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This article surveys the tools available for those interested in the study of Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations of Greek scientific literature. Presenting both standard printed works and the available digital databases, it identifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of each. Thereafter, it sets out the work-in-progress of the ERC project Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic (HUNAYNNET). The remit of this project is to offer a new approach for research into translation techniques and into the history of the transmission of classical Greek literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, building upon the methods of digital philology and computational linguistics.

This essay presents the ERC project ‘Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic’ (HUNAYNNET) based at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The main research question leading the project addresses the contribution of the Syriac tradition in the transfer of Greek scientific literature to the Arabic-speaking world. To fulfill this goal the project is going to provide digital editions of the Syriac and Arabic versions and tools for linguistic corpus-based analysis. The digital Greek–Syriac–Arabic corpus will offer a novel approach for research into the translation techniques and in the history of the transmission of classical Greek literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

This first installment in a series of articles on Syriac manuscripts offers a concise description of two previously unknown manuscripts kept in two small collections in Iraq. Both manuscripts are exclusively of medical content and offer new copies of already known medical works, such as Questions on Medicine for Students by Hunain b. Ishāq and the Syriac Book of Medicines. The two manuscripts are notable not only as new manuscript witnesses but also because they allow us to understand better the manuscript transmission of the texts they contain. Thus, they turn out to be the direct models of two manuscripts of the same content held in European collections (Mingana Syr. 594 and BNF Syr. 425-425).

A little-known thirteenth-century manuscript preserved in Damascus contains by far the largest Syriac medical work that has survived till today. Despite the missing beginning, a preliminary study of the text allows us to argue that it is the medical handbook (entitled Kunnāšā) of Īšōʿ bar ʿAlī, a ninth-century physician and student of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq. The seven books of the handbook appear to follow the model of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia both in composition and content. The actual significance of the handbook in the history of Syriac and Arabic medicine is yet to be assessed, but there can be no doubt that it will be a pivotal source that illustrates the development of Syriac medicine during a period of four centuries at the moment when it was being translated to lay the foundations of the nascent medical tradition in Arabic.