Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/149

 Arab by race. For the most part the scientists and philosophers of the Muslim world were of Persian, Turkish, or Berber blood, but al-Kindi was descended from the Yemenite kings of Kinda (cf. genealogy quoted from the Tarikh al-Hakama cited in note (22) of De Slane's trans. of Ibn Kkallikan, vol. i. p. 355). Very little is known about his life, save that his father was governor of Kufa, that he himself studied at Baghdad, under what teachers is not known, and stood high in favour with the Khalif Mu'tasim (A.H. 218–227). His real training and equipment lay in a knowledge of Greek, which he used in preparing translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Ptolemy's Geography, and a revised edition of the Arabic version of Euclid. Besides this he made Arabic abridgments of Aristotle's Poetica and Hermeneutica, and Porphyry's Isagoge, and wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Analytica Posteriora, Sophistica Elenchi, the Categories, the apocryphal Apology; on Ptolemy's Almagesta and Euclid's Elements, and original treatises, of which the essay "On the Intellect" and another "On the five essences" are the most noteworthy (Latin tr. by A. Nagy in Baeumker and Hertling's Beitrage zur Geschichte der philosophie des MA. II. 5. Munster, 1897).

He accepted as genuine the Theology of Aristotle which had been put into circulation by Naymah of Emessa, and, we are told, revised the Arabic translation. The Theology was an abridgment of the