Ishaq ibn Hunayn was an Arab physician and translator of scientific works. He was the first to write the biography of physicians in the Arabic language, and to translate Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest.
Background
Ishaq ibn Hunayn was born in 830 in Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate (now Iraq). He was the son of the famous translator and physician Hunayn Ibn Ishaq. Ibn Hunayn's first language was Syriac, but he knew Greek and al-Qifti considered his Arabic to be superior to that of his father, who, although bilingual, preferred to write in Syriac. His brother, Dawud ibn Hunayn, was a physician.
Education
Ibn Hunayn was trained under his father’s supervision in the Greek sciences and the discipline of translation.
Career
Ibn Hunayn is associated with the translation movement in Baghdad, which continued to flourish after the decline of the academy founded by the Caliph al-Ma’mun for the purposes of scientific translation. Both he and his father were court physicians; Ibn Hunayn found special favor with the caliphs al-Mu'tamid and al-Mu'tadid and with the latter’s vizier, Qasim ibn ‘Ubaydallah. He is also sometimes connected with the group of scholars who met with the Shi'ite theologian al-Hasan ibn al-Nawbakht.
Ibn Hunayn’s original works are few. His books On Simple Medicines and Outline of Medicine are not extant. His History of Physicians, which does survive, is based, as he indicates, on the work of the same name by John Philoponus. He supplements the original author’s list with the names of the philosophers who lived during the lifetime of each physician, adding very little chronological matter. The account of medical practitioners is not continued beyond Philoponus’ time. The epitome of Aristotle’s De Anima, although attributed to Ibn Hunayn, is unlikely to be his.
Ibn Hunayn’s most notable contributions are his translations from Greek and Syriac. His work is associated with his first cousin Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan al-A‘cam and with ‘Isa ibn Yahya, but especially with his father, with whom he translated medical works, and with Thabit ibn Qurra, who independently revised several of Ishaq’s translations, particularly those of mathematical treatises. Ibn Hunayn is credited with the translation of several of Galen’s books, mostly into Arabic but also into Syriac; he translated epitomes of Galenic works as well.
Among his translations of philosophical works are Galen’s The Number of the Syllogisms and On Demonstration, books XII-XV; three books of the epitome of Plato’s Timaeus, and the Sophist. He translated into Arabic Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, book a and other parts of the Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics and perhaps On Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics. His Syriac translations include part of the Prior Analytics, all of the Posterior Analytics, and the Topics. Other translations are Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Intellect; Nicholas of Damascus’ On Plants; and Nemesius of Emesa’s On the Nature of Man, which is not a work by Gregory of Nyssa as is sometimes stated.
Of special consequence are his mathematical translations: Euclid’s Elements, Optics, and Data; Ptolemy’s Almagest; Archimedes’ On the Sphere and the Cylinder; Menelaus’ Spherics; and works by Autolycus and Hypsicles. The Elements, Optics, and Almagest were revised and presumably improved mathematically by Thabit ibn Qurra. The influence of the several versions and recensions of the Arabic Elements and Almagest is a basic and virtually unstudied problem in the history of Islamic mathematics and astronomy. Because so few texts have been established, the sorting out of separate traditions is not yet possible.
Religion
Ibn Hunayn was affiliated with Nestorianism.
Al-Bayhaqi is among those who claim he converted to Islam.