Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/126

 these usually come after the translators from the Greek. Amongst the Nestorian translators from Syriac was Abu Bishr Matta b. Yunus (d. 328 A.H. =A.D. 939), who rendered into Arabic the Analytica Posteriora and the poetics of Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary on the de generatione et de corruptione, and Themistius' commentary on book 30 of the Metaphysics, all from the existing Syriac versions. He was also the author of original commentaries on Aristotle's Categories and the Isagoge of Porphyry.

The Jacobite translators come on the scene after the Nestorians. Amongst the Jacobites translating from Syriac to Arabic we find Yahya b. Adi of Takrit (d. 364), a pupil of Hunayn, who revised many of the existing versions and prepared translations of Aristotle's Categories, Sophist. Elench., Poetics, and Metaphysics, Plato's Laws and Timæus, as well as Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary on the Categories and Theophrastus on the Moralia. The Jacobite Abu 'Ali Isa b. Zaraah (d. 398) translated the Categories, the Natural History, and the de partibus animalium, with the commentary of John Philoponus.

This is a convenient place to summarize briefly the range of Aristotelian material available to Arabic students of philosophy. The whole of the logical Organon was accessible in Arabic, and in this were included the Rhetoric and Poetics, as well as Porphyry's Isagoge. Of the works on natural science they had the Physica, de coelo, de generatione