From Arabic Books and Manuscripts XII: The Arabic Translation of Artemidorus

Abstract

THE STRANGE PHENOMENON of the human dream has called for constant and quite similar efforts of interpretation through millennia of man's history all over the globe. Modern approaches to the problem seem to have done away with the traditional kind of interpretation. However, they have not done away with the attraction the study of this tradition holds for the historian. On the contrary, they have stimulated increased interest in it in recent years.' In the civilization complex spanning the Near East and Europe, Greek-Hellenistic writings on dream interpretation have provided the most influential sources of information.2 The work containing the greatest amount of detail that has come down to us from Antiquity is that of a certain Artemidorus who lived in the second century A.D. but is otherwise not very well known. Not only is his work long and detailed, but it also contains much theoretical speculation and, comparable in this respect to works on astrology, allows an insight into cultural conditions as they affected the daily lives of people. Artemidorus' work on dream interpretation, entitled Oneirocritica, was translated into Arabic during the great period of the reception of the Greek heritage in Islam. This translation has now been published by Toufic Fahd in the fine series of books put out under the auspices of the French Institute in Damascus.3 The publication of the medieval Arabic translation (henceforth called Ar.) coincides with a new edition of the Greek text (G) by Roger A. Pack.4 Ar. is preserved in a single manuscript of the Library of the University of Istanbul (ar. yazma 4726). According to H. Ritter and A. Ate?, the manuscript is to be dated around 1200, whereas this writer, somewhat more conservatively, has dated it into the fourteenth century.5 Overjoyed with his discovery of the manuscript, T. Fahd has rushed with it into print in that spirit of true scholarly excitement that classical scholars in the West have hardly ever felt since the days of the Renaissance. Only the first three books of the work are contained in the manuscript, causing Fahd to ask himself whether only these three books were translated. While there is some justification for raising this question, the existing evidence speaks overwhelmingly against the theory of a partial translation. It may be noted that the introductory remarks at the beginning of the work are missing in Ar. (there are no corresponding omissions later on at the end of the first book or in the second and third books); in this case, the most likely explanation would seem to be that the manuscript at the disposal of the translator was defective at the beginning.