Introduction

The Arabic translations on which Islamic scholars relied for their knowledge of Greek thinkers were in most cases made by Syriac Christians, who also continued the work of their predecessors in extending and revising these earlier Syriac translations. While the Syriac translations of the Baghdad period cover the whole school corpus of Aristotle, definite evidence for those of the earlier period is confined to a small group of the logical treatises. Bar Hebraeus was the one other known writer on rhetoric in Syriac, though his treatise on the subject was not a textbook, but a commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the context of his massive exposition of the Organon entitled the Cream of Wisdom. The only textbook of rhetoric known in Syriac comes from the ninth century, by Antony of Tagrit.