge, especially as regards drugs, from 

 Indian physicians, who began to travel westwards. 



Progress was also made in astronomical calculations 

 by Mohamed El Batani (c. 850) , who, from his observa- 

 tory at Antioch, recalculated the precession of the 

 equinoxes and drew up a new set of astronomical 

 tables ; while in the eleventh century various observa- 

 tions on solar and lunar eclipses were placed on record 

 by Ibn Junis, who worked near Cairo. 



