Lost Greek mathematical works in Arabic translation

In this short essay, the author illustrates brilliantly the need for looking outside the extant Greek corpus for information about this corpus that is not obtainable otherwise. It is not only true that some scientific texts could be recovered only from the translations - and those he illustrates with examples from Diophantus, Apollonius and Menelaus - but the same is true of other texts as well that one knows very little about or nothing at all. For that, the author speculates from Indian mathematics about the possible contents of early Greek texts. The gist of the argument is that one should never say the Greeks did not know such-and-such a branch of mathematics. The rest of the essay is devoted to a discussion of the possible retrieval of Greek mathematical texts from the Arabic translations of these texts. The author contends that it is not only true that the Arabic translations are on the whole much earlier than the extant Greek manuscripts that formed the basis of the critical editions, but that in some cases they were the only dependable clues to the original texts. In this regard, the author's contention is that, although modern scholarship began to exploit the resources of Arabic manuscript collections, what has actually been printed (to say the nothing of translated) is only a small fraction of what is extant in manuscripts. The reviewer would extend this judgement to include the study of indigenous Arabic scientific texts themselves, for there are literally tons of manuscripts in almost every branch of Arabic science that has not been even read yet.

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