Al-Bīrūnī on Hermetic Forgery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21249452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kevin Van Bladel (Yale University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 54-66 |
| Publication date | 2018-04-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Gnosis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2451-859X • E-ISSN: 2451-8581 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/2451859x-12340048 |
| OpenAlex | W2799419141 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
In Central Asia in the early eleventh century, the Chorasmian scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī recognized that the Arabic works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were inventions of recent centuries falsely written in the name of the ancient sage of legend. He did, however, accept the existence of a historical Hermes and even attempted to establish his chronology. This article presents al-Bīrūnī’s statements about this and contextualizes his view of the Arabic Hermetica as he derived it from Arabic chronographic sources. Al-Bīrūnī’s argument is compared with the celebrated seventeenth-century European criticism of the Greek Hermetica by Isaac Casaubon. It documents a hitherto unknown but significant event in the reception history of the Hermetica and helps to illustrate al-Bīrūnī’s attitude toward the history of science
Ancient history · Arabic · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Chronology · Criticism · Eleventh · Legend · Linguistics · Literature · Physics · Classics · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |