Overview

The edition will be based mainly on two manuscripts, Madrid, Escorial, MS árabe 804 (E1) and Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS B135 sup. (M), whilst Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 2846 fonds arabe (P), a copy of M, as well as Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Cod. arab. 803 (Mu), containing a short partial copy of M, will only be used occasionally. David Colville, the scribe of M, used E1, but he also preserves other variant readings.

Manuscripts

E1

contains Galen's Commentary to books One (fols. 1b-43a), Two (fols. 43b-127b), and Three (fols. 128a-182b); cf. Casiri (1760-70: i. 249-251, no. 800) and Renaud (1941: 18-19, no. 804). It is written in a maghribi hand, and in the margins we have section headings in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew by what is perhaps a fifteenth-century hand; unfortunately, they are often cut off. The manuscript itself is undated, but appears to have been written during a time period similar to Madrid, Escorial, MS árabe 804 (abbreviated as E2), dated to 609 AH (corresponding to 1210/11).

M

contains the commentaries on book Two (fols. 1-83), and the last two and a half parts of book Six (fols. 85-117)—i.e. those parts no longer extant in Greek—as well as Hunayn's Summaries in question-and-answer format on the same parts of the Commentary (fols. 119-131 and 133-144, respectively). As can be seen from the colophon, the Scottish scholar and monk David Colville produced this manuscript in 1624 (Löfgren and Traini 1975-95: i. 66-7, no. 105). According to his own words (M fol. 1a), he produced his copy of Galen's Commentary on book Two 'from a number of manuscripts (a pluribus exemplaribus)' he found in the Escorial Library. From late 16th-century catalogue, we know that the library held at least two manuscripts of this part of the text (Morata 1934: 106-7, 147). The use of the word pluribus would suggest that Colville had access to other manuscripts as well; E1 is one of the manuscripts on which he drew to produce his own, but in the margins, he often adduces variant readings which appear to have come from one or more additional manuscripts. A partial collation of E1, M and P has shown that Colville, the scribe of M, corrected E1 according to another manuscript which we no longer possess. Moreover, in the margins of M, he frequently noted variant readings, often introduced by 'in alio (in another [manuscript])', at times abbreviated to in al.. He took some of these variants from E1, but occasionally, there is a case where M differs from E1, and where he notes a variant reading different from both those of M and E1. We have therefore enough reason to assume that he had at least one additional manuscript at his disposal, a fact confirmed by his statement that he produced M 'from a number of manuscripts'. It is therefore not true that, as Pfaff implicitly claimed for P (a nineteenth-century partial copy of M), 'substantial variants do not occur at all' and that the 'marginal notes are only concerned with words which are difficult to read' (CMG 10.1: xxxii).

Of significant importance for the textual transmission of book Two of Galen's Commentary is also Hunayn's abridgment in question-and-answer format, known as the Questions on the Epidemics (Masa'il al-Abidhimiya), also called Summaries of the Epidemics (Jawami' al-Abidhimiya) in M. Since, with the notable exception of Bryson (2000: 35-7), this text has attracted little scholarly attention, it is useful briefly to describe it and to explain its importance for the present project. In his Questions on the Epidemics, Hunayn provides a digest of Galen's interpretation of various cases reported in the Epidemics. He selects the most crucial parts of Galen's explanation, and rearranges them in a way which is easy to remember. Moreover, the material is divided into questions and answers which further facilitates its absorption. Hunayn originally wrote this abridgment in Syriac, and his pupil Isa ibn Yahya (fl. c. 850s) rendered it into Arabic. Yet, when comparing the Arabic version of the Questions with Hunayn's own Arabic version of Galen's Commentary, it is evident that Isa used the latter to produce the former by quoting certain passages verbatim. Therefore, the Questions represent an important secondary source for the constitution of Hunayn's version. Since the Questions relating to Book Two are relatively short (13 fols.), we will collate them systematically and provide an edition and translation as an appendix to our main edition.

P

a partial copy of M, containing the commentaries on book Two and Six also preserved in MS M, but not Hunayn's Summaries. In his catalogue of the Arabic manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, De Slane (1883-95) already noted that it was 'a modern copy of the MS of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan [i.e. M].'

Mu

a manuscript consisting of loose quires; among them, it would appear, are also some folios containing a partial copy of M, as Bergsträsser (1913: 25) stated—he called this part of the manuscript 803a. It appears that he used Mu to produce his extract of the Arabic version of Galen's Commentary (p. 10-11). So far, we have not been able to ascertain whether Mu still exists.

Two eminent Islamic medical scholars, Ibn Ridwan (d. ca. 1061) and Ibn al-Nafis, produced commentaries on the Epidemics, neither of which has been published. The former is extant in Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 12. 1 (fols. 127b-196b; cf. Sezgin 1970: 35), the latter in Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Aya Sofya 3642 and Cairo, Dar al-Kutub al-Misriya, MS 583 Tibb Tal'at (cf. al-Munajjim 1959: 270). The Cairo copy of Ibn al-Nafis' commentary is either a direct copy of the former or at least represents a very similar branch of the textual tradition (Bachmann 1971: 304). Since the Arabic text of the Hippocratic Epidemics only survives in the lemmas of commentaries on this text, these two works could occasionally, albeit only in isolated cases, help to establish it. Given the importance of these lemmas for the reconstruction of the Hippocratic text, they could in theory yield readings crucial for the understanding of the Greek original, although cases where the Arabic lemmas are only preserved in these latter commentaries will presumably be rare.

Editions

Finally, the Greek text of Galen's Commentary on Book One, edited in as volume 10.1 of the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum is, of course, of great significance for editing the Arabic translation. Its importance for the present project is further increased by the fact that we only have one manuscript (E1) for this part of the Arabic translation. To provide classicists with a tool to evaluate for themselves the state of the Arabic tradition, the English version will be based on the Arabic text. Yet, where the Greek text is extant, and where there are significant differences between the Greek and the Arabic versions, we will record those in the notes.

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